Valley Forge: George Washington and the Crucible of Victory (26 page)

“Your coin, sir?” Johansson said coldly.

“A voucher signed by General George Washington himself, payable in hard cash when presented to the Congress or a legal representative thereof.”

“Damn, is that the game today?” Johansson roared. “I knew it would come to this!

“Jacob, Ebenezer, Jeremiah!”

At his call, three men, obviously his sons, all of them bearded as well, all with powerful shoulders and thickset bodies, came out from the upper entryway to the mill, one of them carrying a shotgun.

The dragoons behind Wayne instantly reacted, drawing their carbines. Several of the men cocked their weapons and raised them.

“Stand at ease, men,” Wayne snapped, not looking back but with his gaze still warily fixed on the three giants approaching.

He stepped closer to the old man.

“Look down that road,” he hissed, pointing to the advancing column of infantry and wagons.

Johansson gave a quick sidelong glance.

“We can settle this one of two ways. Either you comply or you fight. I admire your grit, sir. I would react the same if all was reversed. But there are nine thousand starving soldiers back at Valley Forge, and by General Washington and the great Jehovah I am tasked with feeding them. And I shall feed them. Do I make myself clear?”

Johansson, bristling, began to reply, then looked again at the approaching column now less than a hundred yards off, at the dragoons behind Wayne, and then back at his three sons.

“We fight them, father?” one of his sons asked, obviously more than a little frightened at the display of force. His shotgun was no longer leveled but now pointed at the ground.

Johansson threw out his arms in a gesture of exasperation.

“Put the gun back inside, Jeremiah,” he sighed.

His son seemed more than happy to comply.

“When can I have this voucher?” Johansson asked.

“You can stand beside me and count every pound loaded. I will countersign it. Given the current situation, I regret to say you must carry it to York for payment, but your troubles are but a single drop in an ocean of woe at this moment, sir. This is war. If I do not do this, nine thousand men will starve tomorrow.”

“Damn your war,” Johansson snapped.

“It is your war, too.”

Johansson sniffed derisively.

“Fellow countrymen, weapons pointed at me. Is this your idea of liberty?”

“For the moment, it is the necessity from which liberty will spring, yes, sir,” Wayne replied coldly.

The head of the column was up, the men slowing at the sight of the dragoons, weapons still leveled. The men at the front of the column were now unslinging muskets and holding them half ready.

“Shall we begin?” Wayne asked, but it was most definitely a statement now, and no longer a question.

Johansson muttered a curse, stepped aside, and gestured to the open door of the mill.

“You are the highwaymen now, Mad Anthony, but, by God, I will count every peck that you take.”

Wayne turned back to the men with the wagons.

“One at a time, to the lower level.”

He looked over to a barn slightly upslope from the mill.

“Two wagons up there as well. Sergeant Travis, you were a miller, were you not?”

“Yes, sir,” Travis grinned. “And had a damn sight better mill than this on the Housatonic, I can tell you.”

“Sons of bitches,” Johansson cried, “robbed by New England Yankees, no less.”

Travis laughed as he came up to Johansson’s side.

“You stay with Mr. Johansson here, make sure the count is fair,” Wayne ordered. “And no miller’s count, damn your eyes!”

Travis handed his musket off to a comrade.

“Come along, old man,” Travis said with a grin. “I’ll make sure you aren’t cheated, and I’ll even help you cheat them a bit if you work with me.”

Wayne saw that bringing Travis along had been a smart move. Johansson seemed to find some comfort in a fellow of the same trade. The two went inside, Wayne following behind.

Within the mill there was a cacophony of noise. The mill was in full operation. Both wheels were turning, wooden gears rattling, drive shafts turning the millstones on the lower floor. A farmer, wagon half off loaded and caught by surprise, stood silent, glaring at Wayne, who made mention that he would be compensated and then stepped past him rather than hear yet more complaints.

Since boyhood he had been fascinated by such contrivances, machines that, once constructed, could do the labor of a hundred men. With the temporary thaw, the Schuylkill was running at full flow, some of the rising waters diverted by sluices into the miller’s upper pond. Cold water flowed in a torrent over the twin waterwheels, which, during the freeze of the previous weeks, had most likely been locked solid.

Now was the time for grinding down the late fall harvest, and he had timed this raid to match that. A few weeks ago this place would most likely have been idle. Now it was in full, flourishing operation.

The farmer with the wagonload of wheat looked sullenly at Wayne, saying nothing as Wayne inspected the clanking gears, the turning grindstones a floor below. Off to the left in the work area below, the mill-powered saws
stood motionless. Beyond them was a stack of several thousand board feet of fresh-cut lumber, planks ten feet long, a foot wide, and a couple of inches thick. He marked them. If the bounty of sacks of milled flour, corn meal, rye, and barley did not fill his wagons, he would round out the rest with the lumber. A few hundred planks would help with the corduroying of the roads or would serve as siding for one of the hospitals to keep out dangerous drafts. Gearing was also hooked to a bellows for a forge, and there was even a small drop hammer for fashioning iron and the cutting of nails, several barrels filled with them.

He climbed down a ladder to the lower level, where his men were already eagerly at work, hoisting up fifty-and hundredweight bags of flour and ground meal and carrying them out to the army wagons.

“Those are not really mine,” Johansson protested. “Their owners will sue me for certain if they come back here and I have nothing to show!”

“Sergeant Travis, make proper note.”

Travis, log book open, simply nodded, offering a few words of condolence to Johansson as he meticulously checked off each bag and its weight when the men dropped the bags on scales, waited for a measurement, then hauled them out and tossed them into the wagons.

Each bag had already been stenciled with the name of the farmer who owned it, and Wayne felt a moment of pity for the miller who would have to explain to dozens of clients why their ground flour and corn had disappeared. Lawyers in nearby towns would be delighted for months to come with the suits that would most likely follow.

“Hey, General, you gotta see this!”

One of the men he had sent to the upper barn was standing excitedly before him, shifting back and forth from foot to foot with excitement.

Wayne smiled and followed. It was Corporal Garner, one of the best foragers of his old command. If any man could smell out supplies it would be him.

He followed Garner up to the barn. Inside was indeed a treasure trove that made Wayne’s mouth water. Dozens of hams hung from the rafters, well smoked, more than a few of the men having obviously already cut off a slice for themselves—strictly against orders, but, frankly, he could not blame them. Half a dozen dairy cows on the hoof were in the barn, looking wide-eyed at the new arrivals and, if filled with any sense of consciousness, fully aware of their fate before the day was done. Sacks of ground meal lined the wall of the barn.

In the upper loft rested hundredweight upon hundredweight of mown
hay for the cattle, fodder that his starved horses would greet as eagerly as he would a well-seasoned whiskey or rum.

Garner excitedly led the way to the back of the barn, where a couple of men, armed with spades, were hard at work, having already unearthed a fifty-gallon barrel.

Oh, God, Wayne sighed. A barrel of corn liquor. With much heaving and grunting, they pulled it up from its place of concealment.

The men looked expectantly at the general. “Well, Garner, find me a cup to test this. It could be a wicked Tory plot to poison us.”

Garner unclipped his own cup from his haversack belt and offered it, even as the men tilted the barrel, one of them taking the cup and holding it under the spigot.

All stood silent as Wayne took a sip.

My God, he sighed inwardly, this is good. Most likely aged in this oak cask for at least several years.

He took another sip and then looked at the men.

Fifty gallons, a hundred men. Come tomorrow he would face a court-martial before Washington if he let this brew loose to his command.

He looked at the grinning Garner and his three confederates.

“Listen carefully, you bastards,” he snapped, forcing himself to make a deliberate show of emptying the rest of his cup on the ground.

“When I leave here, a quarter gill apiece to each of you and, damn you, not a word to the others. And I mean that. If any of you even remotely appears to be drunk, I’ll have you all flogged through the camp.

“Do we understand each other?”

“But of course, General,” Garner replied.

“Garner?”

“Sir?”

“This liquor is for the sick and injured only.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Garner, when the surgeons took off your nephew’s leg for the frostbite and rot last month, what would you have done to give the poor lad a sip of this to ease his pain before dying?”

Garner stiffened.

“Yes, sir,” he whispered. “Of course I’ll see that it is taken care of properly.”

Wayne came up to the corporal and patted him on the shoulder.

“Get this safely back and dropped off at the hospital and it is Sergeant Garner, starting tomorrow, and a gallon of this brew for you and your men.”

“Thank you, sir,” Garner replied huskily, then paused. “No need to bribe me, sir, like that. I’d of done it anyway now that you made me think of poor Jamie, and bless you, sir, for remembering him.”

Wayne clasped his old comrade on the shoulder and left the barn, head swimming slightly from the kick of the corn liquor, concerned that others might now smell it on his breath.

The loading was going apace. Half a dozen wagons, each burdened down with half a ton of ground meal or flour, were drawn to one side of the road. A dozen or so curious onlookers had gathered, some supportive of Johansson, most just smiling that it was his misfortune rather than their own. They chatted away with the soldiers, asking for news of how the war was going. The farmer with the wagon who had tried to flee was protesting vehemently—that he was a good patriot, with two sons in the militia—even as his grain was off-loaded and fed into the mill.

Sergeant Travis seemed to have reached some sort of understanding with Johansson as they examined each bag of flour going out, noting down the weight when it was first tossed upon a scale. Wayne assumed that of course Travis was making Johansson feel better about this affair by adding more than a few pounds to each bag on his tally list.

It was past noon and Wayne ordered a halt in their labors. The reward for venturing out on this task was now offered. Two thick smoked hams were carried down from the upper barn, along with a couple of bushel baskets of dried apples. Sergeants lined their men up and played out the ritual of “Who shall have this?” but today there was no bickering, for each slice was at least a pound or more, rich with fat and seasoning. Some of the men decided to build small fires by the side of the road to roast it first; others just ate it cold along with the dried apples, and handfuls of sauerkraut hauled down from the upper barn as well, all of it washed down with near on to a pint each of small beer given to them by the tavern keeper in Phoenixville.

It was the most the men had eaten in better than a month. A reward but, as Wayne also feared, too much for some: Even before they were finished, they had to run off to the privacy of a nearby woodlot. Several of the men became ill from the rich and unaccustomed fare as well. As to the barrel of corn liquor, Garner kept close guard on it, and stood by the wagon upon which it was loaded.

Miller Johansson and his sons and grandsons watched them all with sullen
dislike. The miller kept circulating around, Sergeant Travis solicitously by his side, scribbling notes as to everything taken: pots of sauerkraut; corn liquor; dozens of bushel baskets of dried apples; the smoked hams; six cows on the hoof, all of them giving at least two gallons a day of fine milk and cream. The fodder from the barn was put before the horses of the dragoons and wagon teams. There was even tobacco from a neighboring barn, a rare find this far north, hung up to dry in the rafters. Men stuffed wads into their cheeks, filled their pipes after their feast, or stuffed whole leaves into their haversacks to share later with comrades.

It was hard to drive the men back to work. Most of them lay in the sunlight along the side of the road, drifting off to a few minutes of sleep. Exceptions were those whose innards the feast had unsettled after so many weeks of privation.

The last of the heavy bags of ground meal and flour were finally loaded aboard the wagons, smoked hams carried out of the barn along with the remaining baskets of dried apples, destined for the hospitals as was the sauerkraut, to combat the scurvy that was rampant within the army. The poor farmer who had been caught trying to flee found himself holding a voucher, signed by Washington, to be certain, but now minus the wagon, two mules, and half a ton of wheat, except for a hundredweight that Wayne told him to take back to his family, loaded aboard a wheelbarrow that Johansson agreed to rent to him for a pence a day.

Wayne looked over the receipt that Travis had laboriously filled out and shook his head. If paid fairly with real coin and not Continentals, the miller had made out well this day, overcharging by a good 20 percent or more.

But it was all part of a tragic game. It was doubtful at this moment that Congress would ever honor the voucher issued by Washington and counter-signed by him. Those surrounding Conway, Gates, and Mifflin would denounce it as not following proper channels and tell the poor miller to go to hell. They would then forward the bill directly back to the general with a terse letter of reprimand that he had not followed proper procedure and that, beyond this, he had agreed to overpay the miller, a charge that might bring an investigation. If the war was lost, the miller would lose. If the war was won, even then it might take years for Johansson to press his case on the Congress, while in turn he would be facing the lawyers of many an angry client of his mill.