Washington: A Life (63 page)

At moments Washington viewed the controversy with philosophic resignation and wondered whether he should return to Mount Vernon. After receiving a confidential warning from the Reverend William Gordon that a faction was plotting to install Charles Lee in his stead, Washington replied ruefully: “So soon then as the public gets dissatisfied with my services, or a person is found better qualified to answer her expectation, I shall quit the helm with as much satisfaction and retire to a private station with as much content as ever the wearied pilgrim felt upon his safe arrival in the Holy Land.”
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He didn’t need to worry. The so-called Conway Cabal taught people that Washington was tough and crafty in defending his terrain and that they tangled with him at their peril. Henceforth anyone who underestimated George Washington lived to regret the error. His skillful treatment of the “cabal” silenced his harshest critics, leaving him in unquestioned command of the Continental Army. The end of this war among Washington’s generals augured well for the larger war against the British.

It should be said that the need to solidify Washington’s position and humble his enemies had a political logic. With the possible exception of the Continental Congress, the Continental Army was the purest expression of the new, still inchoate country, a working laboratory for melding together citizen-soldiers from various states and creating a composite American identity. Washington personified that army and was therefore the main unifying figure in the war. John Adams regarded this as the main reason why people tolerated his defeats and overlooked his errors. To Dr. Benjamin Rush, he later pontificated: “There was a time when northern, middle, and southern statesmen … expressly agreed to blow the trumpet of panegyric in concert to cover and dissemble all faults and errors; to represent every defeat as a victory and every retreat as an advancement to make that character [Washington] popular and fashionable with all parties in all places and with all persons, as a center of union, as the central stone in the geometrical arch. There you have the revelation of the whole mystery.”
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In the last analysis, Washington’s triumph over the troublesome Gates, Mifflin, and Conway was total. For unity’s sake, he was unfailingly polite to Gates: “I made a point of treating Gen[era]l Gates with all the attention and cordiality in my power, as well from a sincere desire of harmony as from an unwillingness to give any cause of triumph to our enemies.”
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Gates’s defects as a general would become glaring in time. Thomas Mifflin resigned as quartermaster general amid charges of mismanagement. The most complete triumph came over Thomas Conway, who plied Congress with so many abusive letters and threatened to resign so often that delegates were finally pleased to accept his resignation in April 1778. Conway refused to muzzle his criticism of Washington, however, which led him in July into a duel with John Cadwalader, a stalwart Washington defender. Cadwalader shot Conway in the mouth and neck and is supposed to have boasted as he stared down at his bleeding foe, “I have stopped the damned rascal’s lying anyway.”
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With incredible resilience, Conway recuperated from these wounds and sent Washington a chastened note before he returned to France. “I find myself just able to hold the pen during a few minutes,” the convalescent soldier wrote, “and take this opportunity of expressing my sincere grief for having done, written, or said anything disagreeable to Your Excellency. My career will soon be over. Therefore justice and truth prompt me to declare my last sentiments. You are, in my eyes, the great and the good man. May you long enjoy the love, veneration, and esteem of these states whose liberties you have asserted by your virtues.”
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IN DECEMBER 1777 General William Howe eased into comfortable winter quarters in Philadelphia. For British officers in the eighteenth century, warfare remained a seasonal business, and they saw no reason to sacrifice unduly as cold winds blew. “Assemblies, concerts, comedies, clubs, and the like make us forget that there is any war, save that it is a capital joke,” wrote a Hessian captain, reflecting the overly confident attitude that prevailed among British and Hessian officers after the Brandywine and Germantown victories.
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George Washington struggled with the baffling question of where to house his vagabond, threadbare army during the frigid months ahead. The specter of a harsh winter was alarming: four thousand men lacked a single blanket. If Washington withdrew farther into Pennsylvania’s interior, his army might be secure, but the area already teemed with patriotic refugees from Philadelphia. Such a move would also allow Howe’s men to scavenge the countryside outside Philadelphia and batten freely off local farms. Further complicating his decision was that he had to ensure the safety of two homeless legislatures, now stranded in exile: the Continental Congress in York and the Pennsylvania legislature in Lancaster. “I assure you, sir,” he told Henry Laurens, as he puzzled over the conundrum, “no circumstance in the course of the present contest, or in my whole life, has employed more of my reflection … than in what manner … to dispose of the army during the winter.”
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Washington opted for a spot that was fated to become hallowed ground: Valley Forge, a windswept plateau, twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia, that he would depict as “a dreary kind of place and uncomfortably provided.”
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With its open, rolling fields and woods, the encampment stood a day’s march from Howe’s army and was therefore safe from surprise raids. In theory, it sounded like a promising place. Its high ridges would afford excellent defensive positions; its nearby woods would supply plentiful timber for fuel and construction; abundant local agriculture would nourish his army; and the nearby Schuylkill River and Valley Creek would provide pure water. What should have been an ideal resting place became instead a scene of harrowing misery.

Even before Washington arrived there, the Pennsylvania legislature had the cheek to criticize him for taking his men into winter camp, as if he were retiring into plush quarters. “I can assure those gentlemen,” Washington wrote testily, “that it is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fireside than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blankets. However, although they seem to have little feeling for the naked, distressed soldiers, I feel superabundantly for them and from my soul pity those miseries which it is neither in my power to relieve or prevent.”
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This was a new voice for Washington, reflecting a profound solidarity with his men that went beyond Revolutionary ideology and arose from the special camaraderie of shared suffering.

Already on the icy road to Valley Forge, Washington had spotted streaks of blood from his barefoot men, portending things to come. He slept in the upstairs chamber of a compact, two-story stone mill house built by Isaac Potts, whose iron forges lent the place its name. The commander in chief worked in a modest downstairs room with a fireplace. So meticulous was Washington in his respect for private property that he rented the quarters instead of seizing them. The premises were so cramped that one observer recalled Washington’s family as “exceedingly pinched for room.”
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Many aides slept jammed together on the floor downstairs. To provide extra space, Washington added an adjoining log cabin for meals.

With the treasury bankrupt, Washington experienced a grim foreboding that this winter would mandate stringency far beyond anything yet endured. In general orders for December 17, he suggested that the impending winter might call for preternatural strength and vowed to “share in the hardship and partake of every inconvenience” with his men.
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Whatever his failings as a general, Washington’s moral strength held the shaky army together. His position transcended that of a mere general, having taken on a paternal dimension. “The people of America look up to you as their father,” Henry Knox told him, “and into your hands they entrust their all, fully confident of every exertion on your part for their security and happiness.”
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The first order of business, Washington knew, was to erect warm, dry huts. To set an example, he slept in a tent as the camp succumbed to a building craze; regiments broken into squads of twelve soldiers chopped wood and made huts for themselves. Cleverly, Washington injected a competitive element into the operation: he would pay twelve dollars to the squad that completed the first hut and a hundred dollars to anyone who devised a way to roof these structures without consuming scarce wood. As the men hewed their houses with dull ax blades, they nonetheless seemed cheerful and hardy. “I was there when the army first began to build huts,” wrote Thomas Paine. “They appeared to me like a family of beavers: everyone busy, some carrying logs, others mud, and the rest fastening them together.”
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Within a month a makeshift village, more than two thousand log cabins in all, materialized from the havoc.

Forming parallel avenues, the huts were small, dark, and claustrophobic; a dozen men could be squashed into spaces measuring fourteen by sixteen feet, with only six and a half feet of headroom. Narrow bunks, stacked in triple rows, stood on either side of the door. Many soldiers draped tents over their huts to keep at bay the sharp wintry blasts. While officers had the luxury of wooden floors, ordinary soldiers slept on dank earth. As more trees were felled for shelter and firewood, the campgrounds grew foul and slippery with mud. Dead horses and their entrails lay decomposing everywhere, emitting a putrid stench into the winter air.

For all its esprit de corps, the Continental Army was soon reduced to a ghastly state, its soldiers resembling a horde of unkempt beggars. Men dined on food called “fire cakes,” crude concoctions of flour and water that were cooked on hot stones. Some days they couldn’t scrape together any food at all. Dr. Albigence Waldo of Connecticut limned the horror:

The universal misery didn’t spare officers, who suffered along with their men. One Frenchman strolling through camp caught glimpses of soldiers who “were using as cloaks and overcoats woollen blankets similar to those worn by the patients in our French hospitals. I realized a little later that those were officers and generals.”
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Some desperate soldiers tore canvas strips from tents to cobble together primitive shirts or shoes. The misery reached straight into Washington’s headquarters. “I cannot get as much cloth as will make clothes for my servants,” Washington wrote, “notwithstanding that one of them that attends my person and table is indecently and most shamefully naked.”
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One wonders whether this referred to the trusted Billy Lee. Exacerbating the clothing shortage was a dearth of wagons. To cart supplies around camp, men were harnessed to carriages like draft animals, saddled with yokes. Hoping to ameliorate the situation, Congress, at Washington’s behest, soon appointed Nathanael Greene as the new quartermaster general, an office that had been negligently administered by Thomas Mifflin. At first Greene resisted the appointment, grumbling that “nobody ever heard of a quartermaster in history,” but he submitted to his fate and brilliantly helped the Continental Army avoid starvation as he redeemed his own reputation.
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Part of Washington’s inspirational power at Valley Forge came from his steady presence, as he projected leadership in nonverbal ways that are hard for posterity to re-create. Even contemporaries found it difficult to convey the essence of his calm grandeur. “I cannot describe the impression that the first sight of that great man made upon me,” said one Frenchman. “I could not keep my eyes from that imposing countenance: grave yet not severe; affable without familiarity. Its predominant expression was calm dignity, through which you could trace the strong feelings of the patriot and discern the father as well as the commander of his soldiers.”
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One of the most durable images of Washington at Valley Forge is likely invented. After his death Parson Mason Weems, who fabricated the canard about the cherry tree, told of Washington praying in a snowy glade. A well-known image of Washington, done by Paul Weber and entitled
George Washington in Prayer at Valley Forge,
depicts Washington praying on his knees, his left hand over his heart and his open right hand at his side, pointing to the earth. Washington’s upturned face catches a shaft of celestial light. The image seems designed to meld religion and politics by converting the uniformed Washington into a humble supplicant of the Lord. The reason to doubt the story’s veracity is not Washington’s lack of faith but the typically private nature of his devotions. He would never have prayed so ostentatiously outdoors, where soldiers could have stumbled upon him.

While Washington was somewhat insulated from the camp’s noisome squalor in the Potts house, the despondent men ventilated their grievances. As he strode past the huts, he heard them grumbling inside, “No bread, no soldier!”
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On better days, they would burst into a patriotic tune called “War and Washington.”
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At one point a knot of protesters descended on his office in what must have seemed a mutinous act. Washington undoubtedly bristled at their disruptive presence. Nonetheless, when the men said they had come to make sure Washington understood their suffering, he reacted sympathetically. This man of patrician tastes had learned to value ordinary soldiers. “Naked and starving as they are,” he wrote, “we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery.”
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