Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (30 page)

Washington himself was not disposed to approach either man with charity in his heart. On reading the dismissive comment by Conway, he responded to him with a crisp reproduction of the offending sentence that indicated that he expected an explanation from its writer. There followed a back-and-forth exchange between the two men that drew in Horatio Gates, who issued various denials that he had been a voice in the criticism of Washington and a complaint that someone had pilfered his letter. Conway veered from a defense that included a professed respect for Washington to a sardonic linkage of “the
Great Washington
” to the “
great Frederick
in Europe,” clearly a remark intended as insult and understood as such.
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The whole matter seemed to take an important turn in December 1777, when Congress promoted Conway to major general and then appointed him inspector general of the army. The promotion evoked a protest from at least nine brigadier generals who let Congress know of their anger. Washington simply ignored Conway when he presented himself, apparently eager to whip the remnants of the army into a fighting machine. Gates soon lost heart and abandoned any pretense of respect for Conway, and Congress, realizing that the advancement of Conway to the rank of major general had offended many officers,
accepted Conway’s resignation from the army. Conway may not have submitted his resignation with the expectation that it would be accepted. Disabused of any hope of winning in a contest with Washington, he returned to France in the spring.
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The decision to go into winter quarters was kept from the British and from the American army itself until just before the actual move from Whitemarsh, later in December. The British, of course, received no formal notification, and the army was informed only after it was put on the road to Valley Forge. Weeks before Washington wrote Laurens of his intentions, the Congress, accepting the necessity of winter quarters, had discussed what the army should do after Germantown. A few delegates, apparently immune to facts when thinking of the war, urged that an attempt be made to destroy Howe and take Philadelphia. The simplicity of these suggestions did not trouble their makers, but they did trouble Washington, who had to explain that reality could not be made to conform to such wishes. Most members of Congress, however, required no explanation that the condition of the army made going into winter quarters unavoidable. A committee from Congress visited the camp at Whitemarsh early in December and spent its days there in a serious probe. The condition of the troops was a sobering surprise, and Washington drove home to them the lesson of a poverty-stricken army. The chief lesson was familiar, and for some tiresome: He had close to three thousand men in need of shoes, and almost everyone in camp was hungry.
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Where the army should go for the winter was another matter, and once the idea sank in that the army was going to settle in, Washington began hearing from members of Congress as well as others, in particular members of the legislatures of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

In Pennsylvania, there were many men who thought that Washington should use the winter to recapture Philadelphia; others advocated spreading the army around in cantonments in order to give protection across the state. No planning for such a dispersal proceeded very far, but there was a feeling in the Pennsylvania legislature that if an attack on Philadelphia was impossible, the army should not be allowed to do anything that would deprive inland towns and hamlets of its protection.

The move from Whitemarsh to Valley Forge took six days, owing
to the physical condition of troops, horses, and wagons. The soldiers marched, some on bloody feet. Many horses were sick or weakened by the thin supply of forage, and wagons to carry supplies were also scarce.
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Valley Forge, about eighteen miles northwest of Philadelphia, had been chosen because it was close enough to permit the army to move effectively in response to British forays into the countryside. It was also far enough away from Philadelphia to prevent a British force there from surprising an army in camp. No barracks stood ready in Valley Forge, but the surrounding hills were covered with trees, many large enough to be cut down and turned into lumber for housing. Washington issued orders to cut down the trees and gave the specifications for huts that would provide shelter from snow and low temperatures. Officers organized their soldiers into work parties, and by early January most of the men had roofs over their heads.
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Washington had promised in his general orders that he would share the troops’ lot and did so, living in a tent until the huts went up. He then found quarters for himself and his staff in a house nearby. The weeks that followed differed in one major respect from those of later summer and autumn: They offered to some the opportunity to sit and even rest, but Washington worked with diligence all through his stay at Valley Forge. At least he did not have to ride a horse much of the day or lead soldiers into positions from which to fight and perhaps die.

He soon also had Martha Washington at his side. She found her way to Valley Forge early in February, escorted from Virginia by several officers, and was met near camp by Lieutenant Colonel Richard Kidder Meade, an aide to the general. She had made a similar trip to Cambridge early in the war, but there her accommodations had been much more comfortable. In Valley Forge, she and Washington occupied a small farmhouse that also served as his headquarters. At times its bedrooms were called into service as sitting rooms or were used for other official purposes. Martha took all this in stride with her usual quiet charm and courtesy. Not long after her coming, Washington had a small cabin built where meals could be taken, a space that made day-to-day life a little more comfortable—though not in any fashion luxurious or stylish in the Virginia manner. Entertainment, when Washington could find time for it, consisted of conversation and singing. There were no parties or dances, but the atmosphere was enlivened in the evenings by the presence of other wives—in particular Lucy Knox and
Caty Greene—and by occasional dramatic productions in the nearby bakehouse. No doubt Washington and others at headquarters appreciated the infrequent diversions from the scarcity-dominated lives of everyone in Valley Forge.
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“Scarcity” is in fact probably too mild a word to describe the conditions. When the army arrived at Valley Forge, it carried almost no rations, and the promise of getting any seemed remote. The commissary and quartermaster departments remained idle, in part because their leaders, Joseph Trumbull and Thomas Mifflin, had resigned earlier in the year. Their deputies, for the most part with less energy and indifferent abilities, did not exert themselves to solve the problems that fell to them. The deputies had long felt underpaid and had urged that their merits be recognized in a different system of payment. What they wanted was compensation based on a percentage of the value of the supplies they bought. It was a system that held great possibilities for high incomes, and with such arrangements filling their heads, they shirked their duties. Some near Trenton were accused of consuming a large proportion of food, ostensibly collected for the troops they supposedly served. Corruption and stealing undoubtedly were practiced in the supply departments, sometimes with the cooperation of line officers. Washington hated such behavior, but his main interest, he knew, was in getting a reliable and active set of commissaries to meet their responsibilities, which were to feed and clothe his soldiers.
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A supply apparatus indeed seemed so remote to Washington that he turned to Congress—not because he believed that action-producing supplies would come immediately from them, but rather because he knew that only Congress could provide organization for the long term. Meanwhile he would look out for the army himself.

He began with a proclamation issued just as the army marched into Valley Forge, calling on all farmers within seventy miles who raised grain to thresh half of it by February 1 and the remainder a month later. The proclamation stated that if any grain was left in sheaves, not threshed, it would be seized and paid for as if it were straw. To make certain that no one with grain could plead ignorance of the requirement, the printer of the proclamation in Lancaster, one John Dunlap, was ordered to reproduce it in the next issue of his newspaper and to keep reprinting it until the deadline expired. Washington also called on Dunlap to print the proclamation as a broadside, with one hundred
to be distributed in Lancaster and two hundred sent to headquarters in Valley Forge. Because many farmers in central and western Pennsylvania were Germans and might not read English, Washington requested that the proclamation also be printed in German.
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In the absence of commissaries and quartermasters, Washington sent his troops up and down the Delaware and Schuylkill river valleys to seize grain, horses, pigs, cattle, and forage. In the last days of December, these foraging parties did not consist of large numbers of officers and soldiers. They were ad hoc groups, born of a terrible necessity, and contained hungry and angry men. On one of the early occasions, December 22, Washington discovered firsthand just how desperate some of these men felt. For that night a small unit of foragers, the exact number unknown, were ordered out to collect what they could find, but instead of leaving Valley Forge as ordered, they mutinied. They were quickly put down in the knowledge of the danger such an attempt presented. There were no repetitions, no imitators; the army—hungry, cold, and barely clothed—held together, and small units were dispatched into the countryside. They found little nearby to collect or to seize.
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The army at this moment seemed to Washington close to a catastrophic collapse, and his own feelings approached desperation. He was not, of course, a man given to extravagance in either actions or expression. He had up to this point made only quiet appeals to Congress, all through communications to its president. Henry Laurens, like John Hancock before him, had expressed genuine sympathy in response, but nothing by way of aid had been forthcoming. Delegates from Congress had visited Washington’s headquarters and listened to his appeals, but none of his suggestions, complaints, or requests for supplies had produced any of the food and clothing so badly needed in the army.
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Washington had observed the proprieties in his appeals; he did not go over the president’s head to the whole body of Congress; he did not enlist the help of friendly newspapers or publish tracts or broadsides of his own. His letters to his friends in Virginia were private matters, written for their recipients and not intended to be leaked to the public. Indeed, he avoided exposing the army’s condition to those outside for fear that any British observing the American army closely would take advantage of its weakness and mount a major attack. But
he now changed his tactics, and began seizing what his troops needed. By early February he had mounted a much more systematic campaign of searching by sending several of his most enterprising generals into the surrounding countryside. Anthony Wayne took a brigade along the Delaware River close to Philadelphia and then into New Jersey; Nathanael Greene worked the farms and hamlets between Brandywine and the Schuylkill in Pennsylvania; and Henry Lee began in Delaware. All branched out as they heard of previously unknown supplies.

Each of them encountered farmers resistant to the idea of parting with crops and cattle for the benefit of Washington’s army. Where American commissaries had bought food supplies before, the generals heard complaints that compensation had never come to the farmers. These same farmers were now hiding their cattle and other animals in nearby marshes and woods. Henry Lee may have felt the most sympathy among American officers and wrote Washington of the need of “humanity” in the process of seizing what they wanted. Nathanael Greene listened to the pleas of the farmers but proceeded to take all the supplies he could, saying of himself, “like Pharoh I harden my heart.”
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Taking food away by force, or its threat, intensified the disaffection every American officer found in the Mid-Atlantic states. It did not take long for hearts to harden, as Greene said, and the language of intention changed as the effort went on. Lee reported that his purpose was to “drain” the countryside of its supplies; Greene remarked, similarly, that these rural areas in Pennsylvania had been “gleaned.” Though all noted that scarcity prevailed, they expressed little sympathy for inhabitants who were left little of what they had produced.
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While his troops searched the ground near and far, Washington urged governmental officials, mostly governors, to look within their states for supplies. Connecticut, because of the abundance of cattle and horses there, was a favorite target, and Washington appealed to New York and New Jersey as well.

These and other efforts paid off. By late February enough food had come in to feed most of the soldiers. Getting any supplies to Valley Forge remained a problem, however. The wagon master had warned weeks before that wagons were lacking, and when they were found, horses to pull them were not available. There were also problems of storage; Washington had anticipated this problem—at least in theory—
by urging Congress to provide salt, which was used to preserve freshly slaughtered meat. But as he reminded Congress of this need, he sought to collect as much fresh beef and pork as possible. Winter would gradually ease up, and by March his fears for the present supply disappeared. He had no large amount of food for the troops, but he had enough for the short term.

As Washington had explained to Laurens on December 23, he felt restrained by the danger he would be exposed to should he reveal to Congress just how crippling his lack of food and clothing was. The British, everyone knew, kept their eyes and ears open, and any confession of weakness would be taken as an invitation to attack. In the last week of December, his desperation had mounted to an intolerable point. Quiet appeals to Congress had failed; even the observations by delegates visiting his army had yielded no result. In fact, nothing—no suggestion, no request, no testimony—had brought action to supply the army with basic essentials. Given these abortive efforts to awaken the Congress, and their failure, he resorted to an open threat: This army, he wrote Laurens in a letter that could not be kept from the British, must “Starve—dissolve—or disperse” if nothing was done for it. In this letter and in others he wrote in the final days of 1777 and early 1778, his anger broke through his usual restraint, prompting him to expose much of what he thought about the war and the soldiers who were fighting it.
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