Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (18 page)

Happy explosions of cannon greeted the news of the surrender all over New England. When word reached the American soldiers near Philadelphia, still licking their wounds after the battle at Germantown, they erupted in jubilation. Neither Tories nor enemy soldiers, hearing the joyful firing, could believe that an entire British army had surrendered to the rebels.

Gates, relieved from a tremendous strain, issued a magnanimous report of the battle, generously lauding “the gallant Major General Arnold.” He informed Congress that “too much praise cannot be given the Corps commanded by Col. Morgan.” After the battle he embraced the “Old Wagoner” and said, “Morgan, you have done wonders.”
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* * *

During the nineteenth century it became customary to call the victory at Saratoga the turning point of the Revolutionary War. The battle did more than neutralize the long-threatened invasion from Canada. Soon after the surrender, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Continental Congress sent word of the event to France, hoping that it would result in the “public acknowledgment of the Independence of these United States.”
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It did. The French committed themselves to war with Britain in December and signed a treaty with the United States in February 1778.

But for the Americans, Saratoga was only a bright spot in a back-and-forth contest whose end no one could yet predict. The British ministry sent additional reinforcements across the Atlantic. The war continued. The patriots’ darkest moments still lay before them, as George Washington would soon learn. He was about to lead his army into winter quarters in an area outside Philadelphia called Valley Forge.

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The Discipline of the Leggs

1778

“You might have tracked the army from White Marsh to Valley Forge by the blood of their feet,” George Washington wrote.
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A private who endured the march to winter quarters remembered the trail of “blood upon the rough frozen ground” left by his shoeless companions.

The image is iconic—the reality of walking barefoot in the snow was excruciating, humiliating, and disheartening. News of the defeat of General Burgoyne’s army proved a brief solace. An autumn of unsuccessful fighting had culminated in the enemy occupation of the new nation’s capital, a disintegrating Continental Army, and a dispirited populace. Rather than pull back to more comfortable lodgings in inland cities, Washington installed the army in a makeshift camp at Valley Forge, twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. Protected by the Schuylkill River, the troops would be far enough from the British for safety but close enough for vigilance.

While Howe and his officers savored the comforts of town, danced at balls, gambled in taverns, and fraternized with the city’s many loyalists, Washington’s ragged soldiers chopped down trees, notched logs, and plastered the chinks with mud to create their primitive, dirt-floor huts. The men compared them to dungeon cells.

Their suffering in the midst of one of the most productive areas of the country baffled the soldiers. One explanation was that they were fighting a war during a revolution. The break with Britain had brought an upheaval
of public administration and order. Congress, a flimsy deliberative body, was guided by no traditions and few formal structures. The inexperienced state governments were often inept. The notion of paying taxes repelled many inhabitants, and the largely agricultural colonies lacked a surplus of wealth.

But the administrative tangle was only part of the explanation. The meanness, indecision, delay, and general contrariness of citizens in each of the thirteen states amplified the army’s burden. The citizen soldiers who had rushed to fight early in the war were mostly gone from the army now. The Valley Forge soldiers, many of whom had signed on for three years or the duration of the war, were drawn largely from the young, the landless, the footloose, the poor. The people, as much as their representatives in Congress, had lost interest in the troops, whom they could look down on as the dregs of society.

The ongoing supply problems drove Washington to distraction. Pushing through brush and brambles, men quickly wore their clothing to rags. The garments continued to disintegrate until some men were literally naked, unable to emerge from their huts. Thousands lacked blankets. Three thousand were barefoot—frost-blackened toes required amputation. Hunger gripped bellies. “No meat! No meat!” the soldiers chanted, imitating crows. Receiving no meat, they cried: “No bread, no soldier!” They survived on a flour-and-water mixture baked into “fire cake” on hot rocks. Blanketless men sat shivering and coughing around smoldering green wood. They gagged on the smell of dead horses that lay decomposing in camp. They drew water from turbid, infected creeks. They fell to disease: putrid fever, pneumonia, and dysentery. In the hospital, they were thrown together with those still agonizing from battle wounds. Even there, blankets were scarce. More than two thousand men would die over the winter, twice as many Americans as had fallen in the battles around Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania farms had yielded a bumper crop in 1777. But the opposing armies had devoured the surplus food and forage. The British had captured a number of rebel supply depots. Ensconced in Philadelphia, they offered local farmers payment in silver coinage rather than the steadily deteriorating paper currency of the rebels.

The bungling of Congress amplified the supply crisis. The representatives—they were now meeting in York, Pennsylvania—neglected the army’s needs until prodded by Washington and other officers. General Enoch Poor wrote angrily to officials back home in New Hampshire: “If any of them desert how can I punish them when they plead in their justification that on your part the Contract is broken?” The men needed
supplies immediately or it would be “impracticable to keep them much longer in the field.”
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“Poor food—,” a camp physician summed up in his diary, “hard lodging—Cold Weather—fatigue—Nasty cloaths—nasty Cookery—Vomit half my time—smoak’d out my senses—the Devil’s in’t—I can’t Endure it.”
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Before Christmas, Washington wrote a blistering letter to Congress, laying out the army’s difficulties in the starkest of terms. Unless supplies started flowing immediately, he said, “this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse.” He added, “Rest assured Sir this is not an exaggerated picture.” He concluded with a biting sentence: “I can assure those Gentlemen that it is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fire side than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and Snow without Cloaths or Blankets.”
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Their fellow citizens offered the Continental soldiers scant respect and little sympathy. Washington, however, wrote, “I feel superabundantly for them.”
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* * *

Congress slowly creaked into motion. The commander in chief turned to his most trusted lieutenant to take the matter in hand. Nathanael Greene, a businessman before the war, organized foraging parties to scour the surrounding countryside. Both Washington and Greene loathed the confiscation of civilian property, but no other choice remained. “Inhabitants cry out and beset me from all quarters,” Greene wrote to Washington, “but like Pharoh I harden my heart.” He was determined to “forage the Country naked.” He had civilians whipped for transporting produce to the British.
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Washington persuaded Greene to give up his field command and to assume the position of quartermaster general. Craving martial glory, the Rhode Island general bitterly resented the assignment. “Nobody ever heard of a quarter master in history,” he complained to Washington. To his friend Henry Knox he bemoaned being “taken out of the line of splendor.”
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Greene, who found the position “humiliating to my Military pride,” spent the two years following the Valley Forge winter of 1778 laboring over accounting books, contracts, and shipping problems as he tried to keep the Continental Army in shoes, axes, blankets, and the thousand other supplies needed to wage war. Overseeing a battalion of three thousand clerks, buyers, and haulers, he was continually chagrined by
inadequate finances and lack of cooperation. “The Growing avarice, and a declining currency,” he observed, “are poor materials to build our Independence on.”
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He hated the job and he was good at it. He brought discipline to the department, insisting that foragers display “proper deportment.” He set up grain depots and improved logistics by sending men to repair bridges, improve roads, and commandeer wagons. Greene, like Washington, knew that keeping an army supplied in the field was just as crucial as winning battles. His business skills and common sense saved the army from dissolution. By the spring of 1778, conditions at Valley Forge had begun to inch toward improvement, but problems of supply would vex commanders until the very end of the war.

* * *

The army’s senior officers lived in houses in the area surrounding the Valley Forge camp. Some were joined by their wives. Martha Washington came in time for her husband’s forty-sixth birthday in February. She boosted the commander’s spirits. The soldiers loved her. She was “busy from early morning until late at night” knitting stockings and sewing shirts for the troops. Martha was no stranger to death, having lost her first husband, three of her four children, and five younger siblings, including her dear sister Fanny, who had died in December. She organized a band of women who delivered food to soldiers and cared for the sick and wounded. Just the sight of the women heartened the troops.

Lord Stirling’s wife came, as did his daughter, Lady Kitty, a favorite of Washington. Lucy Knox, with her baby daughter, arrived, escorted by a limping Benedict Arnold, for whom she had acted as go-between with an eligible young lady. An inveterate card player, Lucy loved the social life of camp. Nathanael Greene observed that she was mortified by her obesity, but that Henry was just as fat. The couple lacked a permanent home during the entire course of the war. When they were together, they slept in an iron bed that could hold their combined weight. They were, Greene thought, the ideal of marital bliss.

Greene’s own young wife, Caty, had left her children with relatives to journey to camp. “The lady of General Greene,” a soldier recorded, “is a handsome, elegant, and accomplished woman.”
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She conversed with French officers in their own tongue and flirted quite brazenly. Washington was not immune to her charms. He would, during one winter ball, dance with Caty for three hours straight. Anthony Wayne was another of her admirers. His own marriage had become a cinder—Polly declined to
visit him, though she lived only a few miles away. Caty’s loose behavior might have rankled Greene, as Lucy Knox reported that “all was not well with Greene [and] his lady.”
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Modest dinner parties and communal songfests helped pass the winter days for the generals and their families. Some junior officers put on a performance of Washington’s favorite play, Joseph Addison’s
Cato.
The Enlightenment drama about Cato the Younger’s resistance to Julius Caesar’s tyranny, written in 1712, had already contributed to the rhetoric of the revolution. The lines rang out that winter:

What pity is it

That we can die but once to serve our country.

It is not now a time to talk of aught

But chains or conquest, liberty or death.

* * *

Help arrived from abroad. Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, American envoys in Paris, had recruited the most talented officers from among those who volunteered. In addition to engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko, they sent over the Polish cavalry expert Casimir Pulaski and the experienced German officer Johann de Kalb. The veterans provided the army the experience, military insight, and leadership it was sorely lacking. Some came because they needed work, but many were inspired by a cause they saw as the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals. One European recruit would prove to be the most luminous of all the Revolutionary fighters. He was the nineteen-year-old French nobleman Gilbert de Motier, known as the Marquis de Lafayette.

Portraits from that time show Lafayette a slender, homely, effeminate, and impossibly youthful soldier. Possessed of enormous inherited wealth, he came to America at his own expense. He instantly charmed Washington and the entire high command with his affability, modesty, and sheer brilliance. Congress named him a major general but did not intend him to lead troops. Washington loved him and recognized his preternatural ability. Nathanael Greene found him irresistible due to “an inexplicable charm.”

In September 1777, Lafayette had seen his first action at Brandywine Creek, where he had been shot in the leg. “Take care of him as if he were my son,” Washington admonished those attending him.
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By December the youth had assumed a role as one of Washington’s most trusted confidants and was in command of an entire army division.

* * *

Given the defeats the army had endured, it was not surprising that grumbling about Washington’s leadership rustled through the ranks and ignited whispers in Congress. He’d been outgeneraled, then outgeneraled again. By contrast, Horatio Gates had bagged an entire British army. Some thought Gates might be the man to take charge. A Congressional committee accused Washington of “Want of Genius & Activity.” Even Anthony Wayne, a Washington supporter, detected in the commander “an over stretched caution, which is oftentimes attended with as fatal Consequences, as too much rashness.”
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Congress formed a Board of War to look over Washington’s shoulder, with Gates at its head. They sent a committee to Valley Forge to investigate the condition of the army. They appointed Thomas Conway, an Irish volunteer and critic of Washington, to the new post of inspector general, putting him in charge of training the troops.

To Washington and his close supporters, including Greene, Knox, Lafayette, and aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton, these actions amounted to a “cabal” aimed at deposing the commander. Washington feared that Gates would “be exalted, on the ruin of my reputation and influence.”
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Showing his aptitude for political infighting, Washington deftly outmaneuvered his opponents. By spring, Congress had accepted Conway’s resignation and Washington was again firmly in charge.

* * *

As winter began to relent, a foreign officer arrived in camp who would transform the beleaguered army almost overnight. At first glance, Baron Friedrich von Steuben appeared to be the most experienced and prestigious officer of any to join the American cause. In Europe, he held the exalted rank of lieutenant general. He had served as aide-de-camp to Frederick the Great, the Prussian king widely considered the military mastermind of the century. He traveled with an entourage of handsome young French officers, as befitted a personage of great stature. He bragged about his European estates.

It was a show. Yes, Steuben was a baron—a Germanic prince had made him a knight in the Order of Fidelity and given him the title
Freiherr.
He wore a large star on his breast to prove his nobility. Yes, he had served under Frederick the Great—he had been wounded twice during the Seven Years’ War. But the highest rank Steuben had gained in Frederick’s army was captain. After the war ended, he had been dismissed from the service.
He owned no estates. He had filled the past fourteen years managing the household of a prince in a minuscule German dominion. His prospects had been marred by a rumor that he had once “taken familiarities with young boys.”
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