His Excellency: George Washington (18 page)

The second battle occurred at Germantown on October 4. A textbook illustration of the phrase “the fog of war,” Germantown was a near victory for Washington that was transformed into a defeat when, at a crucial moment in the battle, American troops fired on each other amidst dense fog and smoke, thereby permitting the British to regroup. Washington’s original attack plan was an excessively intricate four-pronged scheme that proved impossible to coordinate, especially during the night march toward the British lines. The attack was intended to be a complete surprise, but Howe was alerted to Washington’s plan at the last moment by Loyalists.

Sighting: October 4, 1777

With the battle in the balance, Washington has ridden forward with his staff to the sound of heavy musket fire. The American advance has stalled at a stone house, a sturdy two-and-a-half-story dwelling owned by Benjamin Chew, now occupied by over 100 British troops pouring a murderous fire from the windows. Washington asks his staff whether this formidable fortress should be by-passed or attacked. Henry Knox insists on the latter course (“we must not leave a castle in the rear”) and Washington defers to his judgment. Knox then directs four light cannons to fire on the house, but the cannon balls bounce off the stone walls. The heavy fog thickens, limiting visibility to a few yards and causing confused American troops to fire on one another. An officer volunteers to go forward under a white flag to propose terms of surrender to the defenders, but they shoot him down in the foggy confusion. Washington supervises several assaults on the house, all futile. The Chew house is never taken, the American advance is stalled, perhaps fatally. After-action reports agree on two points: the fortress should have been by-passed; and seventy-five American bodies lay bayoneted in the doorways and windowsills, while the interior walls, splattered with blood, resembled a slaughter house.
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At the end of the battle the British still held the field, and American casualties, about one thousand, doubled those on the British side. Nevertheless, Washington insisted that the battle could easily have gone the other way. The troops had fought valiantly, exposing the British army as “not that Invincible Body of Men which many suppose them to be.” In his correspondence afterward, he again distorted the casualty lists to exaggerate the American achievement and, in effect, claimed victory. He even adopted the posture of the victorious commander toward Howe, making a point of returning Howe’s dog, which had been found wandering the battlefield searching for his master. A grimmer version of Germantown as an example of strategic victory came from Thomas McKean, a prominent Pennsylvania lawyer and ardent patriot: “If your Excellency attacks & disables a thousand of the Enemy a week, and are constantly reinforced equal to the numbers you lose, as I trust you will, You must soon prove triumphantly victorious, and get the game, tho’ you should not throw sixes,” presumably meaning risk and lose your entire army in the process.
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As Washington was learning to play his new role as a somewhat aggressive fox, the pivotal battle of the war—actually a series of battles—was being waged north of Albany. Throughout the summer of 1777, Washington received regular reports about the steady progress of General John Burgoyne’s army as it moved down from Canada, presumably for a rendezvous with Howe somewhere along the Hudson corridor. Howe’s inexplicable decision to sail south toward the Chesapeake takes on truly bizarre status in the larger strategic context, since it left Burgoyne’s force of eight thousand troops marooned in a sea of hostile militia from western New England, which rallied by the thousands to reinforce the contingent of Continentals commanded by Horatio Gates. Washington sent Benedict Arnold, his most daring and battle-tested general, along with Daniel Morgan’s brigade of sharpshooters, his elite infantry unit, to assist Gates, but the Battle of Saratoga became a textbook example of the decisive role that swarming militia could play when teamed effectively with regulars. (It was also one of the few occasions in the war when militia functioned according to the Minuteman ideal, prompting Washington to observe that he could have obliterated Howe’s army outside Philadelphia if New Jersey and Pennsylvania militia had rallied with equivalent zeal.) The outcome was devastating to British presumptions of inevitable victory. On October 17, Burgoyne surrendered the surviving remnant of his battered army, nearly six thousand men.
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Saratoga radiated shock waves as far as London and Paris, causing the British ministry to consider getting out of the war and the French government to consider getting in. Tremors were also felt within the Continental Congress, where the stupendous success at Saratoga cast Gates’s star in ascendance and invited behind-the-scenes comparisons with Washington’s failure to prevent Howe’s capture of America’s capital city. The discrepancy was not lost on Washington, who found it difficult to acknowledge that he had played only a minor role in America’s greatest victory of the war. His congratulatory letter to Gates ended on a sour note: “I cannot but regret,” he wrote Gates, “that a matter of such magnitude and so interesting to our General Operations, should have reached me by report only,” meaning that Gates should have sent a letter under his own signature. Gates was also informed that Washington was sending one of his most trusted aides, Alexander Hamilton, to Albany in order to detach the bulk of Gates’s force and bring it down to Pennsylvania to join “the Main Army” under his direct command. Saratoga, in short, was a splendid victory, but it must not encourage anyone, including Gates himself, to forget who was the commander in chief.
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The truth was that Saratoga unleashed a whispering campaign against Washington that had been simmering beneath the surface ever since the debacle at Fort Washington. The larger truth was that criticism of Washington could only take the form of whispers, since his transcendent status as “His Excellency” levitated above all political squabbles, making direct criticism almost sacrilegious. Nevertheless, there were audible murmurings in the corridors of the Continental Congress, asking how such a supposedly brilliant general could lose so many battles, the last one permitting capture of America’s capital city. Benjamin Rush, who had once championed Washington’s distinctive status as quasi-king, now wondered out loud whether such power was compatible with republican principles. Most of the criticism was more muted. John Adams offered the shrewdest assessment: “Now we can allow a certain Citizen to be wise, virtuous, and good, without thinking him a Deity or a saviour.”
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Within the army anti-Washington sentiment was especially virulent among the small but politically influential group of French officers who had been promised high rank by members of the Congress anxious to encourage a Franco-American alliance. As a general rule, these French claimants were unqualified in all areas except their own exhaggerated sense of superiority. And it was invariably Washington who was forced to inform them that neither the promises made nor their inflated military credentials would suffice to qualify them as generals. One of the most arrogant and irritating of the group, Philippe Du Condray, ended his protests dramatically by spurring his horse onto a ferry on the Schuylkill River, then drowning when the horse, which could swim much better than Du Condray, kept going out the other end of the ferry. But the most troublesome protester was Thomas Conway, an Irishman by birth who had risen to the rank of colonel in the French army. Washington had described Conway’s proposed promotion to general as “as unfortunate a measure as ever was adopted,” and Conway himself as a man whose “importance in the Army, exists more in his imagination than in reality.”
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Conway did not take kindly to such assessments. What came to be called the “Conway Cabal” was more a gossip network involving a handful of disgruntled players within the Congress and the army that questioned Washington’s judgment than it was a full-fledged conspiracy to have him replaced, presumably with Gates. Once Washington let it be known that his own network of informants kept him fully apprised of the loose talk behind the scenes, both Conway and Gates fell all over themselves disclaiming any malevolent intentions and insisting on their total loyalty to him and to the cause. If Conway’s gossip campaign had the possibility to grow into a more serious challenge to Washington’s authority, or to the assumption that “His Excellency” and the cause were synonymous, this quickly evaporated with Washington’s deft exposure of the not-so-secret conversations. For their part, Conway and Gates had learned that questioning Washington’s judgment, and implicitly his unique authority, was akin to purchasing a one-way ticket to the sidelines, which, in the end, is where both of them landed.
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But the episode did generate more revealing reverberations within Washington’s own mind. Because the Fabian role had never rested comfortably alongside his own more aggressive instincts, the accusation that he should have been able to prevent the capture of Philadelphia reinforced his own sense of failure at Brandywine and Germantown. The whisperings in the corridors, in other words, echoed the whispering in his own head and his honor-driven belief that the refusal to engage Howe’s army in one all-or-nothing battle was somehow a betrayal of his personal reputation. He kept asking his staff to formulate plans for one more engagement, presumably victorious, that would then permit him to take his depleted and frazzled army, a third of whom did not have shoes, into winter quarters. The strategic decision to make the survival of the Continental army the highest priority, the realization that he must fight a protracted defensive war, remained at odds with his own more decisive temperament. Greene tried to remind him that he really had no choice: “your Excellency has the choice of but two things,” Greene advised, “to fight the Enemy without the least Prospect of Success . . . or remain inactive, & be the subject of Censure of an ignorant & impatient populace.” Knox chimed in with the same opinion: “But I believe there is not a single maxim in War that will justify a number of undisciplined troops attacking an equal number of disciplined troops strongly posed in redoubts and having a strong city in their rear such as Philadelphia.”
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The clear lesson of Brandywine and Germantown, Greene argued, was that the Continental army was no match for Howe’s regulars. Let the gossipmongers in the Congress, all blissfully ignorant of this unattractive truth, persist in their naive chatter and their veiled preference for another Gates-like victory. Washington’s greatest responsibility was to ignore such critics. He must also ignore those voices in his head that regarded the presence of Howe’s army in Philadelphia as a standing challenge to his reputation: “I wish that it was in our power to give that Army some capital wound—the reputation of the Army and the happiness of the country loudly calls for it—but in consulting our wishes rather than our reason, we may be hurried by an impatience to attempt something splendid into inextricable difficulties.” Washington’s highest duty was not to answer his critics or satisfy his sense of personal honor, but rather to win the war.
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He knew that Greene was right, but he could not resist the memory of the Trenton-Princeton successes of the previous winter and kept searching for the opportunity to repeat that moment of glory in order to end the current campaign on a triumphant note. Once again, Greene warned him against entangling his personal agenda with the strategic imperatives or his public responsibilities as commander in chief. “The successes of last winter,” Greene observed, “were brilliant and attended with the most happy consequences in changing the complexion of the times,” but they were really only psychological victories, and “if the bills of mortality were to be consulted, I fancy . . . we were no great gainers by those operations.” He concluded with another lecture:

Let us consider the consequences that will result from a disappointment in a measure of this nature—In the first place it will be attended with a vast expence and the loss of many lives to no valuable purpose—it will prove a great obstruction to the recruiting service and a defeat will give a general alarm and spread universal discontent throughout the continent—It will expose the weakness of the militia to the enemy and not only them but to all europe who now consider them much more formidable than they really are.
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It took every ounce of Washington’s legendary self-control to hear and accept Greene’s counsel, which ran against his grain, as well as his wounded pride at being the butt of unofficial criticism. But eventually he embraced Greene’s realistic appraisal as his own. This is one of several moments in Washington’s career when his decision
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to act merits special recognition, since another major engagement with Howe outside Philadelphia risked the existence of the Continental army. It also marks the moment when Washington, who had been struggling with the unpalatable idea for over a year, finally and fully accepted his Fabian role, emotionally as well as rationally, along with the recognition that it would be a protracted war in which the preservation of the Continental army was the priority. These decisions, in turn, completed his transformation into a public figure whose personal convictions must be suppressed and rendered subordinate to his higher calling as an agent of history, which in this case meant that winning the war was more important than being himself. On December 17, the General Orders announced the end of the campaign and the decision to move the army into winter quarters near a previously obscure location in Pennsylvania called Valley Forge. The orders declared that “He himself,” meaning Washington, “will share in the hardship and partake in every inconvenience.” This, it turned out, was not really true. It was true, however, that the man and the cause were now completely synonymous, not just in the public mind, but in Washington’s as well.
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