His Excellency: George Washington (20 page)

Finally, there was Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand, Baron von Steuben. Steuben’s title was a complete fabrication, as was his claim of intimacy with Frederick the Great and his rank of general in the Prussian army. But in addition to being a lovable fraud, Steuben possessed a thorough knowledge of Prussian and French military procedures and an infectious enthusiasm for drilling troops on the parade ground. Soon after turning up as an unannounced volunteer at Valley Forge, Steuben was briskly, if rather incoherently—his English was studded with German profanities—shouting marching orders to platoons, then companies, then whole regiments.

Steuben’s impact on the discipline of the Continental army only becomes comprehensible when one realizes that, prior to his arrival, there had been no uniform standards of march and maneuver at all. And whereas modern-day soldiers complain that daily drilling is a tiresome and mostly useless exercise designed to occupy time, on eighteenth-century battlefields the ability to move precisely from column to line formations, and vice versa, made a crucial difference in delivering maximum firepower at the point of attack or maintaining military order during a strategic retreat. (This is not to mention that standing calmly at attention while the man abreast of you is disemboweled by a cannon ball is an acquired skill and not a natural act.) In May 1778, Steuben became inspector general of the Continental army, and soon thereafter his
Regulations,
popularly known as “The Blue Book,” became the standard source of disciplinary standards for all units. More than anyone else, Steuben was responsible for injecting a professional standard of performance into the Continental army, blending a European code of obedience to authority onto an American army of inveterate individualists, shaping the raw material huddled in the huts of Valley Forge into the hard instrument Washington needed but, until 1778, had not commanded. The last official letter Washington wrote as commander in chief was sent to Steuben, acknowledging that his contribution to American victory ranked near the top because it permitted the Continental army to compete on equal terms with British regulars.
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What did not happen at Valley Forge is probably more important than what did. Throughout the winter of 1777–78 the murmurings against Washington in the Continental Congress continued, and it gradually became clear that the Conway Cabal should have been called (to preserve the alliteration) the “Mifflin Maneuver.” The chief conspirator was actually Thomas Mifflin, who had once served as Washington’s aide outside Boston, where apparently Washington had offended Mifflin’s bottomless but fragile ego by not giving him a combat command. Scholars do not agree about Mifflin’s scheming—some think the purported conspiracy was merely loose talk in the corridors of the Congress—but Mifflin was clearly engaged in some kind of political campaign to undermine Washington’s sovereign control over the army. Despite Mifflin’s adroit leaks and political machinations—to include a list of Washington’s forty-five greatest military blunders deposited by an anonymous “Freeman” on the steps of the Congress—Washington remained calm and collected. The plot, to the extent there ever was one, dissolved when Washington leaked his own story to the press: “Whenever the public gets dissatisfied with my services, or a person is found better qualified to answer her expectations, I shall quit the helm . . . and retire to private life with as much content, as ever the wearied pilgrim felt upon his safe arrival in the Holy-Land.” The publication of Washington’s readiness—or was it a threat?—to resign was more than sufficient to expose and therefore destroy Mifflin’s scheme. It was the last occasion during the war when Washington’s authority was seriously challenged.
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But the most important event that did not happen was the dissolution of the Continental army. It is not clear how many men died of disease and exposure at Valley Forge, but new recruits and, even more important, reenlistments “for the duration,” bolstered the size of the army to twelve thousand in March 1778, with a core of about five thousand battle-tested veterans. And more were on the way. One of the dominant themes in Washington’s early life had been the elemental fact that success followed survival. His military reputation after the Braddock debacle, his inheritance of Mount Vernon, his marriage to Martha Custis, all had occurred when others fell by the wayside and he was left standing. If Washington regarded the Continental army as the institutional projection of his own personality, then the troops marching out of winter quarters at Valley Forge in May 1778 represented a new chapter in that same elemental story.

The month of May, in fact, seemed to brim over with evidence that the war itself was entering a new and perhaps climactic phase. Congress ratified the treaty with France, which promised to alter the strategic chemistry of the conflict, and shortly thereafter passed legislation offering financial incentives (i.e., half pay for seven years for officers, an eighty-dollar bonus for enlisted men) to all serving until the end of the war. Down in Philadelphia, the British army was preparing to evacuate, thereby confirming Washington’s assessment that “the possession of our Towns, while we have an Army in the field, will avail them little,” even when the town happened to be the American capital. General Howe, forced to face his failure at locating the strategic center of the rebellion, had resigned and was replaced by Sir Henry Clinton. And the British ministry, revealing its increasing sense of frustration, had released forged documents purporting to disclose that Washington was really a secret agent who had sold out the American cause for money. As laughable as it was ludicrous, the effort to undermine Washington’s authority only prompted newspaper editorials joking that Howe’s record of failure suggested that he must be an American spy.
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When Clinton began to move his ten thousand troops out of Philadelphia toward New York, Washington was torn between his urge to test his better-trained army in battle and his Fabian resolution to avoid any full-scale engagement. After much brooding and several councils of war, he eventually chose a middle course designed to harass Clinton’s rear without provoking a major fight. During the debate among his general staff about how to proceed, Charles Lee had argued most vociferously against any action, claiming that it was folly to risk casualties now that the French, like the proverbial cavalry, were speeding across the Atlantic to the rescue. What became the Battle at Monmouth Court House was neither foreseen nor intended but became unavoidable when Lafayette, whom Washington had unwisely trusted with command of the advance wing of the American army, blundered into Clinton’s main force.
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Sighting: June 28, 1778

It is very hot, nearly 100 degrees, and Billy Lee has assumed unofficial command of the servants and valets for all the general officers, leading them on horseback to the top of a hill beneath a large sycamore tree where they can more easily observe the looming action and catch the cooling breeze. As Billy Lee takes out his telescope to survey the battlefield, Washington looks up at the group and is heard to observe: “See those fellows collecting on yonder height; the enemy will fire on them to a certainty.” And just as Washington speaks a six-pound artillery ball lands in the sycamore tree, scattering but not injuring Billy Lee and his fellow servants, whom the British had apparently mistaken for Washington and his staff.
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Washington supposedly smiled at this incident. He surely also smiled if he witnessed a more famous scene—there is no evidence that he did—during the height of the battle, when a woman known in the lore as Molly Pitcher (real name, Mary Ludwig Hayes) replaced her fallen husband loading the muzzle of a cannon and showed no concern when a British ball passed between her legs. (A few inches higher, one soldier heard her say, and she would have lost her occupation.) Though witnesses disagree about another famous scene at Monmouth Court House, all agree that Washington was not smiling, some say was trembling with outrage, others claim was cursing a proverbial blue streak.
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He had come upon Lee leading a headlong retreat. Whether the retreat was justified, as Lee and his subsequent scholarly defenders have insisted, is beyond knowing. What is clear beyond any doubt is that Washington considered Lee’s conduct as either cowardly or an insubordinate effort to sabotage an attack he had earlier opposed. Washington relieved Lee on the spot, then rallied the American troops on more favorable terrain—which is what Lee’s supporters argue he was trying to do—while calmly sitting astride his horse in the midst of a blistering British artillery barrage. Under Washington’s direct command, and moving now with a professional polish that Steuben’s drilling made second nature, the troops of the Continental army held the field at the end of the sweltering day and inflicted almost twice their casualties on Clinton’s regulars. As Washington saw it, two conclusions were clear: the Continental army was now a match for British professionals and could hold its own in a conventional, open-field engagement; and Charles Lee was finished as an army officer. What Washington could not know was that Monmouth Court House was the last major action he would command until Yorktown.
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A central lesson of his life—survive and you shall succeed—seemed to be holding true in the months after Valley Forge. Once Clinton barricaded his army in New York, and as Washington took up defensive positions around the city, he recalled being in the same location two years earlier in much less favorable circumstances: “It is not a little pleasing, nor less wonderful to contemplate, that after two years of Maneuvering and undergoing the strangest vicissitudes that perhaps ever attended any one contest since the creation, that both Armies are brought back to the very point they set out from.” Only this time it was the British who were “now reduced to the use of the spade and pick axe for defense.” Victory seemed imminent.
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FRENCH CONNECTIONS AND SOUTHERN STRATEGIES

A
S IT
turned out, victory in the full and final sense that Washington came to define the term was actually five years away. In one sense the War of Independence might best be described as a marathon, and Washington’s distinguishing virtue thus becomes his sheer stamina. But in another sense the marathon metaphor misses the peaks and valleys that made his experience as commander in chief less like a long-distance race and more like a roller-coaster ride. While stamina—the capacity to hold on until the end of the ride—remains an important virtue in this undulating version of the story, Washington’s experience of the trip on the downward dips forced him to develop another set of virtues, indeed to revise his previous understanding of virtue itself. The thirty months between the fall of 1778 and the spring of 1781 felt to Washington like one long, downward dip, the most frustrating and difficult period of his life, the true testing time for both himself and what he believed he was fighting for.

One source of his frustration was the French fleet. Naval supremacy had proved to be Britain’s chief strategic asset in the war, permitting Howe and then Clinton to move troops quickly and with impunity, as well as to threaten every major American city. From the moment the French alliance became official, Washington began dreaming of the day when the presence of a French fleet would offset this British advantage and afford him the same mobility. And the dramatic culmination of his dream was a joint Franco-American operation in which the French fleet bottled up a large British army while the Continental army encircled it along the lines of the Boston siege. But Washington’s dream kept receding into the middle distance, primarily because France insisted on basing its main fleet in the Caribbean in order to protect its interests in the West Indies. Early on, in August 1778, Washington attempted a small-scale version of his larger dream, an amphibious assault on the British garrison of five thousand troops in Rhode Island. When it failed because the smaller French fleet felt obliged to withdraw, Washington himself felt obliged, as he put it, “to put the best face upon the matter,” meaning conceal the fact that, despite French entry into the war, the British navy remained supreme on the Atlantic coast.
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The dream, however, refused to die, in part because it represented the only plausible scenario that permitted Washington to remove his Fabian mask and resume his more natural role as the aggressor, and in part because he did not believe that the British government would ever abandon its American empire without suffering another decisive defeat at the same level as Saratoga. By 1779 the fuzzier features of the dream had formed into a sharper image with New York at its center. New York was the great British enclave in North America, the nest from which ships and troops radiated British power and, not so incidentally, the scene of Washington’s most humiliating defeat three years earlier. Washington therefore came to regard its capture as “the first and capital object, upon which every other is dependent.” Amidst confused reports about the location of the main French fleet—one report had it in the English Channel supporting an invasion that was about to capture London—Washington kept coming back to that mental picture of French ships blocking New York Harbor and the Continental army marching into the captured city with him at the lead, redeeming his own honor and ending the war in one dramatic stroke.
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Although that hope kept colliding with the reality of British naval supremacy and French priorities in Europe and the Caribbean, it remained the centerpiece of Washington’s strategic thinking for nearly three years. During that time Washington deployed the main elements of the Continental army in a giant arc that extended from northern New Jersey into the Hudson Highlands near West Point and then eastward into the hill country of western Connecticut. This deployment served multiple purposes: it permitted a quick retreat to the west if the British managed to assemble a superior force in the region; it protected the Hudson corridor if the British tried again to sever New England from the Middle Atlantic states; and it established a dominant American military presence in a populous region where the allegiance of the civilian inhabitants tended to require reminders of who was in charge. But mostly it left the Continental army poised to strike the decisive blow at New York whenever the winds and the gods delivered the French fleet of Washington’s dream.
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