Lion of Liberty (21 page)

Regardless of the reasons for the different battlefield performances, the results convinced Congress to create a Board of War with supreme powers over Washington and the military, and it named Gates president and Gates's friend, Irish Colonel Thomas Conway, as Inspector General. Bitter over Washington's refusal to appoint him a major general, Conway used his newfound authority to plot Washington's ouster. While disparaging Washington and his generals with anonymous letters to Congress, he enlisted
Gates into the plot by appealing to the Englishman's ambitions and heaping scorn on Washington. “Heaven has been determined to save your country,” Conway flattered Gates, “or a weak general and bad counselors would have ruined it.”
¹¹

Another member of Conway's plot tried enlisting the iconic Patrick Henry: “The northern army has shown us what Americans are capable of doing with a general at their head,” the anonymous critic wrote to Henry. Calling himself “one of your Philadelphia friends,” he charged that “a Gates, a Lee, or a Conway
¹²
would, in a few weeks, render them an irresistible body of men.” Warning Henry that “the letter must be thrown in the fire,” he nonetheless urged Henry that “some of its comments ought to be made public, in order to awaken, enlighten, and alarm our country.”
¹³

In what may have been one of the most significant and least known decisions in his life and, indeed, of the Revolutionary War, Henry sent the letter by express rider to his friend Washington at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where Washington had settled his army in winter quarters after the British occupation of Philadelphia.

“I am sorry there should be one man who counts himself my friend who is not yours,” Henry wrote to Washington.

Washington was equally emotional in thanking Henry, explaining that the anonymous letter “is not the only secret, insidious attempt that has been made to wound my reputation. There have been others equally base, cruel, and ungenerous . . . All I can say is that [America] has ever had, and I trust she will ever have, my honest exertions to promote her interest.
I cannot hope that my services have been the best; but my heart tells me they have been the best I can render.”
¹⁵

The anonymous letter to Henry had, in fact, been written by the Surgeon General of the Continental Army, Dr. Benjamin Rush, the renowned Philadelphia physician who had signed the Declaration of Independence. When he assumed his army post, he found medical services disorganized (as were all services in the new army), but lacked the administrative skills to build an effective organization. Rather than admit his own failure, he complained to Washington of mismanagement by Director General Dr. William Shippen—Richard Henry Lee's brother-in-law. Beset by battlefield crises, Washington dismissed Rush's complaints and provoked the doctor's angry efforts to promote the general's ouster.

In his letter to Henry, Washington confided,

Overall responsibility for the cabal to displace Washington remains unclear. Although Conway was arch-facilitator and Gates and Rush were evident co-conspirators, the plot may well have originated in the War Ministry in London, which generated most British espionage plots. The cabal began to collapse after Gates sent Major General Marquis de Lafayette—a close and loyal aide to Washington—on a quixotic mission to take command of the Northern Army in Albany in mid-February 1778. Once there, he was to mount an improbable expedition in the dead of winter to seize Canada from the British. When Lafayette arrived in Albany, however, there were too few troops and no money, arms, ammunition, or other supplies
for the expedition. Neither the area commanders nor the commissary were aware that Gates had authorized a mission to Canada. “I have been deceived by the Board of War,” Lafayette wrote to Washington. “It would be madness to undertake this operation.”
¹⁷

With Lafayette's revelations, the Conway Cabal, as it came to be called, collapsed. Congress ordered Conway demoted and transferred to an insignificant post along the Hudson River valley; Gates and the Board of War resigned, with Gates returning to his former post as commander of the Northern Army. Congress restored Washington to supreme command, giving him dictatorial powers and abandoning the concept of directing the war by committee.

Washington would never forget Henry's loyalty. “I can only thank you again, in language of the most undissembled gratitude, for your friendship,” Washington wrote after crushing the cabal.

Henry proved his loyalty to Washington and the Revolution in other ways during the Continental Army's winter at Valley Forge. On a wooded plateau some twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia, Valley Forge gave Washington's small army the advantage of elevation if it had to defend itself against a larger enemy. Washington ordered his men to raise a city of huts, which—even in the bitter winter that followed—might have been tolerable had the Quartermaster General provided clothes, blankets, foods, and other supplies that Washington had ordered. “The soldiers lived in misery,” according to Lafayette. “They lacked for clothes, hats, shirts, shoes, their legs and feet black from frostbite—we often had to amputate. . . . The army often went whole days without provisions. . . . The misery prevented new enlistments.”
¹⁸

By Christmas, desertions, disease, exposure to subzero temperatures, starvation, and thirst—for there were no springs on the Valley Forge plateau—had reduced Washington's Continental Army of 11,000 men to 5,000. Some froze to death; those who survived were too weak to fight. When Washington's pleas for supplies went unheeded by Quartermaster General Thomas Mifflin, he pleaded with Congress and the governors of every state for help.

“It is not easy to give you a just and accurate idea of the sufferings of the troops,” Washington wrote to Patrick Henry at the end of 1777.

Henry responded immediately, seizing nine wagonloads of clothing and blankets to meet the needs of Virginia's troops at Valley Forge. He promised Washington that “added to this supply, £15,000 worth of woolens etc. proper for the soldiers will set out from Petersburg in a few days. These last are procured under an act of Assembly empowering me to seize necessaries for our troops wherever they may be found.” He said he had issued orders “to both Carolinas” for blankets and clothes and pledged that “nothing possible for me to effect will be left undone in getting whatever the troops are in want of.” He also obtained and sent on to Washington enough funds to pay every Virginia soldier an attractive bonus for reenlisting. He was unable, however, to send Washington any additional troops, saying that he had sent two battalions south to support the Georgians and Carolinians. “Add to all this our Indian wars and marine service, almost total want of necessaries . . . deserters . . . small pox . . . there remains little prospect of filling the six new battalions from this state.”
²⁰

As Henry was dealing with the crisis at Valley Forge, George Rogers Clark returned from the West with a plan to defeat both the Indians and their British sponsors. Rather than a frontal attack in Indiana and eastern Illinois, Clark proposed a surprise attack with a small force of irregulars on the rear of the British fort at far-off Kaskaskia, on the western border of the Illinois territory by the Mississippi River. If successful, he would then move eastward across Illinois, while a second force advanced from the east to trap the British in a vice and force them to flee northward to Canada. Impressed by Clark's daring and assuredness, Henry commissioned him a lieutenant colonel and scratched up enough money and supplies for him to recruit 175 men and set off for the West.

In the weeks that followed, Virginia's officers at Valley Forge informed Henry that some supplies he had sent via the Quartermaster General had
never reached camp. In addition, they wrote of having found large stores of food and clothing in nearby towns that had not been sent to camp. Henry wrote to the Virginia delegation in Congress demanding an explanation. “I found upon enquiry,” he wrote sternly, “that eight or ten thousand hogs and several thousand fine beeves might have been had very lately in a few counties convenient to the camp.” He told the congressmen that he had commissioned three merchants “to purchase beef, or pork, to the amount of ten thousand pounds and drive it to camp in the most expeditious manner, and advanced them the cash. I have also directed Colonel Simpson to seize two thousand bushels of salt on the eastern shore . . . and reserve a thousand more to answer further orders that may become necessary.” He said he hoped that “these several steps” would ease the immediate crisis among Virginia regiments at Valley Forge. “But Gentlemen,” he scolded,

To Henry's consternation, his letter produced no response. Indeed, a month later, he received this astonishing letter from Washington:

Isolated in his Valley Forge headquarters, Washington said he had no way of knowing whether the sought-after provisions had fallen into “improper hands” or whether “a diminution of resources and increased difficulties in the means of procuring” had caused the shortages. “I address myself to you,” he wrote to Henry, “convinced that our alarming distresses will engage your most serious consideration and that the full force of that zeal and vigor you have manifested upon every other occasion will now operate for our relief.”
²²

Arriving, as it did, after his own letter to Congress and the shipment of ample supplies from Virginia to Valley Forge, Washington's letter outraged Henry. “I am really shocked at the management of Congress,” he vented to Richard Henry Lee. “Good God! Our fate committed to a man utterly unable to perform the task assigned to him! . . . I grieve at it . . . I am really so harassed by the great load of continental business thrown on me lately that I am ready to sink under my burden.”
²³

Fortunately, Henry did not sink under his burden. His relentless letters spurred Washington's aides to look into the activities of Quartermaster General Mifflin. A Philadelphia-area merchant before the Revolution, he had sought to profit from his office by waylaying supplies bound for Valley Forge into his own warehouses, where he sold them to the highest bidders. When Washington confronted him, he resigned and Congress reassigned him to an obscure military post where he could do no harm. Washington persuaded his trusted friend, Rhode Island Major General Nathanael Greene—also a merchant in private life—to accept the Quartermaster General's post. Within days, Valley Forge had a surplus of clothing, food, and other supplies.

Elated over resolution of the supply problem, Henry sent Washington “a stock of good rum, wine, sugar and such other articles as his Excellency may think needful . . . to the preservation of [Washington's] health.” A grateful Washington thanked Henry, saying the “agreeable present” had found him “in a humor to do it all manner of justice.”
²⁴