The Drillmaster of Valley Forge (18 page)

Steuben did not object outright to the order. On the surface, he seemed to be pleased with it. “It gives me great Satisfaction,” he wrote to Washington, “to see that Your Excellency has taken such a wise Step…as to engage the General Officers and the Field Officers…to take Command of the Troops in our daily Exercise.” He meant this sincerely; he wanted the officers to take charge of drill. But the rest of his letter fairly reeked with sarcasm. He had taken charge of drill, he told Washington—clearly tongue in cheek—because he had hoped to “save [the officers] the trouble of descending to those Toilsome & fastidious details which we chearfully [
sic
] encountered from the beginning for the good of the Service.” He concluded the letter with a request for leave, so he could see friends in York.
²⁴

Washington praised the Baron for his flexibility—“the army has derived every advantage from the institution under you, that could be expected in so short a time”—but underneath the passivity of Steuben's response the commanding general detected something that was not quite right. And he worried about the request to travel to York. Steuben claimed that he only wanted to visit friends. Washington didn't buy it. He feared that Steuben planned to meet with his supporters in
Congress, with the intention of amending Washington's order and cajoling the Board of War into fashioning an “inspectorate” that suited his aspirations.
²⁵

This Washington could not tolerate, even if he had stood behind the Baron during the reforms in March and April. Steuben could not be allowed to compromise the carefully managed harmony in the high command. He would have to be headed off.

Before Steuben left for York, Washington gave him confidential letters to be handed to Henry Laurens and the young New York delegate William Duer. To Laurens, Washington merely hinted at his suspicions, while taking care to add that the Baron had been of great service. With Duer, the general was brutally candid…and secretive, for the letter was written in Alex Hamilton's hand and bore the aide's signature as well. But the words were clearly Washington's: “It will not be amiss to be on your guard,” he warned Duer. “The baron is a gentleman for whom I have a particular esteem…. But I am apprehensive, with all his good qualities, a fondness for power and importance, natural to every man, may lead him to wish for more extensive prerogatives in his department than it will be for the good of the service to grant.”

When Washington had first made Steuben the acting inspector general, he related to Duer, he had allowed him a great deal of latitude, necessary for accomplishing so much in so short a period of time. He had to curtail these powers earlier than he had anticipated because some officers had reacted badly. “The novelty of the office excited questions about its boundaries; the extent of its operations alarmed the officers of every rank for their own rights.” Their “jealousies and discontents” had grown so heated, Washington feared, that the success of Steuben's reforms might be “overturned.” Hopefully the general orders of June 15 would set everything right, but Duer would still have to keep an eye on the touchy Prussian:

Washington was very close to being entirely correct. What motivated Steuben was not so much a hunger for power for its own sake, but a desire for accomplishment and efficiency that pushed him to be overzealous. His style of leadership, which owed to his Prussian up-bringing, was geared solely toward results, and did not take the personalities and feelings of other officers into account. In the Continental Army such considerations were paramount. Washington understood this, but Steuben did not.
²⁶

For the moment, though, Steuben's sometimes autocratic manner was a moot point. The British were on the move, and the long sojourn at Valley Forge was coming to an end.

S
TEUBEN WAS PREPARING
for his trip to York when the news came: the British were leaving Philadelphia.

The Baron's mind was occupied with other matters, things that concerned him personally and professionally. Then came the intelligence about the evacuation, passed along on the morning of June 17 to Washington's headquarters by a Philadelphia washerwoman who laundered the uniforms of high-ranking British officers. Sir Henry Clinton's army was going to give up its foothold in eastern Pennsylvania and retreat, possibly to New York City. That very morning, the advance elements of the British army were already in the process of crossing the Delaware into New Jersey.

Washington had anxiously anticipated this development—he had, in fact, been planning for it from early spring. He had already sent portions of William Maxwell's New Jersey Brigade to reinforce Jersey militia across the Delaware, to monitor any move the British might make, but this force was not strong enough to
do anything more than harass Clinton's troops—if they actually retreated in that direction. Washington would not have to do anything, really, for by crossing the Delaware, Clinton showed that he was not interested in marching on Valley Forge. But if the American commander wanted to take a chance and try to destroy part or all of Clinton's army before it could reach the safety of New York, he would have to act
now
.

Gut instinct told Washington to
attack
, that here was an opportunity not to be missed, but where it came to strategy Washington led by consensus. He wanted to hear what his generals had to say. On the evening of the seventeenth, Washington assembled all of his major generals—Charles Lee, Nathanael Greene, Benedict Arnold, Lord Stirling, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Steuben—and most of his brigadiers at his Valley Forge headquarters, the Isaac Potts house. The general-in-chief laid out what he knew of Clinton's movements, gave his frank assessment of the condition of the Continental Army, and asked his generals to present their views on the strategic options. Should the army remain at Valley Forge and wait for another opportunity? Should Washington send a detachment to reinforce the brigade in New Jersey? Or should he hazard it all and send the entire army from Valley Forge to attack the British directly as they made their painfully slow exit from Philadelphia?

Their responses could not have pleased him much. Two of his brigadiers—including, predictably, the pugnacious Anthony Wayne—favored a “general engagement,” an outright attack; Nathanael Greene supported this view, as did Lafayette, albeit with some reservations. But the rest, the majority, counselled caution. Charles Lee stated outright that the Americans were not ready for an open battle with the British, and probably never would be.

Steuben was also circumspect. Clinton, he feared, might be trying to lure Washington into a trap. The British had done so at Barren Hill, less than a month before. Now the stakes were much higher. Washington should follow the retreat carefully, sending a substantial body of troops to cover the fords of the Delaware above Trenton and to observe Clinton's movements. If Clinton's objective was indeed New
York, the Baron suggested, then Washington would be certain of it and could bring up the main army if circumstances warranted it.
²

So the army would watch and wait. With no pressing business other than his desire to meet with the Board of War, Steuben rode out from Valley Forge for York the very next morning.

The Baron was still on the road to York—mounted, presumably, on one of the two “fine horses” given to him by Congress three weeks before—when a courier from headquarters caught up with him. He brought new orders from Washington: Steuben must return to camp immediately. The British had completely evacuated Philadelphia and had crossed into New Jersey; Washington, in response, was sending nearly his entire army—some thirteen thousand men—in pursuit. Cutting his trip short, Steuben wheeled about and spurred his horse back to the Forge.

When he reached camp later that day, the entire army was on the move. Washington had hoped so keenly for a chase that he had already written Lee's marching orders three weeks before, and now altered them slightly to accord to present circumstances. Lee's advance guard of three brigades had left at 3:00
P.M.
, followed by Wayne's division at five o'clock. The main body, under Lafayette and the Baron de Kalb, would march out at four o'clock the next morning, and Lord Stirling's rear guard would wait until the morning of the twenty-first. The army headed not to Philadelphia, but rather to the north and east: to Coryell's Ferry on the Delaware, just west of Princeton. If Clinton hoped to make it safely to New York, no matter by which route, he would have to cut north. By moving east, the Continentals could catch up to the British without any forced marches or Herculean efforts.

The chase was on.

Washington had a significant advantage. Because he had reacted so quickly, the British had only a shadow of a head start. The American line of march was no longer than the one Clinton would have to follow, and the Americans travelled much lighter. And once the British entered New Jersey, they encountered resistance. Maxwell's New Jersey Continentals, supplemented by the Jersey militia under Philemon
Dickinson, harassed Clinton's scarlet-clad columns practically from the moment the British set foot on the east bank of the Delaware at Cooper's Ferry. The Jerseymen did not risk an open battle, but instead hurriedly destroyed bridges immediately in front of Clinton's army, stopping occasionally to fire on the passing Redcoats from barns, mills, and farmhouses along the route. They were no more than an annoyance to Clinton, but that was their intention: the Jersey troops forced Clinton to deploy skirmishers on his flanks, while the entire army had to pause for burned and shattered bridges to be rebuilt.

And then there was the heat, the unforgiving, unrelenting heat. Those who recorded their recollections of the New Jersey campaign of 1778—British, German, or American—noted this above all other miseries. There were a few severe downpours over the next nine days, which transformed the dirt roads into nearly impassible quagmires, but during the day the brutal heat always returned. Temperatures soared well into the nineties. Both sides suffered, but the British appear to have gotten the worst of it. Dehydrated, exhausted men dropped in frighteningly large numbers, felled by heatstroke. Johann Ewald, a captain in the Hessian light infantry (
Jäger
) corps, noted that “no water was to be found on the entire march.”
³

There was something more behind the sluggishness of Clinton's retreat than the vicissitudes of a harsh summer. Clinton's cumbersome baggage train—some fifteen thousand wagons carrying the personal belongings of the officers, spare camp equipage, and all the comforts of home taken from Philadelphia—slowed the army, as did the unusually large number of noncombatants that followed in the army's wake. Alongside the British columns walked some one thousand civilians, including more than seven hundred women and children. This was hardly out of character for European armies, which often resembled travelling cities, and the British army was one of the worst offenders in this regard.

And Clinton was not in any particular hurry. He did not savor the idea of a clash with Washington, but neither did he shrink from it. The British had a significant advantage over the Americans in sheer numbers: roughly twenty thousand troops of all types, as opposed to
thirteen thousand Continentals, exclusive of militia. With such an advantage, neither Clinton nor his officers harbored any real concern that they might be “burgoyn'd”—that is, trapped, cut off, and forced into a humiliating surrender, the fate of “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne's army at Saratoga the previous year. The British took their time, in other words, because they had no fear.

Washington could not help but be encouraged by the slow progress of the British retreat. His army was relatively unimpeded by baggage or civilians, while Maxwell and Dickinson provided him with detailed intelligence as they shadowed Clinton's every move. Although Clinton had more and better-trained troops than Washington did, the British force was strung out haphazardly in a thin column several miles in length. If the Continentals moved quickly enough, they just might be able to draw near to Clinton, isolate his rear guard, and defeat him in detail.

Even moving at a modest pace—Washington, fearing heavy casualties from the heat, did not want to push his army too hard—the Continentals caught up with Clinton within a few short days. By the afternoon of Monday, June 22, the entire American army had reached the Delaware at Coryell's Ferry; it crossed the river that night, and by the morning of the twenty-third, was encamped at Hopewell, New Jersey. There Washington's sources informed him of Clinton's position: after a march of only thirty miles in six days, the head of the British column had just then halted at Crosswicks, New Jersey, a mere seventeen miles south-southeast of Hopewell. The Continentals were within striking distance of the British. With a momentous decision ahead of him, Washington bivouacked his men at Hopewell to rest as he pondered his next move.
⁴

 

S
TEUBEN HAD
just caught up with the army when it made camp at Hopewell.

After his abortive trip to York, the Baron had returned to Valley Forge to confer with Washington. As he did not have a command in
the line, he was free to serve Washington in other ways. So instead of following the army to Coryell's, he and his staff rode immediately for Philadelphia. There they could observe British movements from the rear, in the event that Clinton doubled back and tried to maneuver around behind the Continentals.

Steuben spent the next four days in Philadelphia impatiently awaiting a summons from Washington. He did his best to enjoy himself, taking up residence on New Street in the city's German quarter and flirting with the local girls there in his native tongue; he “fancied himself again in his native country,” Duponceau recalled years later. But despite the parties and the gaiety, the city was a depressing sight—Duponceau thought that the British had left it “filthy”—and though Benedict Arnold soon arrived with a regiment of Continentals to restore order, Philadelphia citizens with Patriot sympathies could not be restrained from punishing those who had collaborated with the British during the occupation. On the twenty-third, the Baron left the city in a hurry, arriving at Washington's camp that evening.

The army was preparing for battle when Steuben rode through the picket line and into the camp at Hopewell. The men were cleaning their muskets and assembling paper cartridges; they were also thinning out their few possessions, for Washington had decreed that they must march light, with no unnecessary baggage, not even tents. After nearly seven months in winter quarters, and with their enemy fleeing before them, they were eager for battle. Their commander in chief, however, had not yet settled on a specific course of action.

On the morning of June 24, a council of war convened at Washington's headquarters. After briefing the generals on the strength and position of the British forces, Washington proposed a deliberate movement against Clinton with the intention of forcing a battle. Charles Lee responded first. It might be acceptable, he contended, to reinforce Maxwell and Dickinson as they played havoc on Clinton's flanks, but to do anything more than that would be to risk destruction. Any outright attack would be suicidal. Even if the Continentals equalled the British in numbers, they would never equal them in discipline. Challenging
the British to battle would be tantamount to “building them a golden bridge,” freely giving them an easy victory to no good purpose. Instead, Lee proposed, the main army should march to the Hudson Highlands, there to await the arrival of the promised French expeditionary force. The French, being professionals, would at least have a fighting chance against the British.

Lee spoke from experience, and many of his juniors deferred to him even if they did not like him personally. Steuben was one of these men. Lafayette, Greene, and Wayne, however, could not abide Lee's caution, not when such an unprecedented opportunity presented itself. At no point in the war thus far had the British made themselves so vulnerable. It would be “disgraceful and humiliating to allow the enemy to cross the Jerseys in tranquility,” Lafayette countered. Wayne suggested that a strong force—around twenty-five hundred men—be sent forward to goad the British into a counterattack.

Washington proposed a compromise: that a strong advance guard of fifteen hundred Continentals be sent to reinforce the Jersey troops and militia already nipping at Clinton's flanks, while the main army followed closely behind to monitor the situation. Like most compromises, it fully satisfied no one. Lee, Lafayette, and Greene agreed to it, albeit for very different reasons; Wayne truculently refused to sign his name to the proposal. Washington himself was not happy with his own compromise, but it was better than doing nothing, and he was not one to overrule the advice of the majority except in the most extraordinary circumstances.

Within hours the situation would change completely. After the council adjourned, Lafayette conferred privately with five of his colleagues, including Wayne, Greene, and Steuben. Together they began to incline toward Wayne's position. Wayne and Greene wrote individually to Washington to protest the compromise. Lafayette wrote on behalf of Steuben and the French engineer Louis Duportail, who begged the marquis to explain to Washington “how sorry, how distressed they are to see that we were going to loose [
sic
] an occasion which may be reputed as one of the finest ever offered.”
⁵

Washington did not wait to summon another council. He had already begun to act, rather liberally, on the compromise plan: before the day was out, he had sent more than two thousand Continentals, including six hundred of Dan Morgan's Virginia riflemen, to reinforce the Jersey troops currently hounding the British. Emboldened by the protests of his more aggressive generals, Washington dispatched another one thousand Continentals the following morning. The American advance guard now numbered nearly five thousand men. Charles Lee, as the senior-most major general, by right deserved to command the force, but as he evinced no interest in what he saw as a doomed enterprise, Washington gave the command to Lafayette. This was no simple reconnaissance. Washington intended to start a fight.