Treason of the Blackest Dye
Washington’s army had scarcely occupied its new winter quarters at Valley Forge when it became clear that it faced a potentially disastrous supply crisis. On December 23, 1777, Washington reported to Henry Laurens, Hancock’s successor as president of Congress, that a dearth of provisions left him utterly helpless to act against the enemy. That was bad enough, but with little to eat for days on end his long-suffering troops were growling and mutinous. Unless supplies reached camp immediately, Washington warned, the army faced a stark trinity of choices: “Starve—dissolve—or disperse.”1
The troops were not only ravenous, but also lamentably clad: of the 11,000 who marched into camp, nearly 3,000 were “barefoot and otherwise naked.” Private Joseph Plumb Martin, a hard-bitten veteran of Kip’s Bay, White Plains, and Germantown who wasn’t given to exaggeration, witnessed a recurrence of what had become the Continental Army’s winter calling card, remembering how its path to Valley Forge could be tracked by yet more bloodstained footprints in the snow. Martin and his comrades now had little more than tatters of old clothing to defy the cutting wind and numbing cold of winter and were mostly without blankets. Lafayette recalled that the soldiers’ “feet and legs turned black with frostbite and often had to be amputated.”2
Even now, Washington opposed coercing civilians into supplying his men with the provisions and clothing they needed so badly. Small seizures of food made in late December 1777, “in consequence of the most pressing and urgent necessity,” had “excited the greatest alarm and uneasiness,” even among those best disposed toward the Revolution. If repeated, Washington warned, such tough measures would have “the most pernicious consequences,” destroying popular support for the Continental Army.3
The situation was all the more galling because the food, clothing, and equipment that the army needed so desperately lay stockpiled in storehouses and depots: the root cause of the problem was logistical, resulting from a total breakdown in the transportation network needed to shift supplies over rural Pennsylvania’s muddy roads. Both the commissary and quartermaster departments were to blame, with Congress, which controlled them, ultimately responsible for the shambles; for example, although General Thomas Mifflin resigned his post of quartermaster general in November 1777, it was three months before that vital vacancy was filled. As the Americans’ elected central government, Congress was already revealing the inherent weakness that would increasingly thwart Washington’s ambitions to take the war to the enemy: unsurprisingly for a body spawned by a revolt against British taxation policies, it lacked power to tax the states to fund the revolutionaries’ national war effort or even to enforce its requests for supplies and manpower.
If food and clothing were scarce at Valley Forge, wood at least was plentiful, and by New Year’s Day 1778 the army was under cover, with the rank and file hunkering in the crude huts they had built for themselves. True to his word, and unlike many of his officers, Washington stayed with his men throughout their winter ordeal in Pennsylvania, just as he had kept close by them at Boston and Morristown. This contrasted with his attitude as commander of the Virginia Regiment between 1755 and 1758, when he’d often left his men in their spartan frontier posts to seek respite in more civilized quarters. At Valley Forge, Washington didn’t share all of his army’s hardships: given his rank and responsibilities, there was no expectation among contemporaries that he should. While the privates, sergeants, and junior officers roughed it in shanties, Washington and his staff were accommodated in cramped but relatively warm stone buildings or wooden farmhouses and ate regular, if rudimentary, meals. There was also a semblance of domesticity as Martha Washington, along with the wives of high-ranking officers such as Greene, Knox, and Lord Stirling, joined their menfolk in camp.
Washington’s continued physical presence at Valley Forge was crucial for the army’s survival. Even if he was not shoeless, cold, hungry, and lousy, as he went his daily rounds he saw many men who were all of these things and through his unending correspondence spared no pains to ensure that Congress knew of their sufferings and sacrifices in the cause of American liberty. Following the stance that he had adopted since first accepting command of the Continental Army in June 1775, Washington sought to achieve his objectives though careful, respectful lobbying of key players in Congress. This, too, was a marked change from his attitude during the 1750s, when his letters to Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie grew petulant and brusque, and ultimately self-defeating.
Prompted by Washington’s frequent reports from headquarters, which chronicled his army’s trials in telling detail, Congress took action. In January it appointed a “Committee at Camp,” instructed to work with Washington to overhaul the army’s organization, addressing such key issues as recruitment, clothing, supply, and discipline. The measures that Washington believed essential to address the “numerous defects” in the “present military establishment” were presented to the committee members in an extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive document. Besides urging pensions as a means of motivating his officers, Washington called for a formal annual draft from the militia to fill his depleted battalions. While certainly a “disagreeable alternative” to voluntary enlistments, drafting was now “an unavoidable one,” he argued: with the Continental Army more than 35,000 men short of the paper establishment, something drastic needed to be done. Earlier that month, Virginia had already resorted to conscription to fill its quota of fifteen Continental regiments, targeting unmarried militiamen, who received a $15 bounty and were obliged to serve for a year. Like militiamen balloted for the old Virginia Regiment during the 1750s, those wealthy enough to provide an able-bodied replacement could dodge the draft. In fact, when the “new army” was first authorized in September 1776, with the states each required to provide their share of men, the hiring of substitutes had become common. Having already served a six-month stint in the Connecticut “levies,” in early 1777, young Joseph Plumb Martin resolved to enlist in the Connecticut Continentals for “three years, or during the war.” Badgered to take the place of one of a squad of militiamen and act as their “scapegoat,” he recalled: “I thought, as I must go, I might as well get as much for my skin as I could.” While deploring such auctions, Washington was nonetheless prepared “to provide a man” in place of his cousin Lund, should he “happen to draw a prize in the militia.” To Washington, Lund was more valuable overseeing Mount Vernon than toting a musket against the British, but such responses merely exacerbated the extent to which the war for American liberty was fought by the most underprivileged and unfree members of American society, white and black alike.4
Once the initial wave of martial enthusiasm, or rage militaire, of 1775 subsided, and it became clear that the war with Britain would be both long and bitter, most of those who endured the greatest dangers and hardships to secure American independence by serving in the Continental Army were not the land-owning citizen-soldiers of hallowed tradition, but rather drifters and marginalized men with little real stake in the society they were defending. Such propertyless men resembled the “volunteers” of the ill-fated American Regiment sent off to Cartagena in 1740 and likewise those who had filled the ranks of Washington’s Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War. Many Continentals undoubtedly believed in their cause, but as Washington had acknowledged in the late summer of 1776, they soldiered on as much from necessity as from high-flown ideological reasons.5
Drawn increasingly from the “lower orders” of American society, as the war ground on, the profile of the Continental Army’s manpower grew ever closer to the redcoats they faced across the battlefield. While the British Army’s rank and file typically took the king’s shilling because they needed a steady wage, they, too, were far from being the mindless scum lambasted by Charles Lee and other commentators. Many of them were unskilled “laborers,” but a significant proportion had worked at trades before enlisting, often in their early twenties. For example, forty-three-year-old Private William Bragg of the 63rd Foot, who was examined for his Chelsea pension in May 1787, was a weaver from Darlington, County Durham. He’d spent twenty-one years with his regiment and not only was “worn out” but had been wounded in the left thigh at Germantown. His comrade, Corporal John Ingram, aged forty-two, had enlisted in the 63rd at the same time. Born in Taunton, Somerset, and formerly a barber, Corporal Ingram was described as “wounded in the head, right leg and left thigh on Long Island, North America.” A veteran of the 23rd Foot (or “Royal Welch Fusiliers”), who appeared before the Chelsea Board in 1790, must have been among the very first British casualties of the conflict. A forty-four-year-old laborer from Burnley, Lancashire, Corporal Matthew Haymer was “wounded in his right thigh and in his left foot at Lexington, in New England, on the 19th April, 1775, also in the right shoulder at Bunker’s Hill on the 17th June 1775.” These injuries had not stopped him serving throughout the American war, accumulating a total of twenty-four years with his regiment. Unsurprisingly, he too was “worn out.”6
As these cases show, British soldiers normally enlisted for “life,” although during the American Revolutionary War, shorter terms, for “three years or the duration,” were introduced, along with more generous bounties, paralleling practice in the Continental Army.7 Even with such incentives, after 1776, Britain struggled to keep her battalions across the Atlantic up to strength. With precious few injections of manpower, regiments were loath to shed any trained soldier still capable of marching and fighting, which is why multiply wounded men like Bragg, Ingram, and Haymer were back on duty as soon as they could walk. For all his frustrations with the Continental Army’s fluctuating strength, unlike his opponents, Washington could at least draw upon a reservoir of local replacements. Although Congress shied away from enforcing conscription, other states besides Virginia authorized their own drafts, offering wildly different bounties, conditions, and terms of service. This meant that besides a kernel of long-term veterans like Private Martin, the Continental Army was topped up by relays of recruits drafted for shorter spells—twelve, nine, or even six months. The system was wasteful, as the short-timers had scarcely been trained before their enlistments expired, yet they sustained Washington’s army after the initial pool of “volunteers”—the kind of rootless, hard-up and adventurous men most likely to succumb to the blandishments of the recruiting parties—had run dry.8
Washington’s manpower headaches never were resolved, but at Valley Forge the supply situation slowly began to improve, helped by the appointment of competent administrators to two crucial jobs: Jeremiah Wadsworth, a rich Connecticut merchant, became head of the commissary department, while Washington’s right-hand man, Major General Nathanael Greene, reluctantly swapped his field command for the onerous and distinctly inglorious staff appointment of quartermaster general. But by then, corruption and inefficiency had already exacted a far higher toll upon the Continentals than Howe’s redcoats and Hessians: in the six months following the army’s arrival at Valley Forge, about 2,500 men—almost a quarter of the army—died as exposure and malnutrition exacerbated the customary campground killers of dysentery and typhus.9
Washington’s standing as a commander whom Congress could work with—indeed, whom it couldn’t work without—was consolidated by another crisis during the trying winter of 1777–78. It arose from grumbling, both within and outside the army, about Washington’s style of leadership. Such criticism was scarcely surprising given the disappointing results of his Pennsylvania campaign, which looked lamer still alongside Gates’s decisive victory over Burgoyne. For example, while admiring Washington’s bravery and devotion to the cause, Brigadier General Anthony Wayne and Major General Johann de Kalb both complained about his tendency to defer too readily to the opinions of councils of war, rather than following his own good sense. Such gripes were not without foundation; although Washington had known since March 1777 that “it never was the intention of Congress, that he should be bound by the majority of voices in a council of war, contrary to his own judgment,” by then the habit of doing so was already ingrained.10
Inside Congress, John Adams, who had been instrumental in securing Washington’s elevation to commander in chief in 1775, was now concerned at his near-deification. Indeed, for many Americans, Washington’s emergence as the symbolic figurehead of their new republic had invested him with a quasi-royal status; the title “Father of his Country” first appeared in print in 1778. Such popular veneration, which threatened to replace one King George with another, rubbed against the republican grain of men like Adams. As he confided to his wife, Abigail, another reason to offer thanks for Saratoga was that the “glory of turning the tide of arms” did not belong to Washington. Had it done so, he cautioned, “idolatry and adulation would have been unbounded,” even to the extent that American liberties might be endangered. Adams added: “We can allow a certain citizen to be wise, virtuous, and good, without thinking him a deity or a savior.”11
Despite their criticisms, none of these men suggested that Washington should be supplanted as commander in chief. One prominent revolutionary who did urge such a drastic measure was the outspoken Dr. Benjamin Rush, now surgeon general of military hospitals in Washington’s own Middle Department. An ardent admirer of Washington when the war began, before the end of 1776 Rush was already turning against him. By the following autumn, his attitude had hardened into outright opposition. On October 21, 1777, in a letter to John Adams, he extolled his good friend Horatio Gates at the expense of Washington: “Look at the characters of both!” Rush exclaimed. “The one on the pinnacle of military glory—exulting in the success of schemes planned with wisdom, and executed with vigor and bravery . . . the other outgeneraled and twice beated [sic].” Rush then proceeded to quote another soldier he greatly admired: Brigadier General Thomas Conway, an Irish-born French Army officer now in the American service. In “a letter to a friend,” Rush reported, Conway had said that: “A great and good God has decreed that America shall be free, or __________ [Washington] and weak counselors would have ruined her long ago.”12
Conway’s “friend” was none other than Gates. This surprising intelligence reached Washington some weeks later in roundabout fashion. The officer charged with carrying the Saratoga victory dispatches to Congress was Gates’s aide-de-camp, the Trenton and Princeton veteran Colonel James Wilkinson. Stopping at Reading en route to York, Wilkinson fell into company with other officers belonging to the “family” of Major General Lord Stirling. It was a convivial occasion, with his Lordship reminiscing, at some length, about his adventures during the Battle of Long Island.13 As the drink and conversation flowed, Wilkinson divulged Conway’s criticisms of the commander in chief. These reached Stirling via his aide Major William McWilliams. A staunch Washington devotee whom Conway had recently derided as a drunkard, his Lordship felt duty-bound to expose “such wicked duplicity.” As forwarded to Washington, Conway’s words read: “Heaven has been determined to save your country; or a weak general and bad counselors would have ruined it.”14
Without verifying this unauthenticated gossip, Washington immediately took the offensive, writing Conway a terse note quoting what he was alleged to have declared. That same day, November 5, 1777, Conway replied, conceding that he had written a congratulatory letter to Gates, in which he had spoken his mind “freely” but denying using the words attributed to him and offering to have the original retrieved as proof. Conway’s letter to Gates is now lost, but judging by a surviving paraphrased extract, it was scarcely complimentary to the commander in chief. Conway now took the opportunity to clear the air by offering his opinion of Washington, “without flattery or envy,” writing “you are a brave man, an honest man, a patriot, and a man of great sense.” He added a less flattering rider that nonetheless echoed the sentiments of some other senior officers: “Your modesty is such, that although your advice in council is commonly sound and proper, you have often been influenced by men who were not equal to you in point of experience, knowledge or judgment.”15 In a subsequent letter to Washington, written after his olive branch had been brushed aside, the indignant Irishman pointed out that in Europe it was common for officers to express frank criticisms of superiors in their personal correspondence: indeed, it would be ironic if such “an odious and tyrannical inquisition” should be introduced by the commander of an army “raised for the defense of Liberty.”16 Had Conway known of Washington’s persistent attempts to undermine his own commander, John Forbes, in 1758, he might have added hypocrisy to his charge of despotism.
Despite his anger, Washington had no wish to escalate the quarrel and so highlight damaging rifts within the Continental Army at a critical time: that was achieved, albeit unwittingly, by Congress. On November 7, it appointed Thomas Mifflin, the former quartermaster general, to the reorganized Board of War. On Mifflin’s recommendation, Congress soon after chose Gates as president of the board; and on December 13, it selected Conway to fill the new staff post of inspector general to the army, with promotion to major general. Although founded on Conway’s reputation as an experienced professional soldier and effective drillmaster who came strongly recommended by Major General Sullivan, this posting and jump in rank immediately made him a focus for jealousy and resentment among the other brigadiers who had been passed over and raised suspicions that his new influence would be wielded against Washington and his henchmen.
While historians have discredited the existence of a conspiracy to replace Washington with Gates—alliteratively dubbed the “Conway Cabal”—given the timing of Congress’s appointments, that is precisely how things appeared to him and his devoted followers.17 For example, Washington’s old friend the army physician Dr. James Craik wrote on January 6 to warn him that “a strong faction” was forming against him “in the new Board of War and in the Congress.” Craik believed that General Mifflin was among the most “active” of those “secret enemies who would rob you of the great and truly deserved esteem your country has for you.” At the same time, Lafayette was warning Henry Laurens against attempts to discredit Washington by “Gates’s faction, or Mifflin’s forces.” Laurens was quick to reassure the marquis that criticism of Washington within Congress amounted to “little more than tittle-tattle.” He added: “I think that the friends of our brave and virtuous general, may rest assured that he is out of the reach of his enemies, if he has an enemy, a fact which I am in doubt of.”18
In fact, Washington certainly had detractors inside Congress, notably James Lovell of Massachusetts, whose private opinions reflected civilian distrust of professional soldiers in general and of the commander in chief’s close-knit and prickly military entourage in particular. For example, after Congress allowed Washington extra staff officers, Lovell wrote to Sam Adams complaining that it seemed the “13 United States” together could not supply enough “honest men” as “aides de camp, secretaries and privy councilors to one great man, whom no citizen shall dare even to talk about say the Gentlemen of the Blade.”19
Yet the only prominent revolutionary to actively call for Washington’s replacement was former congressman Dr. Rush. On January 12, 1778, he rashly sent an anonymous letter to Virginian delegate Patrick Henry: “The northern army has shown us what Americans are capable of doing with a GENERAL at their head,” he wrote. “The spirit of the southern army is no ways inferior to the spirit of the northern. A Gates, a Lee, or a Conway would in a few weeks render them an irresistible body of men.” Rush then quoted the now infamous words attributed to Conway that he had first cited to John Adams three months earlier. Henry sent the letter to Washington, who swiftly suspected the identity of its author.20
In the face of the perceived threat, Washington’s most loyal supporters, men like Greene, Lafayette, and Hamilton, closed ranks in what amounted to a “cabal” of their own. When General Conway appeared at Valley Forge to assume his duties as inspector general, he received a reception as frosty as the weather. After Washington explained that Conway must await instructions from the Board of War before starting work and hinted that his promotion was unjustified, the quarrelsome Hibernian countered with a letter sarcastically comparing “the great Washington” to Frederick the Great of Prussia.21
Whatever his personal feelings at such slights, as commander in chief Washington was unable to resent them privately by issuing a challenge to a duel, particularly as such conduct was banned under the Continental Army’s Articles of War. But there was no lack of men willing to pick up a sword or a brace of pistols on his behalf. Conway discovered this soon enough. He had swiftly been cold-shouldered by his colleagues, including his former friend Lafayette, who now disowned him as “an ambitious and dangerous man”;22 when Congress appointed the marquis to lead another proposed “irruption” into Canada, he refused to accept Conway as his second in command. In April, the exasperated Conway offered Congress his resignation; to his chagrin it was promptly accepted. But the matter didn’t rest there. In July, before Conway left for France, an angry exchange with another Washington loyalist, Brigadier General John Cadwalader, prompted a duel. In the ensuing encounter Conway was shot in the mouth; the ball emerged from the back of his neck, beneath his pigtailed hair. Apparently convinced he was dying, Conway took the opportunity to make Washington a fulsome apology, acknowledging him to be a genuinely “great and good man.”23
Neither was Washington inclined to let Horatio Gates off the hook. Even though Gates had done no more than receive an unsolicited letter from Conway, he’d made no attempt to defend Washington against criticism. The two generals exchanged a series of letters that did neither of them credit. Gates’s outraged appeal for help in tracking down the miscreant who had rifled his private correspondence did nothing to dispel Washington’s impression that he was implicated in intrigue with “a dangerous incendiary.” Beaten down by Washington’s reproaches, Gates finally expressed his innocence of any conspiracy: “I solemnly declare that I am of no faction,” he wrote, adding, “I cannot believe your Excellency will either suffer your suspicions or the prejudices of others to induce you to spend another moment upon this subject.” Washington agreed to bury the hatchet, consigning the controversy “as far as future events will permit” to “oblivion.”24
Without doubt, Washington emerged from the affair stronger than ever, with an enhanced standing inside Congress. In addition, the vociferous reaction of Washington’s partisans against those suspected of plotting against “His Excellency,” which has been compared by one respected historian to a “witch hunt,” served notice that future critics would be swiftly silenced: there’d be no more talk of replacing Washington with Gates—or with anyone else.25
Both the Conway episode and the shared hardships of the Valley Forge winter fostered the emergence of an officer corps that increasingly conformed to Washington’s vision of the type of men he had always wanted to lead the Continental Army. Unlike many of the amateur officers who had served against the British at Boston and New York in 1775–76, these long-term professionals came mostly from the propertied ranks of society; they saw themselves as “gentlemen” and expected to be treated as such. Just as the rank and file of the Continental Army had changed since 1776, with those men signed up for “three years or the duration” increasingly resembling the redcoats they viewed down the barrels of their muskets, as the war dragged on, so Washington’s officers drew closer to the British model in background, outlook, and aspirations. Above all, they were concerned with two intertwined concepts that had driven Washington since his youth: status and honor.
By the time the army encamped at Valley Forge, many officers felt that they had been slighted by their civilian masters in Congress on both counts. Not only were they often denied the promotions they believed they’d earned by hard service, but their pay, which was increasingly devalued by rampant inflation, provided small compensation for lost civilian incomes; such cavalier treatment was bitterly resented, not least by Major General Benedict Arnold. In an attempt to address their financial problems, officers again looked to British precedent and demanded the right to half pay for life—essentially a pension for retired officers—to commence at the war’s end. When first approached with the notion in November 1777, Washington was doubtful, aware that congressmen suspicious of standing armies would resist such a move on ideological grounds. But faced with a mounting wave of resignations from disenchanted officers, Washington swiftly changed his mind. Resurrecting the desperate arguments that he had used in the summer of 1776, when urging solid material incentives for recruits, in his detailed address to Congress’s Camp Committee Washington underlined the need for realism: “Motives of public virtue” were no longer enough; if his officers’ “languishing zeal” was to be revived, their “private interest” must also be considered: half pay was the only answer. Conscious that the Continental Army was now the torchbearer of American liberty, in May 1778, Congress approved the pensions, although limiting them to seven years. Even this partial consent was grudging, with accusations of antirepublicanism and extortion only salting the wounds of officers who already believed their precious honor had been impugned.26
As Thomas Conway could testify, one consequence of a heightened sense of personal reputation among officers who considered themselves “gentlemen” was a mania for duelling.27 Unsurprisingly, the volatile mixture of touchy young men, lethal weapons, and an unbending code of conduct ensured that dueling was already endemic within European armies: for example, jäger Captain Ewald soldiered through the American War of Independence with just one good eye: he had lost the other in 1770, when, as a young lieutenant in the Leib Regiment, a night of revelry in Cassell’s “Hof von England” inn led to a disastrous encounter with a drinking companion.28 Although proscribed under the Continental Army’s British-based Articles of War, “affairs of honor” were nonetheless common: just like his counterpart serving King George, the American officer who refused a challenge faced the social stigma of cowardice. Continental Army surgeon James Thacher was often required to attend such “meetings” and patch up the survivors: in August 1780, after duels on successive days sacrificed “two valuable lives . . . to what is termed principles of honor,” he railed against “this fashionable folly, this awful blindness and perversion of mind, this barbarous and infernal practice, this foul stain on the history of man!”29 Yet such appeals to rationalism fell on deaf ears: in coming years, dueling would add a dangerous edge to politics in the young American Republic; in the southern states it would linger on into the middle decades of the nineteenth century, another “peculiar institution” to set alongside slavery.30
The growing distinctiveness of Washington’s honor-conscious officer caste—Lovell’s “Gentlemen of the Blade”—was exemplified by an extraordinary theatrical performance at Valley Forge. In an expression of group solidarity and as a mark of esteem for Washington, they presented an amateur production of his favorite play, Addison’s Cato. It was Cato that Washington had quarried to express the true depth of his feelings for Sally Fairfax in 1758 and his admiration for Benedict Arnold in 1776. This was an exclusive event, for officers only. Underlining the social gap between leaders and led, it also indicated the growing gulf between American soldiers and civilians, incurring the derision of men like Sam Adams, who considered such performances as a decadent and un-Republican imitation of the plays often staged by British Army officers.31
That same month, in fact, the British officer corps in Philadelphia gave a very different but no less remarkable performance as a farewell for Sir William Howe, who was being replaced as commander in chief in North America by Henry Clinton. This elaborate “Mischianza” (from the Italian for “medley”) reflected a growing interest in the medieval “Gothic” past, with rival teams of mounted officers in fancy dress—the “Knights of the Blended Rose” and the “Burning Mountain”—fighting mock combats to champion the honor of their chosen ladies. Given Washington’s own love of horses and his youthful penchant for knight-errantry, this lavish and colorful echo of the age of chivalry would surely have appealed no less than the sterner fare of Cato. Captain Peebles of the Black Watch certainly enjoyed himself. The spirited tourney was followed by a spectacular firework display, after which the carefree company relished “a very elegant supper” and “danced and drank till day light.” But with the rebels still ensconced nearby at Valley Forge, others considered the elaborate and costly celebration to be ill timed and tasteless. Lord Howe’s secretary, Ambrose Serle, observed sourly: “Our enemies will dwell upon the folly and extravagance of it with pleasure.”32
While Howe’s officers clashed sabers under the admiring eyes of Philadelphia’s Loyalist belles, Washington’s men were honing their skills for the serious business of war. That spring the Continental Army underwent a training program that underpinned its emergence as a professional, European-style force. On February 23, 1778, a former officer in the Prussian army, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, arrived in camp. Like other foreign officers, he had been recommended to Congress by Benjamin Franklin and his fellow American commissioners in Paris, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee. Aided by Franklin’s celebrity among Europe’s intellectuals for his pioneering work on electricity, they had been lobbying since 1776 to orchestrate French backing for the revolutionaries’ struggle against Britain. Unlike many of the military adventurers who preceded him, Steuben was an asset rather than a liability. Following the lead of Lafayette, the “baron” aspired to the rank and pay of major general, but was willing to serve as a volunteer until he had proved his worth. Washington was impressed by Steuben from the outset. One of his own military heroes was Frederick the Great: in 1759, he’d tried in vain to order a bust of “Old Fritz” to ornament Mount Vernon; here was an officer who had actually fought under the great man in his epic clashes with the Austrians, French, and Russians, encounters dutifully chronicled in the Virginia Gazette.
To Washington, Steuben’s graduation from “the first military school in Europe” along with “his former rank” made him “peculiarly qualified” to fill the post of inspector general left vacant by Conway’s resignation. Steuben’s daunting task was to impose a single, uniform method of drill—what Washington characterized as “a well combined general system”—upon an army within which each battalion followed its own inclinations. Just months after Steuben’s arrival at Valley Forge, a delighted Washington was singing his praises to Henry Laurens. Indeed, Steuben’s “knowledge of his profession added to the zeal which he has discovered since he began upon the functions of his office” led Washington to “consider him as an acquisition to the service” and to recommend that Congress forthwith ratify his rank and appointment.33
At Valley Forge, Steuben found an army already steeped in British military traditions, which he was reluctantly obliged to accommodate within his own system of drill. Writing to his patron Franklin, after his Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States—the famous “Blue Book”—had been published, the baron apologized that “circumstances have obliged me to deviate from the principles” typically used in European armies. “Young as we are,” he explained, “we have already our prejudices as [have] the most ancient nations; the prepossession in favor of the British service, has obliged me to comply with many things which are against my principles.” Regrettably, these included the redcoats’ characteristic “formation in two ranks,” rather than the three used by other nations, including the Prussians. Another veteran of European warfare, Sir Henry Clinton, also disapproved of “the open, flimsy order of two deep in line” adopted by the British in America. Yet when he succeeded William Howe as commander in chief, he kept it all the same: not only had it proved effective enough on the battlefield, but the rebels used it too.34
While falling short of his own Germanic ideals, Steuben’s training methods, which concentrated upon the essential skills required to maneuver and fight in a disciplined fashion, had a profound impact upon the confidence and effectiveness of the Continental Army; crucially, by exploiting his knowledge of a radically new French drill, Steuben trained his men in a simplified approach to the notoriously tricky business of deploying from column of march to line of battle: to achieve this, unflustered, in the face of the enemy, was the acid test of the true veteran.35
An opportunity for the troops to demonstrate their new proficiency on the drill field came in early May, when confirmation arrived that France had formally entered into alliance with the United States. A great parade was staged to celebrate an event that promised to establish American “liberty and Independence upon lasting foundations.” On the morning of May 6, all the brigades assembled for a thanksgiving service and general inspection before marching off to form two long lines. After thirteen cannon fired a salute, the infantry began a continuous fire of musketry that rippled along the battalions. Twice repeated, this feu de joie was punctuated by “huzzas” to the “King of France, the friendly European powers,” and “the American states.” Each man was issued a gill of rum to celebrate the occasion. Daniel Morgan’s veteran riflemen missed the party: they were ordered to patrol through the night to make sure the redcoats didn’t arrive uninvited.36
For British strategists, the Franco-American alliance altered the focus of the war: already struggling to suppress a colonial insurrection, they now faced a far wider conflict against the old Bourbon enemy. Its impact upon Germain’s priorities was immediate and profound. In late March 1778, Clinton was directed that the main war effort must now be against the French rather than the Americans and therefore switched from the mainland to the Caribbean. He was to send 5,000 redcoats to St. Lucia, and another 3,000 to Florida, which seemed a likely objective for France’s traditional ally, Spain, who was soon expected to join the fight against Britain. Meanwhile, Clinton must evacuate Philadelphia and withdraw what was left of his army to New York. In another sure sign of the radical shift in London’s objectives, a fresh set of peace commissioners, headed by the Earl of Carlisle, were sent across the Atlantic to open negotiations with the rebels. Empowered to concede anything short of total independence, it only compounded the soldiers’ sense of humiliation and betrayal. Jotting in his journal on June 10, a disgusted John Peebles commented: “Alas Britain how art thou fallen.”37 Congress likewise saw the initiative for what it was—a sign of British weakness and desperation—and ignored it.
Although Philadelphia had proved of precious little strategic value to the British, its evacuation after so much hard fighting was a glum prospect for officers already depressed by the resignation of Howe. For all his faults and errors, brave, lazy, uncomplicated Sir William had remained popular with the army’s rank and file and most of the officer corps. Clinton was a very different proposition: arrogantly intelligent yet fundamentally insecure. A man who could characterize himself as a “shy bitch” was unlikely to work well with colleagues and subordinates of different temperaments.38
Clinton viewed his inherited command as a poisoned chalice but resolved to make the best of things. While obliged to abandon Philadelphia, he decided to delay the dispatch of the detachments earmarked for other fronts until he had reached New York, keeping his seasoned army together for the risky march across New Jersey. Some 3,000 Loyalists who feared the reprisals of returning revolutionaries were put aboard ship, along with stores and German troops deemed too unfit, or unreliable, to complete the punishing cross-country trek. On the morning of June 18, Clinton’s army crossed the Delaware River and headed east. Encumbered by a lengthy wagon train, its progress was sluggish. Six days found it no farther than Allentown, just thirty-five miles from Philadelphia. There, in order to avoid a hazardous passage of the Raritan River at Brunswick, Clinton veered northeast, heading for Sandy Hook.
Clinton’s lumbering column was shadowed at a respectful distance by Washington’s reformed and reinvigorated army. Most of its senior officers were so delighted to see their enemies quit Philadelphia that they felt inclined to let them go unmolested. This group included Charles Lee, who had recently rejoined the army following an exchange of prisoners and resumed his place as senior major general. While still a captive, Lee had sent Washington a detailed plan for reorganizing the “American Army” and simplifying its drill. The latter task had already been undertaken, during Lee’s prolonged absence, by Baron Steuben. But Lee’s paper also included a pessimistic assessment that was utterly at odds with Washington’s vision of his revamped army and its capabilities. To claim that the Americans were now disciplined enough to risk a “decisive action in fair ground” was “talking nonsense,” Lee maintained. Rather than subscribe to the “insanity” of seeking battle, they should put their faith in a defensive strategy of “harassing and impeding” the enemy and, if necessary, falling back behind the Susquehanna River. Lee continued to promote his plan when he reached Valley Forge; he was convinced that the British in Philadelphia would soon take the offensive, so obliging the Continental Army to fight on “very disadvantageous” terms; he couldn’t credit that the enemy would “pass through the Jerseys to New York.”39
Not only did Lee totally misread Clinton’s intentions, but his cautious, “Fabian,” mentality was now badly out of step with the mood of Washington and his more hawkish acolytes—Greene, Wayne, Hamilton, and Lafayette—for whom the enemy’s extended column offered a target too tempting to resist. With opinion within the high command divided, however, a vague and potentially dangerous compromise was reached. At a council of war held at Hopewell Township on June 24, it was decided to avoid “a general action.” Instead, a corps of 1,500 men would shadow the British, menacing their flanks and rear and reinforcing “the other Continental troops and militia” who were “already hanging about them.” A disgusted Alexander Hamilton identified Lee as the prime mover behind that “sage plan,” which “would have done honor to the most honorable society of midwives, and to them only.” 40
That same day, Greene, Lafayette and Wayne all wrote to Washington, making it clear that the council’s decision did not truly reflect their own opinions. While agreeing that an unnecessary battle should be avoided, all felt that more should be done than simply harassing Clinton’s army. Greene wrote: “I am clearly of opinion for making a serious impression with the light troops—and for having the army in supporting distance.” Like Washington, Greene was aggressive by instinct, and keen to fight. If they allowed the enemy to pass through New Jersey without “attempting any thing upon them,” he added, they would always regret it. Lafayette agreed, pushing for the advance detachment to be reinforced to 2,000 or 2,500 “selected men”—enough to engage part of the enemy’s force and even beat their “tremendous grenadiers.” Wayne also wanted to bolster the detachment, while keeping the main army close enough to the enemy’s rear to act swiftly, although not to provoke a major engagement contrary to Washington’s wishes. Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton underlined another, and equally pressing, justification for more decisive action: “We feel our personal honor as well as the honor of the army and the good of the service interested, and are heartily desirous to attempt whatever the disposition of our men will second and prudence authorize.”41
Washington was receptive to these arguments: the vanguard was therefore tripled to more than 5,000 men and placed under Lafayette. Major General Lee, who had been happy to relinquish command of the original, far smaller force to the young Frenchman, now changed his mind: as second in command of the army, he must assume what was “undoubtedly the most honorable command” next to Washington’s.42 On June 27, when the baking sun forced both armies to rest, it was agreed that this swollen vanguard should chivvy Clinton as soon as his march resumed.
Early the next morning, June 28, 1778, the British moved out in two divisions: the first consisting of about 4,000 men and the baggage under General Knyphausen; the second, which followed an hour or so later, numbered another 6,000 troops led by Clinton. Alerted to this movement, Lee’s detachment crossed a series of three ravines to attack the British rear guard near Monmouth Court House. The Americans were soon in trouble. The tail of the snaking British column, commanded by the omnipotent and ever-aggressive Cornwallis, delivered a lethal sting. It comprised the army’s best units: Guards, grenadiers, light infantry, and light dragoons. These crack troops riposted effectively, and as Clinton swiftly reinforced them, Lee’s outnumbered force was pushed back. Those who grudgingly retreated included Private Joseph Plumb Martin. As he and his comrades were taking a breather while the artillery negotiated a muddy defile, Washington suddenly rode up on his “old English charger,” surrounded by his staff. Martin heard him ask “by whose orders the troops were retreating.” When told that Lee was responsible, Washington said something else, but, as he was riding forward, Martin didn’t catch his words. Men nearer to the general heard him say “damn him.” Mild as this might seem, it was an unusual outburst from the typically restrained Washington: Private Martin remarked that such language was certainly “very unlike” him, although, as he “seemed at the instant to be in a great passion,” his looks conveyed exactly the same sentiments.43 Moving on toward the enemy, Washington soon encountered Lee in person. In a rare explosion of temper, he apparently subjected him to a verbal flaying, then, regaining his composure, calmly set about restoring order; for once, Lee was lost for words, cowed by the Virginian’s uncharacteristic rage.44
Besides Lee’s advance guard there were about 6,000 men in the main body of Washington’s army, so the odds remained even—provided they would stand and fight. Now, as at Princeton, Washington’s inspiring, personal leadership was crucial in ensuring that they did. His aide Alexander Hamilton wrote admiringly: “By his own good sense and fortitude he turned the fate of the day.” In a dig at Horatio Gates, whose victory at Saratoga was attributed by many to the courageous battlefield leadership of Benedict Arnold, Hamilton added that Washington had not let another man win his laurels for him, “but by his own presence, he brought order out of confusion, animated his troops and led them to success.” Another Washington devotee, Major General Greene was equally certain that his intervention was decisive: “The commander-in-chief was every where, his presence gave spirit and confidence and his command and authority soon brought everything into order and regularity.”45
Arraying his Continentals in a strong defensive position on high ground behind the most westerly ravine, and with powerful support from well-sited artillery, Washington rebuffed a succession of determined but poorly coordinated British assaults. With casualties mounting and dozens of men dropping dead from heat exhaustion alone, Clinton broke off the fight. Washington’s soldiers were exultant at facing “the flower of the British army” in open battle. Their discipline had prevented Lee’s withdrawal from escalating into a general rout and vindicated Steuben’s training regime at Valley Forge. That fair-minded professional Captain Ewald conceded: “Today the Americans showed much boldness and resolution on all sides during their attacks.”46
In his General Orders of June 29, Washington congratulated his army “on the victory obtained over the arms of his Britannic Majesty yesterday,” while a brief dispatch to Henry Laurens reported how the enemy had been “forced . . . from the field.”47 Yet the Battle of Monmouth Court House was an indecisive affair, in which neither side could truly claim a clear-cut success: Washington had failed to destroy or even deflect Clinton’s column, and on June 29, it continued on its way without further interruption, reaching Sandy Hook on July 1 to rendezvous with Lord Howe’s fleet. By July 6, Clinton’s troops were all safely inside the fortifications of Manhattan.
If Monmouth—the last major engagement to be fought in the war’s northern theater—failed to deliver the unambiguous battlefield victory that Washington still wanted, it was decisive in another sense, by eliminating his sole remaining rival within the Continental Army. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, while still smarting from Washington’s stinging public rebuke, General Lee penned three notes to him in quick succession, the last of them demanding a court-martial to clear his name. Washington acquiesced and, given Lee’s intemperate choice of language, added a charge of disrespect to counts of failing to engage the enemy and “making an unnecessary, disorderly and shameful retreat.”48 Evidence was heard over several weeks as the army marched toward a new position on the Lower Hudson. The court’s verdict, delivered on August 12, was unanimous: Lee was found guilty on all three charges. Although the first could have brought a death sentence, he was merely suspended from service for a year.49
While Lee was clearly guilty of disrespect toward Washington, the other two crimes laid to his charge were by no means proven. Yet, as historian John Shy has pointed out, an acquittal on them would have been tantamount to a vote of no-confidence in Washington;50 the surprising leniency of Lee’s sentence certainly supports this interpretation. Interestingly, vindication for Lee’s withdrawal at Monmouth came from his opponent. Henry Clinton did not doubt that, if Lee had stood his ground, “his whole corps would probably have fallen into the power of the King’s army,” long before Washington’s force could have succored him.51
Incensed at what he considered to be unjust treatment, Lee refused to accept his fate and keep quiet, instead attacking Washington and his inner circle in the press. This so incensed Washington’s aide John Laurens that he challenged Lee to a duel. The Englishman had already shrugged off similar invitations from Wayne and Steuben, who both felt that he had disparaged them while publicly defending his own conduct at Monmouth. But Laurens was more persistent, and Lee finally agreed to accept. When they fought with pistols in a field outside Philadelphia, Lee sustained a flesh wound; both combatants were ready to continue, but their seconds persuaded them that honor had been satisfied.52 Lee never returned to the Continental Army. On balance, this was just as well: as his behavior after Monmouth confirmed, whatever his merits as a general officer—and these are by no means clear from his service record—Lee was disqualified from high command by his cantankerous character. Even Lee’s most ardent admirers, men like Benjamin Rush, conceded that his “knowledge and experience” was offset by “his oddities or vices.” Given his volatile personality, it is hard to imagine him ever working loyally under Washington, let alone providing an alternative figurehead for a concerted revolutionary war effort.53
For the British, meanwhile, Henry Clinton’s return to New York City proved timely. Less than a week later, on July 11, the French alliance bore fruit when Vice Admiral Charles-Hector, Comte d’Estaing, appeared off Sandy Hook with a formidable fleet of sixteen “ships of the line”; these powerful vessels, typically with two gun decks in North American waters, were so designated because of their ability to join the formal lines of battle in which rival fleets customarily fought each other. Outgunned and undermanned, Lord Howe’s ships stayed safe within New York Harbor, denying d’Estaing the chance to inflict a decisive defeat. While more than 2,000 privateering craft sailed under American colors during the Revolutionary War, creating havoc among British merchantmen, the official Continental Navy never amounted to above a score of single-deck frigates, often commanded by dashing officers capable of fighting morale-boosting ship-to-ship actions but insignificant in broader strategic terms. The appearance of d’Estaing’s formidable squadron therefore gave a hefty jolt to the balance of sea power: while William Howe’s land operations had been conducted confident in the knowledge that his brother’s warships dominated North American waters, Henry Clinton enjoyed no such guarantee.54
Acutely aware of d’Estaing’s significance, Washington took pains to welcome him and to give assurances that he would spare no effort to foster a “cordial and lasting amity” between the new allies.55 With the British still too strong at New York, d’Estaing and Washington instead resolved to strike at Newport, Rhode Island. Its garrison of 3,000 British, Germans, and Loyalist provincial troops offered a seemingly soft target. At the end of July the French fleet entered Narragansett Bay; soon after, Major General John Sullivan was menacing the British garrison with 10,000 men, mostly militia but with a stiffening of Continental regiments. All looked set for an overwhelming combined assault by land and sea when the indefatigable “Black Dick” Howe unexpectedly arrived off Newport on August 9 with a reinforced fleet. D’Estaing sailed out to meet him, but a gale kept the rivals apart. Meanwhile, the dogged Sullivan pushed on with his siegeworks. On August 14, an attack was repulsed, and the dejected militia began to disband. By now d’Estaing, too, was keen to depart and refit his damaged ships in Boston before Howe sought another battle. Sullivan’s appeals could not dissuade him. Bitterly disappointed at this “betrayal,” the New Englander couldn’t contain his disappointment. When he was forced to lift the siege, the garrison staged a sally to help him on his way; on September 1, 1778, Howe’s ships brought Clinton with a relief force of 4,000 men from New York. It was a shambolic start to the Franco-American alliance and a clear reminder that, even with the entrance of the French, sea power remained in the balance, dependent upon the resolution of local commanders, the commitment of resources, and the fickleness of the wind.
No less disappointed than Sullivan, but far more diplomatic in his reaction, Washington worked to minimize any long-term damage. Having fought the French as a young man, he knew as well as anyone that old enmities still lurked just beneath the surface: they must be smothered for the greater good of the cause. As he wrote to the crestfallen Nathanael Greene, who’d eagerly joined the expedition to reconquer his birthplace and who distinguished himself during the fighting withdrawal, while the campaign’s failure was regrettable, “a still worse consequence” would be the sowing of “seeds of dissention and distrust between us and our new allies.” Given the “universal clamor” against the French—which had triggered murderous brawls in Boston—the tactful Greene was to exert himself to pacify d’Estaing, “heal all private animosities,” and stifle “all illiberal expressions and reflections” from American officers that threatened to scupper the alliance.56
Clinton sought to exploit his enemy’s embarrassment and the local superiority of Howe’s fleet by taking the offensive. Under the command of Major General “No Flint” Grey, the Newport relief force was sent to raid the New England coast, burning New Bedford and rounding up cattle on Martha’s Vineyard. Some hard-line British officers, the “fire and sword men,” approved of such devastation and believed more of the same would bring the rebels to heel; others saw the raids as futile, even counterproductive.57 Eager to land a telling blow while he still commanded the men soon to be siphoned off to other battle fronts, Clinton now proposed attacking Boston and destroying the French fleet sheltering there. When Lord Howe vetoed the plan as too risky, Clinton sought to provoke a decisive engagement with Washington’s army encamped amid the hills north of Manhattan. But when a powerful British force entered New Jersey, Washington resurrected the Fabian strategy that he had used against Howe for much of the previous year, refusing to be enticed from his strong ground. During the winter of 1778–79, Washington’s army was quartered in an arc above Manhattan, with concentrations at Danbury in Connecticut, West Point in the Hudson Highlands, and Middlebrook, New Jersey.58
Meanwhile, direct French intervention had prompted Congress to revive its long-cherished plans to invade Canada. While he had backed such an offensive in 1775, Washington now opposed it, and on good grounds. In an official letter to Congress, sent on November 11, 1778, he emphasized the notorious logistical problem of pushing troops across the intervening wilderness. But in a private letter, sent three days later to his friend the president of Congress Henry Laurens, Washington revealed that his real misgivings concerned the motives of his French allies. Alarmed “for the true and permanent interests” of his country, Washington feared the consequences of sending a French army into what was until recently a Bourbon possession—“attached to them by all the ties of blood, habits, manners, religion.” Displaying his firm grasp of political realities, he told Laurens: “I fear this would be too great a temptation to be resisted by any power actuated by the common maxims of national policy.” For Americans, the ramifications of a rebuilt New France were frightening to contemplate: with her Spanish relatives in possession of New Orleans and controlling the Mississippi River and well-disposed tribes of Indians arching along the western frontier between the two Bourbon territories, France would “have it in her power to give law to these states.” Although “heartily disposed” to think the best of America’s new ally, he added that “it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest, and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.”59
When the French and Americans next acted together, the objective could not have been more distant from Canada; their presence in Georgia, the most southerly rebel state, resulted from a significant shift in British operations. In early November 1778, Clinton had reluctantly embarked the hefty detachments that Germain demanded, a development, as he dolefully informed the American Secretary, which would preclude future offensives by his own main army. The increasingly despondent Clinton had already tendered his resignation, without success. Tied to a command he no longer wanted, Sir Henry still sought to use his limited resources on other fronts. When Germain had first recommended the abandonment of Philadelphia, he had also suggested a southern expedition to exploit the reportedly strong Loyalist sentiments in Georgia and the Carolinas. Clinton acted on that recommendation, sending a capable officer, Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell, with 3,000 men, including his own 71st Regiment of Highlanders, to reconquer Georgia. When Campbell’s force landed, shortly before Christmas 1778, resistance was insignificant. On December 29, Savannah fell to the British, and in January 1779, Augusta followed suit. Campbell’s successor, Brigadier General Augustine Prevost, aimed a stroke at Charleston, South Carolina, but was obliged to turn back after Congress’s new commander in the Southern Department, Major General Benjamin Lincoln, headed north from Georgia to relieve the port.
While the British were making headway in Georgia, d’Estaing had been preoccupied in the Caribbean. A soldier before turning sailor, on St. Lucia he returned to his old trade, encountering the veteran redcoats that Clinton had sent from New York under the ubiquitous Major General James Grant. These troops soon demonstrated the combat skills they had acquired in more than two years of tough campaigning against the American rebels. On December 18, 1778, a single brigade of 1,300 men under Brigadier General William Medows successfully defended the brushwood-covered peninsula of The Vigie against a determined attack by 5,000 French regulars. In “this Bunker Hill of the Caribbean,” which gave a taste of things to come in Spain and Portugal thirty years later, the thin red line shredded the oncoming assault columns, with round shot and canister from four heavy eighteen-pounder cannon increasing the carnage: the British suffered 171 casualties, the French a staggering 1,600, including 400 killed.60 When they finally arrived, tidings of this brilliant success over the old enemy heartened Clinton’s troops now watching Washington’s army from Manhattan. In his diary Captain Peebles noted approvingly: “Well done little Meadows. He licked them handsomely.”61
That summer, Clinton still hoped to tempt Washington into a decisive engagement. He calculated that a drive against the American forts guarding the strategically vital Highlands on the Hudson River—the same objectives that he’d briefly, captured and then reluctantly relinquished in October 1777—would draw Washington’s army from its current position in New Jersey. When Stony Point and Verplanck’s Point were both seized on June 1, 1779, so threatening to rupture the Americans’ communications with New England, Washington shifted troops to bolster the newly erected fortifications farther north, overlooking the Hudson at West Point, but once again avoided battle. Meanwhile, Sir Henry tried another ploy, sending Major General Tryon to raid the coast of Connecticut. Tryon fulfilled his task with a zeal that exceeded Clinton’s orders: between July 5 and July 11, New Haven, Fairfield, and Norwalk were all torched. Although Washington ordered troops to Connecticut, he refused to fall into Clinton’s trap by marching his main army into New England.
Instead, Washington struck back by authorizing a surprise attack on Stony Point. The mission was entrusted to the aggressive and flamboyant Brigadier General Anthony Wayne. Like the redcoats of “No Flint” Grey who had inflicted such a stinging defeat on his Pennsylvanians at Paoli, by Washington’s specific order Wayne was to attack “with fixed bayonets and muskets unloaded.” His command consisted of “chosen men” drawn from the light infantry companies that each Continental regiment had been ordered to form in May 1778; following British Army practice, these elite units were temporarily brigaded together. On July 15, 1779, they justified their privileged status, swiftly overpowering Stony Point’s garrison: at a cost of fifteen killed and eighty-five wounded, including Wayne himself, the Americans slew sixty-three redcoats, wounded another seventy, and took 442 prisoners. An elated Wayne reported that his light infantry had “behaved like men who are determined to be free.”62
Shaken by this coup, Clinton immediately recalled Tryon’s command, while Washington ordered the destruction of the fortifications at Stony Point and fell back. Soon after, on August 19, the Americans deepened Clinton’s depression with another daring hit-and-run raid that further demonstrated the Continental Army’s growing élan. This time the blow fell against the post of Paulus Hook, on the New Jersey shore within cannon shot of New York City. In a well-planned and audacious operation conducted by the Virginian Major Henry Lee—father of the legendary Confederate commander Robert E. Lee—another 150 prisoners were taken. As Washington appreciated, while “small on the great scale” such exploits increased his army’s confidence, while disgracing the enemy.63 In their wake the disheartened Clinton once again tendered his resignation: as before, Germain refused to accept it.
During the summer of 1779, while Washington’s main army fenced warily with Clinton on the Lower Hudson, a substantial detachment was sent to the northwest to punish Britain’s allies among the Six Nations of the Iroquois, who had unleashed destructive raids on the frontiers of New York and Pennsylvania during the previous year. While the Iroquois contribution to Burgoyne’s 1777 campaign had proved short lived and ultimately insignificant, their attacks in 1778 had a far greater impact on the revolutionary cause, not simply terrorizing settlers, but destroying rich farmlands crucial for feeding the Continental Army. They had also highlighted the stark difference between the European-style war being fought on the eastern seaboard and the less-restrained conflict characteristic of the western frontiers. That dichotomy was brought home to Captain Ewald of the Hessian jägers one evening in June 1779 after “a captain of the Indians,” who had served with the Loyalist rangers led by Colonel John Butler and the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, reached the British lines in the Hudson Highlands. This mixed-race warrior, whose father was an English-born gunsmith among the Iroquois, had participated in the notorious raid on the Wyoming Valley in July 1778. It had been a gory business: “I had worked so hard with my tomahawk and scalping knife that my arms were bloody above the elbows,” he told his listeners. Asked why Colonel Butler hadn’t prevented such cruelties, the warrior patiently explained another reality of frontier warfare that had been clear to French officers operating alongside the Shawnees and Delawares in the 1750s: had Butler dared to “meddle” with the Indians’ “customs and laws,” they would have taken umbrage and deserted him instantly. According to the Indians’ ways, he added, enemy officers never received quarter. If taken alive, such war leaders faced death by torture. Indeed, one rebel major was subjected to a three-day ordeal, “during which the Indians danced continually around this poor fellow among their prisoners of war. Since he was a brave and distinguished soldier, they shouted to him that he should now act like a man at the end of his life.” Appalled, yet clearly fascinated at this insight into a parallel world of war at its most savage, Ewald noted that the narrator’s “heart seemed to rejoice with this tale.”64
In fact, Ewald had already experienced something of the ferocity of frontier-style warfare at first hand. During the previous summer, he and his jägers had cooperated with Loyalist cavalry in mounting a devastating ambush near Philips’s Manor, New York. The victims were Massachusetts Continentals and a band of Mahican Indians from Stockbridge in the same state. As Ewald acknowledged, it had been a “hot fight” in heavily wooded terrain, with the cornered Americans—white and Indian alike—defending themselves “like brave men.” After about three hours, many of them were dead, either dropped by the jägers’ rifles, or cut down by the dragoons. It was an unusually ruthless engagement. Ewald noted: “No Indians, especially, received quarter . . . save for a few.” When he later walked over the ground, the curious Ewald examined the dead Mahicans and was impressed by “their sinewy and muscular bodies” and their expressions, which testified “that they had perished with resolution”; they put him in mind of his own Germanic ancestors under Arminius, who had massacred the legions of Varus in AD 9. A dedicated soldier, but clearly a humane man, Ewald wrote nothing of why the Stockbridge warriors should be virtually annihilated, while about fifty of their white comrades were spared and taken prisoner. The mere fact that they were Indians was apparently sufficient explanation: the bloody episode suggests that even when tribal fighters operated far from the frontiers and alongside “conventional” forces, they were deemed to fall outside the customary “Rules of War” and treated without mercy.65
Washington’s punitive expedition to exact retribution upon the Iroquois was commanded by the conscientious, if conspicuously unlucky, Major General Sullivan. As Washington knew from his own hard experience, Indian fighting was a chancy and unpredictable business, and he gave Sullivan detailed advice intended to minimize the risk of another Braddock-style fiasco. Above all, he was to maintain the aggressive initiative. Sullivan should “make rather than receive attacks, attended with as much impetuosity, shouting and noise as possible, and to make the troops act in as loose and dispersed a way as is consistent with a proper degree of government, concert and mutual support.” Mimicking the celebrated tactics of his old colleague Henri Bouquet, developed during the Forbes campaign of 1758 and tested at Bushy Run in 1763, Washington urged that “wherever they have an opportunity,” Sullivan’s men should “rush on with the war whoop and fixed bayonet: nothing will disconcert and terrify the Indians more than this.” While Washington had shunned a plundering, destructive war in the east and deplored Tryon’s recent coastal raids on New England, the western frontier was a different matter. Against “savage” Indians, there was no need for civility or restraint. Sullivan’s object must be the utter devastation of the Indian settlements: indeed, Washington emphasized, these should “not be merely overrun but destroyed”; there could be no negotiation “until the total ruin of their settlements is effected.” If the Indians then showed some “disposition for peace,” they should be required to prove their sincerity by delivering up such “principal instigators of their past hostility” as Butler and Brant.66
Although marked down for vengeance, Joseph Brant, or Thayendanegea, had sought to minimize the sufferings of the frontier settlers; despite his “savage” background, he, too, exemplified the qualities of gentleman and warrior that Washington prized. Among the most remarkable of all Native American leaders, Brant was a protégé of Britain’s influential Indian superintendent, Sir William Johnson, and in 1758, while aged about fifteen, had accompanied him to fight the French at Ticonderoga. After schooling in New Hampshire, in late 1775, Brant had traveled to England as part of a delegation intended to secure British backing to guarantee the integrity of tribal lands against the incursions of the American revolutionaries. In London the dignified and articulate Mohawk became the toast of the town. He was interviewed by James Boswell for an article in the London Magazine, and his portrait was painted by the leading society artist George Romney; it would be painted again in 1786 by none other than Gilbert Stuart, later to achieve acclaim for his iconic likenesses of President Washington. By August 1776, Brant was with the British forces poised off New York and struck up an enduring friendship with a kindred spirit, the aristocratic and chivalrous General Hugh, Lord Percy.67
As a guest aboard the Eagle, Brant also won the admiration of Lord Howe’s personal secretary, Ambrose Serle, who noted that he “was remarkably easy and sensible in his discourse,” expressing “an air of gravity, which rendered it to me the more engaging. His remarks were pertinent, and bespoke a strong natural understanding.” Serle was especially impressed that Brant had “translated [a] great part of the English New Testament into the Mohawk language.” Indeed, in Serle’s opinion, Brant and a fellow chief were “abundantly less savages” and “more refined and more sensible than half at least of our ship’s company.”68
To tackle Brant’s people, Sullivan was given an army of 2,500 veteran Continentals, supplemented by artillery and militia: about 4,000 in all. He proceeded with caution, and on August 29, defeated a force of outgunned Iroquois warriors and Loyalist rangers at Newtown. When they fell back to the British fort at Niagara on the Canadian border, the Iroquois heartlands—the Mohawk Valley and Genesee Country—lay undefended. Following Washington’s instructions, which reflected the strategy used against the Cherokees by James Grant in 1761, Sullivan implemented a systematic scorched-earth policy that destroyed the Iroquois cornfields and villages. Reporting the results of Sullivan’s “plan of chastisement” to Lafayette in September, Washington believed it would convince the Iroquois that their “cruelties are not to pass with impunity” and that they had been incited to “acts of barbarism by a nation which is unable to protect them.” Sullivan had “burnt between 15 and 20 towns,” along with “their crops and every thing that was to be found,” sending the inhabitants “fleeing in the utmost confusion, consternation and distress towards Niagara, distant 100 miles through an uninhabited wilderness.”69
As the Seneca chief Cornplanter reminded Washington a decade later, by authorizing this comprehensive devastation, he had given new resonance to his old Indian name: “When your army entered the country of the Six Nations,” Cornplanter told him, “we called you Town Destroyer; and to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale and our children cling close to the neck of their mothers.”70 Although Sullivan’s expedition avenged Iroquois depredations, it did not cow the Six Nations’ warriors: incensed by their losses and increasingly reliant upon British support, in both 1780 and 1781, they fell upon the New York frontier with renewed fury.
For all its ferocity, this ongoing Indian war remained distinct from operations on the eastern seaboard. There, the strategic situation had undergone a dramatic and, for Washington, perplexing shift. Requested to help Congress’s commander in the Southern Department—Major General Benjamin Lincoln—d’Estaing returned from the Caribbean and by September 1, 1779, was anchored off the Georgian coast. He’d no intention of lingering, but as long as the West Indian hurricane season ruled out further operations there, he was willing to join a Franco-American offensive against Savannah. On September 12, he landed 4,500 troops; combined with Lincoln’s army of about 3,000, they surrounded Prevost’s outnumbered garrison. But the siege moved slowly—far too slowly for d’Estaing, whose crews rapidly succumbed to sickness. When a bombardment failed to intimidate Prevost and his men, d’Estaing boldly resolved to storm the city’s defenses; always a risky undertaking, this decision went against the advice of a majority of officers. Like Washington’s cautious counselors during the siege of Boston, they were right to be wary. When the assault was launched on October 9, it was beaten back with more than 800 casualties; d’Estaing himself was seriously wounded. Although Lincoln wished to continue operations, d’Estaing had no desire to stay in Georgia. The siege was lifted on October 18, 1779. For a second time, direct French intervention had failed utterly to deliver the expected results.
That September, after first intelligence arrived of d’Estaing’s appearance off Savannah, Clinton had gathered all of his available forces in New York City, evacuating Newport, Rhode Island, and his remaining posts in the Hudson Highlands. While these withdrawals indicated that a fresh British offensive in the north was unlikely, this massing of manpower nonetheless made it possible for Clinton to contemplate a strike elsewhere. Building upon the tidings of d’Estaing’s total defeat, on Boxing Day 1779, Clinton set sail from New York with 7,600 men: his objective was Charleston, South Carolina, where he had been thwarted so ignominiously by Charles Lee in 1776. If South Carolina was restored to Crown control, Lord George Germain now believed, it could become the base for a British thrust northward, harnessing resurgent Loyalists to methodically overrun and pacify the remaining rebel states.
Although he longed to attack New York—the hub of British strength in America since the summer of 1776, and the scene of his own most humiliating defeats as commander of the Continental Army—Washington was powerless to exploit the absence of Clinton and thousands of his men far to the south. He was reduced to inactivity by a formidable combination of circumstances that were all beyond his control. The winter of 1779–80 was the coldest on record, and his army’s sojourn at Jockey Hollow, near Morristown, New Jersey (the same ground where it had quartered in January 1777, after Princeton), proved unremittingly grim, worse even than Valley Forge. On December 16, 1779, just days after occupying his new winter quarters, Washington sent a blunt circular letter to the states. The army’s supply situation was “beyond description alarming,” with all its magazines bare and the commissaries lacking the cash or credit to replenish them, he wrote. His troops had already been on half rations for five or six weeks; there was scarcely enough bread for three more days, and once that was gone they must glean the surrounding countryside. In the past there had been temporary glitches caused by “accidental delays in forwarding supplies,” Washington added, but this latest crisis was different in magnitude: “We have never experienced a like extremity at any period of the war,” he warned. Without “extraordinary exertions” by the states from which the army drew its supplies, it must “infallibly disband in a fortnight.”71
The crisis was exacerbated by the unrelenting weather. Snowstorms were bad enough for poorly clad, shivering soldiers obliged to shelter under canvas until they had built ramshackle huts, but the deep drifts that soon accumulated also made the region’s roads impassable for supply wagons. Once local depots were emptied, there would be no prospect of relief from farther afield for weeks to come. Yet with the economy undergoing financial meltdown, local farmers refused to sell their surplus produce for the drastically depreciated Continental dollars. By the onset of 1780, Washington’s ravenous Continentals were plundering surrounding farmsteads of whatever they could find. Washington was well aware of the dire consequences of such pilfering for his army’s discipline and also for its precarious base of civilian support but, given the genuine distress of his men, hesitated to punish them. To prevent an escalation of marauding, Washington appealed to the county magistrates of New Jersey to impose requisitions of cattle and grain. Given the urgency of the situation, he had no doubt that the specified quotas would be delivered voluntarily: if not, they would be taken by force. According to Dr. James Thacher, Washington’s uncompromising invitation was “attended with the happiest success,” yielding sufficient supplies to save “the army from destruction.”72
But this respite was temporary. With their bellies soon empty again, Washington’s desperate veterans continued to scour the vicinity for any morsel. General Orders of January 28, 1780 announced that Washington would no longer excuse “the plundering and licentious spirit of the soldiery”; according to the outraged magistrates, scarcely a night passed “without gangs of soldiers going out of camp and committing every species of robbery, depredation and the grossest personal insults.” For the future, any man found straggling beyond the sentries after retreat beating risked a hundred lashes on the spot; those detected in robbery or violence might receive up to five hundred lashes, at the discretion of the officer of the guard.73 The situation was so desperate that Washington was now prepared to exceed the penalties laid down in the army’s Articles of War. As Dr. Thacher testified, during the crackdown, heavy floggings were inflicted, although many of the recipients made a point of receiving “the severest stripes without uttering a groan, or once shrinking from the lash.” Thacher attributed this to “stubbornness or pride”—along with the men’s habit of chewing a lead bullet “while under the lash, till it is made quite flat and jagged.”74
Like the harsh weather, the supply crisis continued well into the spring of 1780. When Joseph Plumb Martin of the Connecticut Continentals arrived in camp in late May, he once again encountered his familiar companion, “the monster hunger.” For several days after rejoining the main army, Martin and his comrades “got a little musty bread,” with “a little beef about every other day”: but before long, he recalled bitterly, “we got nothing at all.” Now “exasperated beyond endurance,” such veterans faced a stark choice: starve to death or quit the army and go home. It was a cruel dilemma for men who, Martin maintained, were “truly patriotic,” who “loved their country” and had already suffered “every thing short of death in its cause.” Their discontent finally erupted on May 25. According to Private Martin, after a day spent “growling like sore headed dogs,” by evening roll call the soldiers were showing their teeth, defiantly back-talking their officers and ignoring orders. When the adjutant of Martin’s regiment called one of the men “a mutinous rascal,” his comrades spontaneously turned out and formed up on the parade ground beside him in a menacing show of solidarity. In an ensuing brawl, several officers were roughed up, and Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs of the 6th Connecticut Regiment was wounded with a bayonet. The outbreak was contained before it could escalate by a timely issue of provisions and the arrival of steady Pennsylvanian troops but nonetheless served warning that many seasoned Continentals were nearing the end of their patience with Congress.75
This latest crisis had barely subsided when Washington received news of a shattering patriot defeat in the south. There Clinton’s switch of front had yielded spectacular dividends. On February 11, 1780 his storm-lashed force was within striking distance of its objective, Charleston. General Lincoln awaited Clinton’s advance within the port’s fortifications. On the night of April 1–2, the British began digging their siege lines. Enduring heavy bombardment, and with his escape route cut, Lincoln was ready to surrender the city on condition that he and his army went free. Disinclined to haggle, Clinton offered the alternatives of unconditional surrender or a bloody storm. Pressurized by Charleston’s skittish citizens, on May 12, Lincoln capitulated. Some 2,500 Continentals—virtually the entire regular army of the Southern Department—became prisoners of war, while hundreds of captured militiamen were released on parole. Captain Peebles of the 42nd described the Continentals as a “ragged dirty looking set of people as usual, but [with] more appearance of discipline than what we have seen formerly.” Some of their officers were “decent looking men”; they included another “old acquaintance” of Peebles from happier days, Colonel Nathaniel Gist of the 3rd Virginian Continentals, the son of Washington’s wilderness guide, Christopher.76 The fall of Charleston was an American defeat to rival Fort Washington, and it kindled British hopes that the revived southern strategy might yet hold the key to victory. Warned of the approach of a fresh French expeditionary force and fearing for his New York garrison, Clinton returned north on June 8, 1780 with 4,000 men, leaving Lord Cornwallis to continue the reconquest of the south.
In the north, by contrast, the strategic situation remained stagnated. Even the arrival of the long-anticipated French fleet, which decanted 5,500 regular troops onto Rhode Island in mid-July, failed to break the deadlock. Although the French general, Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, would fall under Washington’s orders, his naval colleague Commodore the Chevalier de Ternay held an independent command; this meant that he could veto any joint operations that the French disliked.77 As Ternay’s fleet had been promptly blockaded in Newport by the Royal Navy, obliging Rochambeau to summon help from the New England militia to reinforce the defenses, there was clearly no immediate prospect for a new Franco-American offensive, whether against New York, or anywhere else.
The fifty-five-year-old Rochambeau was an experienced officer with a distinguished record of service in both the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. From the outset, Washington set about building a professional relationship with him and his countrymen. As he spoke no French himself, he used his trusted confidant Lafayette as a go-between: “All the information he gives and all the propositions he makes,” he told the French commander, “I entreat you will consider as coming from me.” Mindful of the tensions and resentments that had followed the collapse of the Franco-American attempt upon Rhode Island two years before, in announcing the arrival of Rochambeau’s force, Washington’s General Orders expressed a hope that “the only contention” between the Americans and the troops of His Most Christian Majesty would be to “excel each other in good offices and in the display of every military virtue.”78
That summer brought more bleak tidings from the south. Against Washington’s advice, Congress sent Horatio Gates to assume command in that troubled sector. On August 16, 1780, the victor of Saratoga suffered a crushing defeat at Camden, South Carolina. Faced with Cornwallis’s veterans, Gates blundered by forming his entire left wing of militia, without the customary backbone of Continentals. The militia fled immediately, many without even firing their weapons, although the Continentals on the right staged a stubborn stand before being outflanked and broken; their bravery cost them dear, and the slain included the tough Bavarian veteran Baron de Kalb. One survivor, Colonel Otho Williams of the 6th Maryland Regiment, blamed the utter rout upon the “infamous cowardice of the militia of Virginia and North Carolina [which] gave the enemy every advantage over our few regular troops.” To Alexander Hamilton, Camden demonstrated “the necessity of changing our system” and eschewing amateur soldiers: Gates’s “passion for militia, I fancy will be a little cured, and he will cease to think them the best bulwark of American liberty,” he wrote.79
For Washington, too, “the late disaster in Carolina” bolstered his consistent argument that it was fatal to depend upon militia. Writing to the latest president of Congress, Samuel Huntington, he rammed home the old message yet again: “Regular troops alone are equal to the exigencies of modern war, as well for defense as offence.” While useful as “light troops to be scattered in the woods and plague rather than do serious injury to the enemy,” militia could never acquire the “firmness requisite for the real business of fighting”: that prized quality “could only be attained by a constant course of discipline and service.”80 In fact, as Washington’s trusty subordinates in the south would soon demonstrate, provided their limitations were recognized, militiamen had the potential to complement the Continentals, not simply as hovering skirmishers, but in set-piece engagements.
Building upon his success, Cornwallis marched into North Carolina, once again chasing the chimera of active Loyalist support. On September 26, he reached Charlotte, pausing to give his weary troops a breather. Meanwhile, to the west, Major Patrick Ferguson—the same officer who’d had Washington in his sights at Brandywine three years earlier—was advancing toward Charlotte at the head of a force of Loyalist provincials and militia. But the wild backcountry of the Carolinas was a hostile environment for Crown sympathizers: on October 7, Ferguson’s little army, which had taken up a defensive position on King’s Mountain, was overwhelmed by Tennessee backwoodsmen in a pitiless encounter. The gallant Ferguson died in a hail of rifle balls, along with many of his men; the major’s body was treated with unmerited disrespect, with the victors taking turns to urinate upon it.81 Some survivors were singled out for summary execution. Small in scale, King’s Mountain epitomized the brutality and vindictiveness of what had become a virtual civil war in the south—exactly the kind of unrestrained irregular conflict that Washington had been so keen to avoid elsewhere.
Back in New York after his Charleston triumph, Clinton faced his own share of frustrations in 1780. Still in aggressive mode, he had wanted to attack Rochambeau’s infantry on Rhode Island, but his curmudgeonly naval colleague, Lord Howe’s successor, Vice Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot, was lukewarm, and the strike was canceled. In addition, an advance by Washington toward King’s Bridge—the route from Manhattan Island to the mainland—gave cause for caution. On September 14, a far more dynamic sailor than Arbuthnot, Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney, reached New York bringing ten more ships of the line. Unlike Arbuthnot, Rodney was game to join Clinton’s redcoats in a crack at the French. But by now the mercurial Clinton had changed his mind: with all the delays, the enemy had fortified themselves too strongly to justify an attack.
Still adjusting to their new surroundings, Rochambeau and his naval partner Ternay were determined to maintain a defensive stance. At a strategic summit held at Hartford, Connecticut, on September 20–22, 1780, Washington secured their agreement to his contention that “of all the enterprises which may be undertaken, the most important and decisive is the reduction of New York, which is the center and focus of all the British forces.” However, his suggestion that the French land and sea forces should separate, with the fleet heading for Boston and the troops reinforcing the American army above Manhattan, was rejected, Rochambeau and Ternay “observing that they had pointed instructions from their court for the fleet and army to support each other.” In an admission that boded ill for future allied operations, Versailles had ordered that the French troops should be confined “as much as possible on islands,” so minimizing friction with “American citizens.” Even the incentive of a joint “winter expedition to Canada”—a prospect that Washington had only recently regarded with horror—failed to excite Rochambeau: before “concerting” any such plan he must consult the ministry in France, “as he imagined there might be some political objections to the measure.” In short, there would be no offensive that year.82
Meanwhile, Clinton’s gaze had been drawn inexorably back to his perennial objective, the rugged Hudson Highlands. Sir Henry’s latest plan to seize them hatched one of the most notorious and remarkable episodes in the American Revolutionary War, which affected both him and Washington more profoundly than any other. It hinged upon the treason of the revolutionary hero Major General Benedict Arnold, now commandant of the crucial fortifications at West Point. In an act of breathtaking duplicity, the discontented Arnold agreed to sell his post to the British for £20,000 and the rank of general in the royal service.
Since early 1779, as he informed Germain, Clinton had been given reason to believe that Arnold was “desirous of quitting the rebel service and joining the cause of Great Britain” owing to his “displeasure at the alliance between France and America.” Under a false identity, Arnold embarked upon a secret correspondence that yielded “most material intelligence,” dangling the tantalizing information that he expected to be “employed in the American service” in an important role and was willing to surrender himself “under every possible advantage to His Majesty’s arms.” In July 1780, when Arnold gained command of 4,000 men and all the rebel forts in the Hudson Highlands, Clinton put two and two together: not only was Arnold the mysterious correspondent, he concluded, but he promised an “object of the highest importance”—control of the Hudson River as far as Albany. Admiral Rodney was keen to offer all naval assistance to Clinton’s projected “movement up the North River”: it only remained to confirm Arnold’s identity beyond all doubt, settle the details of the plan, and ensure that there was no risk of the king’s troops falling victim to a counterplot. A meeting was fixed, with Arnold adamant that the person sent to confer with him should be Clinton’s adjutant general, twenty-nine-year-old Major John André, who had handled the secret correspondence from the outset.83
André was ferried upriver by the sloop HMS Vulture, and the clandestine meeting with Arnold went ahead early on September 22. So far, all had gone to plan, and the plot looked set to fulfill Clinton’s hopes. But the next day, André’s luck ran out. Carrying a pass from Arnold and using the alias “John Anderson,” the major set out overland to reach safety at New York. This journey took him through the no-man’s-land that stretched between the British and American armies, a violent and lawless zone contested by rival bands of irregulars hardened by years of guerrilla warfare and mutually addicted to plunder. In Westchester County, André encountered three American militiamen whom he mistook for Loyalists, not least because one of them, John Paulding, was wearing the “green, red-trimmed coat” of a Hessian jäger.84 Spurning a bribe, the trio searched the major and found incriminating documents in his boot. Out of uniform and beyond his own lines, André was arrested as a spy. Arnold was alerted to this development by a letter from one of his unsuspecting subordinates; he opened it on the morning of September 25, shortly before his treachery became clear to Washington, who arrived at Arnold’s headquarters later that same day on the way back from his discouraging conference with Rochambeau at Hartford. There he read the documents seized from André: in Arnold’s handwriting, these disclosed details of West Point’s defenses. Immediate steps were taken to detain Arnold, but by then he had embarked on a barge, coolly bluffed his way past the American outpost at Verplanck’s Point, and reached safety aboard the Vulture moored downriver.
The ensuing shock and horror at Arnold’s crime was mingled with relief at the precariously narrow margin by which disaster had been averted. Washington’s General Orders issued the following day, September 26, expressed all three emotions:
Treason of the blackest dye was yesterday discovered! General Arnold who commanded at West Point, lost to every sentiment of honor, of public and private obligation, was about to deliver up that important post into the hands of the enemy. Such an event must have given the American cause a deadly wound if not fatal stab. Happily the treason has been timely discovered to prevent the fatal misfortune. The providential train of circumstances which led to it affords the most convincing proof that the liberties of America are the object of divine protection.85
Coming so close to success, Arnold’s plan left Washington badly shaken. Among the most stalwart fighters in the revolutionary cause and severely wounded for his pains, Arnold had been one of Washington’s favorites; in symbolic recognition of his courage on the battlefield he had given him a handsome set of epaulettes. Yet while undoubtedly a warrior, Arnold was plainly no gentleman. André, by contrast, was both. A professional soldier, he’d fought at Brandywine, Paoli, Germantown, and Monmouth. No stranger to the sight of blood and smell of gunsmoke, André was also courteous, debonair, and cultivated, fluent in four languages and a gifted artist to boot; a keen amateur actor, he had not only ridden in the “Mischianza” tournament at Philadelphia in May 1778 but also designed the risqué “Turkish” costumes worn by those ladies daring enough to participate.
Arnold was beyond retribution, but there remained the question of what to do with André, who had been captured under circumstances that left no doubt of his involvement in espionage. As Washington reported to Sir Henry Clinton, a board of general officers appointed to examine the major swiftly concluded that he “ought to be considered as a spy from the enemy, and that agreeable to the law and usage of nations it is their opinion he ought to suffer death.”86
Clinton, who ordinarily struggled to form friendships, was devoted to his young adjutant general and deeply concerned at his plight. Believing that Washington’s officers had reached their verdict without all the relevant facts, Clinton sent a three-man delegation upriver in a desperate bid to save André. Only Lieutenant General James Robertson was permitted to land, meeting Major General Nathanael Greene in the private capacity of “gentleman” rather than “officer.” Greene had warned Robertson that the distinction was irrelevant, as “the case of an acknowledged spy admitted no official discussion.” With a “blush,” Greene added that “the army must be satisfied by seeing spies executed.” However, it appeared just one thing would placate them: for André to be set free, Arnold must be given up. Of course, such a solution was unthinkable to Clinton, and Robertson had answered this offer “with a look only, which threw Greene into confusion.” He left the meeting “persuaded” that André would not be harmed.87
Robertson had misread the determined mood of Washington and his generals. André was under no such illusion. On September 29, he had written Clinton a letter absolving him of any responsibility for his predicament. Now “perfectly tranquil in mind and prepared for any fate to which an honest zeal for my king’s service may have devoted me,” the major asked only that any proceeds from the sale of his officer’s commission would go to his mother and three sisters.88 André’s impeccable conduct in the face of impending death deeply impressed his captors, winning admirers like young Alexander Hamilton. Indeed, he personified the very qualities that they aspired to as officers and gentlemen. Knowing he must die, André hoped at least to be shot like a soldier, not hanged as a spy: he wrote to Washington requesting that indulgence but received no reply. According to Hamilton, as a firing squad would have been “incompatible with the customs of war,” it was decided to withhold an answer to spare André “the sensations, which a certain knowledge of the intended mode would inflict.”89
André’s execution on October 2 was a solemn, awe-inspiring occasion. One of the many bystanders, Dr. James Thacher, reported that almost all the American army’s senior officers attended—with the notable exception of Washington and his immediate staff. Calm and dignified as he walked through the crowd dressed in his scarlet regimentals and polished boots, André had smiled and exchanged polite bows with several acquaintances. When the gallows suddenly came in sight, he momentarily recoiled. Asked what was amiss, he replied: “I am reconciled to my death, but I detest the mode.” André’s courage was all the more impressive because, as Dr. Thacher noted with rather too much clinical detachment, he was fighting to master his physical fear: while standing near the gallows, the major revealed “some degree of trepidation; placing his foot on a stone and rolling it over, and choking in his throat, as if attempting to swallow.” But in his last minutes André gave the performance of his life, coolly blindfolding himself with a handkerchief and adjusting the hangman’s noose. In contrast to André’s composure, by now many of the onlookers were openly weeping. Another witness, Major Caleb Gibbs of Washington’s elite Life Guard, reported that, when André was asked for any last words, he simply “called on all the gentlemen present to bear witness that he died like a brave man.” Gibbs added: “and did.”90
When news of André’s hanging reached Clinton’s army, his officers wore black crepe armbands for eight days as a mark of mourning. Captain Ewald especially regretted André’s fate, as he’d met him before the war while he was visiting Cassell. The captain recalled that he had “shown much friendship for me and the Jäger Corps.”91 Unsurprisingly, the execution of the popular young major provoked an unprecedented storm of opprobrium against Washington from both British officers and civilian commentators. When André’s mock-heroic poem “The Cow Chase,” written in 1780 to lampoon a foraging expedition by Lord Stirling, was republished in London in the following year, its “Advertisement” condemned the “inhuman Washington.”92 The opening stanza of Ann Seward’s “A Monody on the Death of André” exemplified the tragic episode’s impact upon perceptions of a man that many Britons had previously admired:
Oh Washington! I thought thee great and good,
Nor knew thy Nero thirst for guiltless blood;
Severe to use the power that fortune gave;
Thou cool determined murderer of the brave.93
Years later, Sir Henry Clinton remained bitter at André’s execution, which he blamed upon Washington’s vindictive rage “at the near accomplishment of a plan which might have effectually restored the King’s authority and tumbled him from his present exalted situation” and which had left him burning “with a desire of wreaking his vengeance on the principal actors in it.” Heedless of “the acknowledged worth and abilities of the amiable young man who had thus fallen into his hands, and in opposition to every principle of policy and call of humanity, he without remorse put him to a most ignominious death.” 94
There is no evidence that Washington bore André any such malice. Reporting the execution to his aide and close friend Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, he wrote: “Andre has met his fate, and with that fortitude which was to be expected from an accomplished man and gallant officer.” All of Washington’s animosity was channeled at Arnold. While Laurens believed that the turncoat was destined to endure the “torments of a mental Hell,” Washington was convinced that Arnold was immune to self-reproach. “From such traits of his character which have lately come to my knowledge,” he wrote to Laurens, “he seems to have been so hackneyed in villainy, and so lost to all sense of honor and shame that while his faculties will enable him to continue his sordid pursuits there will be no time for remorse.”95
Indeed, while André attracted almost universal sympathy and admiration, Arnold became the most hated man in America. As Dr. Thacher observed, “Could Arnold have been suspended on the gibbet erected for André, not a tear or sigh would have been produced.” It has been plausibly suggested that the unprecedented invective directed against Arnold screened the guilt of many of his countrymen who had themselves betrayed the revolutionary cause in less spectacular fashion, by failing to join the fight against Britain, or by not even expressing solidarity with the hard-pressed Continental Army.96
Yet, for all the vilification he incurred, Arnold was scarcely unique in his disillusionment with Congress and its broken promises or, as he expressed it in a letter to Washington, “the ingratitude of my country.”97 Other soldiers who’d risked life and limb for American liberty, only to find their efforts ignored by apathetic civilians, were no less embittered: Arnold’s treason was merely the most dramatic and infamous manifestation of a discontent that would soon surface far more widely.