For all his frustration with the course of the war, Gen. Howe was not a fool. He had now twice absorbed the lessons of attempting to dislodge the Americans from their riverside forts with a primarily overland assault. If the redoubts were to fall, it would have to be from a combined attack by land and water. So, in cooperation with his brother, he organized a plan to engage the defenders of Fort Mifflin with three times as much firepower as he had brought to bear the previous month against the larger and better-defended Fort Mercer. Less than two miles to the rear of Fort Mifflin on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, a spit of land called Province Island protruded from the river’s shallows. For years it had been used as a sanctuary by local Indians harassed by a vigilante group of Scots-Irish known as the Paxton Boys. In the first week of November, the British general ordered the island’s Indian population cleared as his cannoneers hauled their artillery onto the foreland that jutted out nearest the Delaware River.
In the interim since von Donop’s strike at Fort Mercer, the garrison at Fort Mifflin had ballooned to some 400 Americans, including the young diarist Joseph Plumb Martin. At daybreak on November 10 they awoke to a fusillade that would be the largest extended bombardment of the Revolutionary War. Over the next four days British artillery from Province Island rained continuous fire on the rickety outpost—balls launched directly at its wooden barracks and walls; mortar and howitzer shells lobbed over its parapets; grapeshot rattling its bastions at the merest glimpse of a cocked hat or musket barrel. The fort’s 10 cannons proved ineffectual in response, “a Burlesque upon the art of Fortification,” wrote one Continental regular. When the Continentals’ lone 32-pounder ran out of ammunition, the fort’s commander offered a gill of rum, about four ounces, to any soldier who dared enter the parade ground to recover British cannonballs to be fired back at the enemy. Each night, under the tireless direction of the French engineer Maj. François de Fleury, the defenders attempted to repair the damage and shore up their crumbling walls. By the next afternoon the enemy’s artillery would have reduced their efforts to rubble.
For the moment the Americans found redemption only in the weather. A series of intense squalls had blown in from the north, roiling the currents on the river and preventing Adm. Howe’s ships from reaching their target. On the night of November 14, however, the veil of clouds lifted to reveal a black canopy bristling with pinpoints of starlight. The coup de grâce was delivered the next morning, when the river tides carried eight British gunboats armed with 228 more cannons upriver. Keeping out of range of the artillery at Fort Mercer, the vessels encircled the little fort on Mud Island and fired at will. The waterborne show of force was no match for what even Washington referred to snidely as the “Gondolas and Guard Boats” of the Continental Navy. During one hour over 1,000 cannonballs reportedly fell within Fort Mifflin’s walls.
With his gift for limpid, simple prose, the diarist Joseph Plumb Martin sketched a grisly portrait from the perspective of boots—or, in his case, bare feet—on the ground. “I have seen the enemy’s shells fall upon it and sink so low that their report could not be heard when they burst, and I could only feel a tremulous motion of the earth at the time,” he wrote. “At other times, when they burst near the surface of the ground, they would throw the mud fifty feet in the air.” Martin witnessed comrades “split like fish to be broiled” while he himself “endured hardships, sufficient to kill half a dozen horses.” He was six days shy of his seventeenth birthday.
As the battle progressed, the converted British East Indiaman Empress of Russia managed to ride the current into the narrow channel that separated the fort from the mainland. British marines, clambering to the ship’s crow’s nest, heaved scores of hand grenades down on the Continentals firing from the parapets. That night, with ammunition running low and over half of the redoubt’s exhausted and starving men either killed or wounded, Fort Mifflin’s commanding officer, Colonel Christopher Greene—a third cousin of Nathanael Greene—ordered its evacuation. Just prior to midnight, with the oars of their longboats muffled with sheepskins, the Americans slipped their dead into the Delaware’s currents and rowed across the river to Fort Mercer. A small unit was left behind to spike the cannons and set the outpost ablaze before its members, too, crossed. The escapees included Joseph Plumb Martin. The following morning the British took possession of the charred and splintered remnants of the little citadel.
General Howe—buoyed by casualty reports of only 13 British dead and 24 wounded during the siege—immediately ordered Gen. Cornwallis to lead 3,000 men to storm Fort Mercer. Washington briefly considered reinforcing the New Jersey outpost, but a team of generals he sent to assess that contingency advised against it. On November 20, five days after the fall of Fort Mifflin, Col. Greene ordered Fort Mercer’s walls abandoned. Cornwallis’s detachment moved in the following morning. To his delight, Cornwallis also found himself in possession of 400 head of cattle, which he ordered driven to Philadelphia as a gift to Howe’s hungry troops.
With the Delaware River now open to Adm. Richard Howe’s large transport vessels, any hope of starving the British out of Philadelphia slipped away like a smuggler’s schooner. Washington, under pressure from Congress to react, could do no more than dispatch an undersized division of roughly 2,000 men under Nathanael Greene to southern New Jersey with discretionary instructions to engage Cornwallis whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself. Riding with Greene was the peripatetic Marquis de Lafayette.
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Lafayette had spent his short convalescence dashing off billets-doux to Adrienne, updating his powerful father-in-law on the vigilance and righteousness of the American cause, and pestering Washington for a command of his own. Finally, having received no reply from his patron, in early October he had quit his hospital bed, wrapped his game leg in a blanket, bidden his Moravian hosts adieu, and ridden off to Whitemarsh. There he slept on the floor in the commander in chief’s hovel of a headquarters, shared the general staff’s one tin plate, and continued his lobbying. This persistence eventually broke down Washington’s inchoate reservations, and in one of his first letters to the new president of Congress, Henry Laurens, Washington wrote of his “delicate situation with respect to the Marquis Le Fayette.”I Washington advised the senior Laurens that a refusal to grant the Frenchman’s request “will not only induce him to return [to France] in disgust—but may involve some unfavorable consequences.” Moreover, in the wake of Lafayette’s heroism at Brandywine, he was now inclined “to gratify him his wishes.”
“The Marquis,” Washington added with what may be imagined as a sigh of resignation, “is determined to be in the way of danger.” While awaiting Laurens’s directions, Washington attached Lafayette to Gen. Greene’s expeditionary force in a sort of trial run.
By late November, Greene had stalked Cornwallis’s force to the town of Gloucester in southwest New Jersey. There he put 400 riflemen under the command of Lafayette and tasked him with probing the enemy lines. On the afternoon of November 25, Lafayette, still hobbling on his wounded leg, crept to within yards of the Redcoat camp to conduct a troop count. As he was making his return circumference he came upon a stand-alone picket of some 400 Hessians. Fulfilling Washington’s forecast—and perhaps his worst fears—the Frenchman gathered his infantry and attacked. The Americans routed the Hessians, killing or wounding close to 40 and chasing the rest for a good half mile before the combination of British reinforcements and darkness ended the engagement.
General Greene’s reconstruction of the action for Washington was evenhanded in its praise for the marquis. More impressive, Lafayette’s own précis of his “little success” stressed the heroics of the American troops while downplaying his own role as “not very considerable.” If nothing else, Lafayette had learned to say what his commander in chief wanted to hear. Immediately after receiving both communiqués, Washington relayed to Congress his own summation of the encounter, again suggesting that Lafayette be given a greater role in the army. This time Congress agreed, and on December 1, Lafayette was placed in charge of the division of Virginians formerly led by the disgraced Gen. Stephen. In the meantime any hopes Washington had of Greene’s luring Cornwallis into a fight evaporated when Cornwallis and his troops were recalled to Philadelphia. If Gen. Howe was going to force a major engagement, he was going to do it on his own terms.
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On December 4, American scouts reported that the entire British army with Howe at its head was marching from Philadelphia toward Whitemarsh. Sensing a final opportunity for a conclusive confrontation before winter set in, Washington roused his troops and, in John Laurens’s words, “paraded our men so as to make them acquainted with the ground and its advantages.” The following morning when the British hove into view the Continentals were already positioned in the fortified hills overlooking a deep swale in front of the camp. The Redcoats were then greeted with a series of feints designed to draw them closer to the defile, including a fusillade into their right flank from Dan Morgan’s rifle corps. General Howe, proving either too savvy or too indifferent, refused to take the bait. “We wished nothing more than to have them engage us,” recorded the prolific Joseph Plumb Martin, who had arrived at Whitemarsh the previous day: “For we were sure of giving them a drubbing, being in excellent fighting trim, as we were starved and as cross and illnatured as curs.” His sarcasm is understandable.
Instead, for the next 48 hours the British probed the American battle lines for weaknesses, finding none. Howe then withdrew his army in such haste that Continental soldiers raced to scavenge the abandoned blankets and cooking kettles, some of the latter with fires still burning beneath them. Howe’s imminent return to England—and the prospect of explaining another defeat on the heels of the humiliation at Saratoga—probably influenced his decision to seek the succor of Philadelphia. And in that instant the expectation of another large-scale engagement that had buoyed what Washington called his “soldiery” since Germantown became as meager as their paydays and daily rations. What the commander in chief and his staff of confidants considered a moral victory at Whitemarsh left a sour taste in the mouths of many others, not least in the halls of Congress.
Again the sotto voce grumbling circulated, this time not quite so sotto. Would not someone like Horatio Gates or Benedict Arnold have carried the fight to the enemy from those limestone hills? “Two battles he has lost for us by two such Blunders as might have disgraced a Soldier of three months standing,” sniped the New Jersey delegate Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant to his fellow congressman James Lovell of Massachusetts. Now that the opportunity had passed, all that remained was the prospect of a cold and hungry season of waiting. As Jedediah Huntington wrote to his father in Connecticut, “What probability is there of recruiting our Army? Money will not do it for it has almost intirely lost its Value. How is it possible to clothe our men? They have worn out their Blankets & other Clothing and I see no prospect of renewing them.” Or, as the historian Wayne Bodle observed, “In the camp of the American Army, the winter of discontent had begun early.”
With the farmsteads and mills surrounding Whitemarsh bled dry by the two voracious armies, there was nothing left for Washington but to find another area to stake winter camp. So it was that in the waning autumn weeks of 1777, mounted messengers pocked the sodden roads between Whitemarsh, York, and Lancaster—the seat of Pennsylvania’s state legislature—as Washington, the Continental Congress, and the local politicians debated various options. Some of Washington’s aides pressed for a chain of winter cantonments meandering from Reading to Lancaster, the better to protect what little Continental stores remained. Others argued that fragmenting the army in such a manner would lead to a flood of desertions. Still other general officers—including Greene, Lafayette, and Wayne—put forth the proposition of marching the troops to winter quarters as far south as Wilmington, Delaware. The irascible Count Pulaski, echoing the sentiments of a healthy swath of junior officers and the more bellicose members of Congress, called for an immediate attack on Philadelphia. General Lord Stirling’s was the lone voice suggesting that the army consider wintering over in the “Great Valley of Trydruffin,” or Valley Forge, some 13 miles to the west. A circumspect Washington was more wary than usual of voicing his opinion on the subject. For ultimately any decision would entail a delicate balancing act.
On the one hand was the covey of congressional delegates, abetted by some of his own lieutenants, majors, and colonels, who still wanted to take the fight to the enemy. On the other was the political reality of the state government, which expected the Continental Army to remain near enough to Philadelphia to prevent, as one representative put it, “the ravages and insults of the enemy” across its suburbs. That both these strategies broke against Washington’s own intuition and military experience was the conundrum. To this point the entire Pennsylvania campaign had been an exercise in experimentation after the decisive victories at Trenton and Princeton that closed out the previous year. To Washington’s critics it had been a failed experiment incurring a cascade of defeats. In reality it had consisted of little more than several inconclusive, though violent, tactical clashes punctuated by extended periods of strategic regrouping. There was, however, a larger picture to consider.
By early December the news of Burgoyne’s surrender had reached Versailles. King Louis XVI and his ministers were so overjoyed that it inspired a démarche, with the king himself notifying Benjamin Franklin that now was a propitious time for the Americans to officially resubmit their bid for French aid. More surprisingly, France’s military minds appeared to be just as impressed by reports of Washington’s attack on Howe at Germantown as they were by Gates’s victory. The irony was palpable—while at home Washington endured harsh criticism for his army’s failure, across the Atlantic his stab at Germantown, coming so soon after the defeat at Brandywine, was viewed as a dazzling display of audacity. Despite the mixed outcomes, the news that an American army still in its infancy and consisting of citizen-soldiers had defeated the British on one front and thrown a major scare into them on another nearly 300 miles away was taken as a sign of an ascendant United States. As the French foreign minister wrote to Franklin and Deane, “This, promises everything.”
Washington could well imagine how the news of Saratoga would play in Paris, though he would not learn for months how strongly the Germantown engagement influenced the French. He was, however, certain of one thing—his bedraggled and bedeviled troops were in no condition to conduct a major offensive against Philadelphia. He had personally journeyed to the city’s edge to view the British defenses, and John Laurens, who accompanied the observation party, described them in a letter to his father as “redoubts of a very respectable profit, faced with plank, formidably fraised, and the intervals between them with an abbatis unusually strong.” The French engineer Col. Duportail delicately advised Washington that even a Continental Army doubled in strength would break on the enemy’s ramparts. Young Laurens was equally direct, telling his father that any attack on the city would constitute “madness.”
Convinced that his American forces were far too weak to storm Philadelphia, Washington settled on the next best strategy. As he wrote to his old friend Patrick Henry in Virginia, “Next to being strong, it is best to be thought so by the enemy.” Another defeat, the commander in chief knew, would expose his army’s fragility not only to the British, but also to potential allies across the Atlantic. His troops needed the winter to restore their vigor and morale. Ideally this rehabilitation site would be somewhere inland, far from harm’s way. Yet to suggest such a path would be anathema to the federal and state civil authorities. There had to be another way to make his point. In a brazen act of political jujitsu, he decided to turn the criticisms of his leadership skills to his advantage.
Three days after confiding his fears to Patrick Henry, Washington penned a letter that confronted his doubters head-on. “I am informed that it is matter of amazement, and that reflections have been thrown out against this Army, for not being more active and enterprizing than, in the opinion of some, they ought to have been,” he wrote to the president of Congress, Henry Laurens. He then went on to detail “the best way to account for” these defamations—specifically the scandalous dearth of arms, ammunition, shoes, clothing, blankets, and wages that his soldiers had been promised. Even if these commodities were to somehow miraculously appear, he continued, Gen. Howe’s forces still massively outnumbered his own army. To drive home the point, Lafayette addressed his own letter to Henry Laurens, describing “the quite nacked fellow [soldiers]” warming themselves at his campfire, and proclaimed, “How happy I would be if our army was drest in a comfortable manner.”
The dual complaint prompted a congressional fact-finding committee to journey to Whitemarsh where—as Washington had presumed—the delegates were shocked by the camp’s ragged condition. A third of the Continentals remained without blankets, shoes, and socks, and the congressmen were shamed into unbuckling their own footwear to hand over to freezing soldiers. They also vowed to press their fellow congressmen for an untangling of the army’s supply line upon their return to York. In their official report, however, they could not resist tossing a dart at the commander in chief. The promised reforms, the committee noted, could be accomplished only with a commensurate upturn in the army’s lax discipline. None of this, of course, answered the question regarding a site for a winter camp.
Washington’s official papers during this period are noticeably sparse and betray little of his personal feelings over this tumultuous debate. Moreover, unfortunately for historians, fearing the capture of a personal journal, he had discontinued his diary entries early in the revolution. This leaves to posterity’s conjecture many of his intimate thoughts on events through eight years of war. Happily, in many instances the writings of acolytes such as Laurens, Hamilton, and Lafayette provide guideposts to his innermost reflections. In this instance, one can assume that John Laurens’s views mirrored those of the general he cherished when, in a letter to his father, Henry, in early December, he itemized the reasoning behind the Continental Army’s requirement of “exemption from fatigue in order to compensate for their want of clothing.” The men needed safe, warm quarters, he wrote, in order to discourage desertion, encourage enlistment, and fine-tune the force’s discipline and training. Yet he also recognized the realities of abandoning the local populace to the mercies of the Crown. Without naming a specific location, he then suggested a compromise that “leaves us within distance for taking considerable advantage of the Enemy and covering a valuable and extensive country.”
There were manifold facts to parse in selecting the site. It had to be secure enough to fend off a British attack in force while central enough to afford the citizens throughout the countryside around Philadelphia protection against lesser enemy excursions. It had to lie between the army depots and hospitals at Lancaster, Reading, and York yet still be close enough to the capital city should some as yet unfathomable opportunity for a winter assault present itself. Fresh water would need to be available, as would enough wood to build barracks cabins and keep fires burning. It was a military and political conundrum that Washington was still mulling when, at the urging of Lord Stirling, Gen. Wayne—born in Chester County and thoroughly familiar with the area—came around with the answer.
Wayne joined Lord Stirling in suggesting “hutting” atop the undulating, triangular plateau overlooking the Valley of the Forges. Washington immediately recognized that the site met both civil and military prescriptions. Some 23 miles northwest of Philadelphia, it was close enough for American horsemen and outlying pickets to react to any British “ravages” or “insults.” Yet at a day’s march from the city, it was also far enough from the enemy stronghold to make it virtually immune to surprise attack. In the event of a major British assault, its natural contours—it was bounded by steep falloffs on two sides and the Schuylkill on the third—would provide excellent defensive terrain. It was blessed with an abundant supply of fresh water from both the river and copious creeks and wells. Finally, the thick carpet of virgin hardwood forests on the western rises anchored by the 426-foot Mount Joy and, behind it, the slightly higher Mount Misery, would prove integral for the sustainment of a winter camp’s two vital B’s—burning and building.
Perhaps more important, the site lay on the western rim of the fall campaign’s sundry battlegrounds. The farms, orchards, and mills to the southeast had been virtually picked clean by both armies. But to this point western Chester County had been the scene of relatively little pillaging. While the Schuylkill remained ice-free it would provide a thoroughfare into the Pennsylvania interior for both communications and supplies. And once the river froze, Valley Forge’s road network, though susceptible to washouts, afforded at least two sturdy cobblestoned avenues, both laid down in the 1740s and generally passable for Conestoga wagons delivering provisions from points farther west. Moreover, in a worst-case scenario, the large artery formed by the confluence of the two roads could be used as an escape route that ran some 60 miles west all the way to hilly Lancaster, perfect terrain from which to conduct guerrilla operations.
Unlike Washington’s current encampment at Whitemarsh, Valley Forge was not wilderness. It was farm country, and it would require all the expertise the French engineer Duportail and his subordinates could muster to construct adequate field fortifications. But, overall, it was as stable an anchor from which to run the far-flung business of war as the commander in chief could expect to find. It would do as the bloodied and desperate Continental Army’s home for the next six months.
I. John Hancock, in failing health, resigned from the post he had held since May 1775 on October 31, 1777. The following day the delegates voted near-unanimously to elect Henry Laurens to the post. The only dissenting vote was cast by Laurens himself, a chivalrous action meant to show his uninterest in placing personal promotions over his civic duty.