Given the ravages of winter quarters, it might have been easy for many soldiers to forget that there was still a war on. Washington could not. Though the weather restricted both antagonists’ movements in New England, upstate New York, and even New York City, he was constantly apprised of Continental defensive designs from Savannah to Richmond. He considered Charleston, South Carolina, especially its key harbor, particularly vulnerable to a siege. His daily conversations with the Palmetto State’s John Laurens may have heightened his awareness of that front, and messengers from Valley Forge riding south with warnings and instructions were a common sight.
Closer to home, he continued to dispatch daily patrols to police the roads leading into and out of Philadelphia. Their primary purpose, as always, was to enforce the ban on commerce with the enemy and to gather intelligence, particularly concerning any British excursions out into the counties neighboring the city. Washington encouraged his field commanders to harass these British patrols whenever feasible, and his campaign of bedevilment even included an attempt to disrupt the enemy’s supply deliveries by floating mines down the Delaware to blast the provision ships in Philadelphia’s harbor.
The idea was the brainchild of the inventor David Bushnell, a thin, stern-faced Connecticut Yankee with a knack for gadgetry. Bushnell was the oldest of five children in a farming family; after his parents died, he sold his share of the homestead to his brother and enrolled at Yale University at the relatively mature age of 31. There he studied the natural sciences, which led to his successful detonation of several waterproof kegs packed with gunpowder beneath the surface of the Connecticut River. With the help of two New Haven clock makers, and his own precision, Bushnell managed to concoct a crude timing device attached to a musket’s gunlock to explode his “torpedoes,” as he named them. Four years later the gun smoke had barely cleared from the fields of Lexington and Concord when he offered his unique services to the Continental Army.
Benjamin Franklin, another famous tinkerer, was the first to advise Washington of Bushnell’s peculiar talents. The commander in chief immediately sensed the potential of these underwater time bombs as a weapon against the mighty Royal Navy. But the question hung—how to deliver them with accuracy? Bushnell’s answer: the world’s first documented use of a submarine in warfare. With his experiments, Bushnell was following in the tradition of a group of visionaries and scalawags who had attempted to pioneer the science of underwater machinery.
The Dutch-born Cornelis Drebbel is often credited with creating the world’s first submarine. In 1605, Drebbel journeyed to London, where he persuaded King James I to underwrite the construction of a submersible boat propelled by oars fitted into leather joints to make the rowlocks watertight. Drebbel claimed to have conducted a maiden voyage beneath the Thames—but there were in fact no first-person accounts other than his own. Still, even if the Drebbel submarine “was simply an elaborate hoax perpetrated on a guileless king by an ambitious mountebank,” it helped spark genuine innovation by a series of inventors. The most prominent of these was Edmond Halley, the British royal astronomer for whom the comet is named. A century after Cornelis Drebbel’s invisible feat, Halley attached a string of lead weights to a primitive diving bell, procured a volunteer, and sank the contraption into a lake. When its operator detached the weights after a few minutes, the trapped oxygen floated it back to the surface with its occupant unharmed. Now, decades later, it was left to the American David Bushnell to design a craft that could both travel underwater and sustain its driver for more than a few moments of breathing time.
Bushnell constructed the frame of his one-man submersible by joining two tortoise-shell-shaped oaken slabs in an upright position. A windowed conning tower large enough for a man’s head was affixed to the top of the craft between two snorkels that automatically closed upon submersion. The watertight gaskets were then slathered with tar before the entire contraption was bound with wrought iron staves. Bushnell once again turned to his clock makers for assistance with the ship’s mechanics. They helped him devise a valve-controlled bay that could fill with or flush seawater in order to control the ship’s depth, a form of ballast still employed today. Two screw propellers—one to maintain propulsion and one projecting upward to assist in ascents—were operated by foot pedals and hand cranks.
Because its tiny compartment held so little air, the vessel Bushnell dubbed the Turtle could remain submerged for only a few minutes. This perforce limited its use to night operations. The ingenious Bushnell solved the problem of operating the machinery in the murky depths by coating his instrument panel and compass needles with bioluminescent fox fire, a species of fungus found in decaying wood that glows in the dark. With more ballast attached to its hull to keep the vessel upright, the Turtle—which actually more resembled a walnut—was deemed fit for operation in the fall of 1776. Its first target was none other than Adm. Howe’s 64-gun flagship of the line HMS Eagle, at the time engaged in the blockade of New York Harbor.
The Turtle was transported overland to the Hudson River and fitted with a torpedo two and a half feet long packing 150 pounds of gunpowder. Late at night on September 6, Continental whaleboats towed the contraption along the surface in New York Harbor to just outside the range of the Eagle’s cannons. During trials on the Connecticut River and in Long Island Sound, the Turtle’s volunteer pilot, Sgt. Ezra Lee of Connecticut’s 10th Infantry Regiment, had been trained to submerge the vessel when he approached an enemy ship. He would then bore a hole in its hull with a large screw controlled by the hand cranks, guide the torpedo into the opening, and set the explosive’s timer. Like so many of the Continentals’ best-laid military plans, the Turtle’s initial mission fell apart almost immediately. Bushnell and his fellow planners had failed to take into account the Hudson River’s strong currents.
After Sgt. Lee was cut loose from the whaleboats that night it took him over three hours of furious pedaling to reach the Eagle, by which time the sun was already peeking over the eastern horizon. In addition, the Americans were unaware that copper plating had only recently been laid over the Eagle’s hull to protect against shipworms. Whether the Turtle’s screw failed to penetrate this metal sheathing or was thwarted by the thick iron plate attached to the Eagle’s rudder hinge is immaterial. Lee, running out of air, exhausted, and possibly suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning, abandoned the scene. As he made for the New Jersey riverbank in broad daylight he was spotted by enemy sentries on Governors Island, who launched an oared guard boat in pursuit of the floating globe. Lee managed to frighten them off by detonating his torpedo. But with the element of surprise eliminated, the Turtle’s future effectiveness was compromised. Although the British maintained that no such thing as a submarine had attacked them, they subsequently intensified their lookout for any bizarre little boats toting what they referred to as exploding “infernals.”
Within the month Bushnell tried again. Sailing this time with the tide, Sgt. Lee pedaled the Turtle toward a British frigate anchored off Manhattan. But he was spotted by the ship’s night watch and forced to retreat under a salvo of flintlock fire. A few days later the Turtle’s tender vessel, with the submarine on it, was sunk by enemy cannon fire off New Jersey’s Fort Lee. The Turtle may have been gone; Bushnell’s tenacity remained. In early January 1778 he journeyed to Valley Forge and approached Washington with a plan to prepare a fresh batch of torpedoes and float them down the Delaware toward Philadelphia’s harbor. There would be no need for timing devices, as the triggers on the bombs were set to detonate on contact with the hull of a ship. The city’s moorings were then so crowded with enemy vessels that Bushnell and Washington hoped the torpedoes might ignite a wharf fire which would engulf Adm. Howe’s entire fleet.
The sun had only just risen on January 5 when two boys walking along the Delaware’s riverbank north of Philadelphia spotted one of the first powder-packed kegs approaching on the ebb tide. Thinking the flotsam might contain something valuable, they secured a small boat to investigate. When they gaffed the object, the “infernal” blew them and their craft to pieces. The explosion alerted lookouts who had been posted near the harbor to warn of floating ice chunks. Within moments panicked British sailors manning berthed warships unleashed a broadside of cannon fire at the remaining torpedoes while half-dressed soldiers rushed to the riverbank to pour shot into the water. The barrage lasted for hours, long after it had destroyed the floating bombs before they could do any physical damage. The psychological bruise to the British, however, was captured smartly by the New Jersey congressman and author Francis Hopkinson, whose subsequent 15-stanza poem, “The Battle of the Kegs,” lampooned the enemy’s hysterical reaction to what they thought was an amphibious invasion. Hopkinson’s mocking parody, with specific references to Gen. Howe leaping from the bed of his mistress to don his battle attire, was published in newspapers from Massachusetts to Georgia, and became a staple recited around Valley Forge campfires.
Bushnell went on to develop other types of waterborne mines that could be delivered without his submarine, and Continental forces successfully deployed several of his prototypes along the Delaware and in New London Harbor. Years later Washington hailed his pet inventor as “a man of Great Mechanical Powers, fertile of invention and master in execution.” Yet he also admitted that Bushnell “labored for some time ineffectually, and though the advocates for his scheme continued sanguine, he never did succeed.” That the commander in chief of the Continental Army deigned to embrace David Bushnell’s eccentric enterprises reflected Washington’s desperation as well as his tendency to try anything that might addle the enemy’s superior force. As for Bushnell, though he was often referred to as the “father of submarine warfare,” his name—once as celebrated as Fulton’s and Whitney’s—has since faded into the mists of time.
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The floating time bomb having come to naught but embarrassment to the British, by mid-January 1778 Washington had returned his attention to his increasingly bifurcated land operations. Since arriving at Valley Forge he had in effect split his winter command, using the Schuylkill as the dividing line. To the east of the river, the vast tract that stretched nearly 50 miles to New Jersey remained the nominal responsibility of the Pennsylvania militia, now under the temporary leadership of 23-year-old Gen. John Lacey. Lacey had been appointed after Gen. Armstrong, citing ill health, withdrew on temporary leave to his home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Like his predecessor, Lacey never came close to commanding the 1,000 troops the state had promised. His ranks were further thinned when scores of Pennsylvania men of fighting age subject to the compulsory militia laws simply refused to report for duty. So undermanned were Lacey’s regiments that American spies in Philadelphia reported the city’s markets suddenly awash with goods trundled in by the “country folk” predominantly from Montgomery County and Bucks County north of the city. One alarmed informant reported that there were enough flour sacks pouring into the city to keep 10,000 Redcoats in bread each day. The Continental blockade was further hamstrung by armed Tories banding together to escort caravans of overstuffed supply wagons and herds of cattle into the city, literally daring Lacey’s militiamen to stop them.
In response, a clearly exasperated Washington turned to desperate measures. He wrote to one militia commander, “With respect to your future treatment of the Tories, the most effectual way of putting a stop to their traitorous practices, will be shooting some of the more notorious offenders wherever they can be found in flagrante delicto.” He also toyed briefly with the idea of depopulating the problematic Montgomery and Bucks counties by forcing their inhabitants to pack up and move a minimum of 15 miles farther north from Philadelphia. Inevitably recognizing the impracticability of such a scheme, he instead dispatched a company of Continental regulars across the Schuylkill to anchor Gen. Lacey’s right wing, and ordered Casimir Pulaski’s already overburdened and undernourished cavalry to recross the Delaware from New Jersey whenever they could to buttress the Pennsylvanians’ left flank.
Pulaski’s light dragoons had encountered a chilly reception in Trenton, whose pastures and infrastructure were still recovering from the ravages of both the Hessians’ occupation and the previous Christmas’s fighting. The fact that Pulaski’s unit arrived with a reputation as horse thieves did not ease tensions. Only weeks earlier Washington had been forced to reprimand Pulaski for his liberal interpretation of his instructions to confiscate horses from Loyalists only. Moreover, New Jersey’s capital city, consisting of barely 600 structures, was already garrisoning several hundred American sailors who had participated in the defense of Fort Mercer and Fort Mifflin. Its sullen citizenry was loath to welcome more mouths, human or equine, to feed and shelter. For his part, the Polish count repeatedly complained to Washington that the Navy’s “galley men” had so stretched the township’s limits that he had difficulty finding beds for his troops, much less stalls for his animals. As the days passed, Pulaski’s increasingly shrill communiqués arrived at the Potts House as regularly as the Angelus—which is to say as often as petitions from Trenton’s civil magistrates imploring the commander in chief to find another winter billet for either the sailors or the cavalrymen, if not both.
Washington trod delicately around the two squabbling factions. As much as he relied on a healthy and rested cavalry corps for his spring campaign, he could ill afford to alienate the New Jerseyans. After he abandoned his plans for a Christmas attack on Philadelphia, his strategy was more focused on the long view of the war. Accordingly, he suspected that when fighting resumed it would center on New York rather than Philadelphia. This meant that key battles were likely to take place throughout New Jersey. To that end Washington had cultivated a cordial relationship with the state’s governor William Livingston, who was also the commander of the New Jersey militia—precisely the musket men whom he expected to play a prominent role in future engagements. Now, Livingston had taken up the cause of Trenton’s grumbling town fathers. Placating Pulaski was not worth the risk of compromising the goodwill he had built up with Livingston. Pulaski was in essence left to his own foraging devices as long as he hatched no more “plundering schemes.”
Pulaski, finding the area too fallow to support his dragoons, ultimately split his four companies between the New Jersey towns of Flemington and Pennington to Trenton’s northwest. The count himself, when not attempting to fulfill his orders to patrol Bucks County, remained in Trenton with a small coterie of horsemen whose mounts were quartered in hay fields miles from town. These arrangements inevitably rendered the concept of quick strikes against Pennsylvania’s Tory smugglers rather negligible.
Meanwhile, the mutual distrust that arose between Lacey’s state militiamen and the army regulars sent to reinforce them took on the trappings of a cold war within the hot war. If the New Jersey irregulars in and around Trenton grudgingly accepted the presence of the American sailors and Pulaski’s horsemen, the Pennsylvanians flaunted their outright hostility toward the Continentals. They accused the regulars of taking bribes to allow supply wagons to pass into Philadelphia, and of the more heinous crime of confiscating supplies from patriotic farmers and selling them to city-bound Loyalists. Regular-army officers answered these accusations by painting the militiamen as too frightened to stop and fight the gun-toting civilians, particularly the Doan Gang.
Struggling to maintain some shred of equanimity, Washington reacted as best he could to the charges and countercharges, sending a fact-finding mission across the river to report back on the situation. But a string of outraged General Orders evidenced his frustration—“It is with inexpressible grief and indignation that the General has received information of the cruel outrages and robberies lately committed by soldiers, on the other side of the Schuylkill: Were we in an enemy’s country such practices would be unwarrantable; but committed against our friends are in the highest degree base, cruel and injurious to the cause in which we are engaged,” read one.
In the end, his investigators found some merit in both arguments. A few Continentals suspected of selling travel passes were reprimanded and transferred back to Valley Forge. At the same time, Washington urged Gen. Lacey to step up his efforts against the armed supply caravans. But for the most part, the commander in chief’s hands were tied, and any joint embargo effort on the part of these two groups was a pipe dream. Even if he could have afforded to buttress the patrols east of the Schuylkill with more of his regulars—which, given his finite resources, he could not—it had long been decided in York and Lancaster that the territory in question was under the nominal military purview of the state of Pennsylvania. Picking another fight with the state’s civil authorities was pointless, particularly since a congressional delegation was soon due in camp. The agreement to bottle up the British in Philadelphia had been a joint pact between the army and Pennsylvania’s statesmen, after all, and if they were overly worried in Lancaster about the ample amount of provisions reaching Gen. Howe’s troops, it was their responsibility to strengthen their own force to halt it.
By late January the enmity between the militia and the regulars had so calcified that the American efforts on that side of the river were more sieve than blockade. As more marketers flooded the roads into the city, the price of food in Philadelphia actually began to fall. Allowing the bad blood to persist between the state militiamen and his regulars—and allowing the British to get fat off the intramural rift—was about the best of Washington’s several terrible options. Until, that is, he could make his case to the delegation from York. At least the situation on the west bank of the Schuylkill was more manageable.
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Washington considered the area just below and to the west of Valley Forge the most vulnerable to a British probe, and thus the more dangerous defensive assignment. In addition to the trenches and redoubts excavated beyond the 400 “outer line” cabins facing Philadelphia, another mile-long slit trench pocked with rifle pits had been dug as a fallback position on the western edge of the camp near the base of the double-humped Mount Joy. This trough roughly followed the contours of the base of the mountain, atop which the Continentals had erected a 38-foot observation tower with sweeping views down the Schuylkill Valley. The tower was staffed day and night by lookouts supplied with spyglasses and signal flags. In addition, there were some 800 to 1,000 pickets constantly patrolling the territory to the southeast between Valley Forge and Philadelphia.
Given the wretchedness of camp life, it was considered something of a plum detail to be detached for anything that smacked of real soldiering. To that end the task of proscribing smugglers west of the Schuylkill as well as guarding against any British raids fell primarily to Dan Morgan and his rifle corps, the Continental Army’s most effective guerrilla fighters. Morgan’s men were bolstered by a small corps of mounted dragoons under the command of his fellow Virginian, 21-year-old Captain Henry Lee III. The dashing Lee, nicknamed “Light Horse Harry,” was a scion of one of Virginia’s first families and considered one of the finest horsemen in the state. He had graduated from the College of New Jersey four years earlier with a degree in Latin and the intent of pursuing a legal career. The war changed that, and upon volunteering his services he was commissioned a captain.
The Lees had known the Washingtons since Mount Vernon, and Capt. Lee had in fact declined the commander in chief’s invitation to join his staff as an aide-de-camp. He was flattered by the offer, he wrote, and thanked Washington for the opportunity, “certainly the first recommendation I can bear to posterity.”I But he remained, as he put it, “wedded to my sword,” and preferred to continue in the field. His gracious decline of the post was in keeping with his outsize reputation for professional and personal concern for his riders.
Chester County had a population of some 30,000 at the time, with Quakers making up a sizable portion, and the county’s lower reaches were known to be dominated by an increasingly Tory-inclined populace. In addition to maintaining security and disrupting trade with the enemy, Lee’s assignment on the western periphery of Valley Forge was also to broaden the army’s network of spies and informants. It was hazardous duty. Any Whigs thought to have contact with the Continentals, or even a favorable impression of their cause, faced harassment and, in some cases, British-condoned kidnapping. Moreover, Gen. Howe had offered a bounty of 40 to 60 “hard dollars” for every captured American officer, and the risk of encountering Loyalist informers made it too chancy for Lee’s limited detachments to linger in any one vicinity for more than 24 hours.
Despite the risk, not only did Capt. Lee become Washington’s unofficial geographer in the area—scouting the countryside and recommending the most favorable junctions to place pickets and erect guard posts—but he and his 25 or so horsemen interacted with the local population perhaps more than any other American troopers. As the historian Wayne Bodle observes, Lee’s “rapport with the common soldiers seemed to extend to the class of common citizens from which they were drawn.” This sympathy led Lee to keep meticulous payment records for farmers under his jurisdiction who supplied him with food and shelter as well as offer them protection from both British and Continental foraging parties.
As it happened, the mutual bonds of trust Lee cultivated with these local patriots led to one of the most exciting sidebars of the war. On the night of January 19, one of Lee’s constituents allowed him and his small escort of seven riders to bunk in his farmhouse. The Americans were awakened at daybreak by the sound of Redcoats attempting to batter down the farmer’s oaken front door. Lee, rushing to a window, counted a sizable British patrol consisting of some 130 mounted dragoons surrounding the property. Only later would he discover that the company was commanded by the despised Banastre Tarleton. The farmhouse had more windows than Lee had men, but he positioned his Virginians so expertly that the British were soon retreating under what Lee drolly described as a “very warm” cascade of musket balls. Tarleton then threatened to burn Lee and his men out. This was met with jeers, hoots, and taunts reminding the British colonel that the structure was made of stone.
In an attempt to salvage his advantage, if not his dignity, Tarleton finally ordered his troops to seize the Americans’ horses. But as the Redcoats approached the adjacent stable they were intercepted by Lee and his reckless squad, who rushed from the farmstead with their carbines blazing. The enemy turned tail and fled down the road toward Philadelphia. Lee and his men saddled quickly and, joined by a small company of Morgan’s foot soldiers drawn to the sound of the gunfire, gave chase. The British riders rapidly outdistanced the Continentals afoot. With three of his horsemen bleeding from minor wounds, Lee opted for discretion over valor and called off the pursuit. A minor engagement soon forgotten. Or so he thought.
From a military perspective, the tactical significance of Lee’s skirmish was close to nil. Two of the British dragoons had been killed, with Lee counting another four, including Tarleton, wounded. But the spreading tales of the outnumbered company’s derring-do sent a vicarious shiver through the Valley Forge campsite. John Laurens was naturally agog, lauding the audacity “of the officers and men who had the honor of forcing such an incomparable superiority of numbers to a shameful retreat.” And a 19-year-old New Jersey captain named William Gifford, writing to his best friend in the state’s militia, encapsulated the mythology born that morning by describing how Lee’s “superior bravery . . . and vigilance baffled the [British] designs . . . Obligat[ing] them to disgracefully retreat after Repeated & fruitless attempts.” Washington personally congratulated Lee on his gallantry, and included in his General Orders for January 20 “his warmest thanks to Captn Lee & Officers & men . . . which by their superior Bravery . . . baffled the Enemy’s designs.”
Within days Lee’s exploits at the farmhouse had become the stuff of legend, a fable masked by reality. One of the reasons Lee found himself bushwhacked with such an underwhelming force was that no American commander at Valley Forge, regardless of the value of his assignment, could muster much in the way of manpower or, in Lee’s case, horsepower. As noted, two days before Christmas, Washington had reported to Congress that between one quarter and one third of his force—nearly 3,000 troopers—did not possess the clothing to render them fit for duty. Now, a month later, that number had risen by another 1,000. It was only natural for men living amid such misery to direct their anger toward local and state legislators who had sent them off to war and now seemingly abandoned them.
General Poor, for instance, having apparently given up on receiving redress from his governor, wrote to the New Hampshire state assembly about being barely able to tolerate the shame of having to inspect his troops each morning while listening to their “lamentable tales of distresses” that were beyond his power to alleviate. His starving and half-naked soldiers, Poor wrote, were solely dependent “on the cold hand of meek-eyed charity alone.” As with the implied menace in Washington’s “disperse” letter, Poor intimated that unless the situation was rapidly remedied, he did not know how much longer he could hold his troops in the field. Similarly, a lieutenant colonel with Massachusetts’s 12th Regiment described to his state’s executive council the appalling sight of assembling his company each morning in the snow and slushy mud. Some 90 of his soldiers, he wrote, “have not a Shoee to their foot and near as many who have no feet to their Stockings.”
At least the young New Jersey officer so aroused by Light Horse Harry Lee’s gallantry was willing to give the civil authorities back home the benefit of the doubt. In the same letter to his friend, Capt. Gifford wrote that he could not believe his state representatives were venal; they were merely ignorant of the hardship facing him and fellow New Jerseyans. “If they had any idea,” he wrote, “they certainly wou’d do more for us.” After fighting through the fall campaigns, Gifford and his companions had expected to be assigned a winter bivouac closer to home. They were, after all, less than 50 miles from the New Jersey border. Instead, they found themselves “very bare for clothes” atop a snow-swept plateau in southeast Pennsylvania, forced to shelter in what he called dilapidated Indian “wigwams.”
Gifford’s charity toward his state’s civil authorities was the exception. The 26-year-old Massachusetts lieutenant colonel John Brooks spoke for most when he concluded that if in fact the “bare footed, bare leg’d, bare breech’d” condition of his troops was merely a lack of foresight, “then the Lord pity us.” But, invoking the principle res ipsa loquitur, he added that if their plight was brought about “thro’ negligence or Design, is there not some chosen curse reserv’d for those who are the cause of so much Misery?”II
The groundswell of grievances from the enlisted ranks did not go unnoticed by the officers they held responsible for their plight. Food purchasing agents rarely set foot within the confines of the Valley Forge encampment after a commissary officer was killed by a mob of hungry soldiers. And representatives from the clothier general’s department attached to the army so feared physical retribution that they staked winter quarters some five miles northwest of the camp. The Continental Army’s paymaster in York, aware of his unwelcome presence at the cantonment, quite simply wrote to Washington that there was no sense in his visiting until Congress somehow managed to raise enough money to actually pay the soldiers.
Washington was left to cope with this myriad of colliding catastrophes while still concentrating on his overarching strategy of keeping his army a disciplined, confident, and competent force. Yet there was one hurdle he was never able to clear. For if there was a common and overriding enemy aside from the British, aside from the Tories, and aside from the bickering lawmakers upon whom the American troops longed to loose their wrath, it was the members of the numerous pacifist religious sects who populated much of southeastern Pennsylvania. Many a Continental soldier went to his grave hating the Quakers.
I. Little did Lee know that “the first recommendation I can bear to posterity” would in fact be to father a son he named Robert Edward, who married the daughter of George Washington’s adopted step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis and, on April 9, 1865, surrendered his sword to Ulysses S. Grant in the town of Appomattox Court House.
II. Brooks would later practice what he preached when, as commander of his state’s militia in 1787, he made sure that his soldiers were well-clothed, well-armed, and well-fed when he ordered them into the field to put down Shays’ Rebellion.