To the British it was a bold ambush. To George Washington, it was yet another war crime. In the event, there was little doubt that what came to be known as the Battle of Crooked Billet was designed as a harbinger—these were the consequences facing the upstart Continentals who had the temerity to decline the Crown’s generous peace terms.
The engagement was conceived in the waning hours of the final night of April 1778, when Gen. Howe summoned Capt. John Graves Simcoe and Lt. Col. Robert Abercrombie to his headquarters at the Masters-Penn House in Philadelphia to order their light infantry units into the field. Despite his reluctance to initiate a full-scale engagement with Washington’s regulars, Howe was quick to recognize, and to take advantage of, the Pennsylvania militia’s tenuous hold on the townships and farmsteads that lay between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers.
Earlier that day, Loyalist spies had passed along the precise location of the young militia leader Gen. John Lacey’s camp on the border of Bucks County and Montgomery County. Simcoe, whose regiment had been fighting in the area for months, knew the place well. The British-born Simcoe’s green-coated Queen’s American Rangers, as they had been dubbed, were a particularly brutal band of Tories who had earned the description “partisan hunters” for their search-and-destroy missions against civilians thought to be sympathetic to the rebels. They rarely took prisoners. Simcoe’s orders were, in cooperation with Abercrombie’s regulars, “to secure the country and facilitate the inhabitants bringing in their products to market.” If in the process of “securing the country” the Rangers managed to stage a sneak attack on Lacey’s bedraggled force, so much the better.
Over the first months of 1778 reports of British incursions and depredations across southern New Jersey had streamed into Washington’s headquarters. More recently—and more worrisomely—enemy movements into Pennsylvania east of the Schuylkill had also grown more flagrant. Since assuming command from Gen. Armstrong in January, Lacey had been handicapped by—and complained loudly about—a hostile populace and, not coincidentally, a lack of accurate intelligence. The allotment of 1,000 troops promised to him by the Pennsylvania state legislature had never arrived, and by early spring a combination of desertions and decommissions had reduced his strength to little more than 400 men to patrol an area larger than Rhode Island. Of these troops, the majority had arrived in-theater only within the past week. Most were without guns; none had ever seen combat.
By both necessity and their instructions, Lacey and his irregulars were constantly on the move, either seeking (with little success) to intercept farmers hauling goods into Philadelphia or avoiding the more frequent and larger British patrols. Added to their woes were the well-armed gangs of Loyalist vigilantes that had lately sprung up in imitation of the Doan Gang. These mounted cohorts lived off the plunder looted from Whig-owned farms and mills, and had given themselves semiofficial-sounding names such as the Independent Dragoons and the Pennsylvania Volunteers. So undermanned and ill-equipped was Lacey’s company that it could not even interdict a committee of Quakers openly traveling to Philadelphia earlier that month for their annual meeting under the protection of these armed guards.
On the night of April 30, Lacey had made camp along Pennypack Creek near the Crooked Billet Tavern, about midway between Valley Forge and Trenton and just over 20 miles from Philadelphia. He ordered pickets to patrol the surrounding roads, but the officer in charge of the sentries fell asleep before assigning the manpower.I Simcoe’s Rangers and Abercrombie’s Redcoats, totaling some 850 men, encountered no resistance as they crept to the edge of the encampment in a pincer formation. As dawn broke on May 1, they attacked.
Surrounded and outnumbered, the groggy Americans took heavy casualties as they stumbled out of their tents into sheets of musket fire. Lacey at last managed to mount his horse and whip into place a tenuous battle line that repelled a subsequent bayonet charge. Then, while the British regrouped, he led a small company of troops into a nearby brake of wood. Employing the thick copse of oak and chestnut to defensive advantage, he and his surviving militiamen repulsed a cavalry charge from Abercrombie’s dragoons before engaging in a running, four-mile firefight. Then, inexplicably, the British broke off the engagement despite having suffered only seven men wounded and two horses killed. When Lacey and his little company returned to the original battleground they understood why. While they had been fending off Abercrombie, Simcoe’s Rangers had turned their campground into a charnel house. Nearly half of Lacey’s command had been wiped out, with civilian witnesses reporting that surrendering Continentals were run through with bayonets and cutlasses while the American wounded were heaved onto pyres of buckwheat straw and burned alive.
The atrocity at Crooked Billet in effect rendered moot the entire Continental presence in Pennsylvania east of the Schuylkill. Many of the militiamen who had managed to flee the slaughter never returned to duty. Even as his company commanders took roll call in the blood-soaked fields, Lacey recognized that those who remained were now too psychologically damaged to constitute a professional force. As Simcoe himself noted in his journal, the savagery of the massacre “had its full effect of intimidating the militia, as they never afterward appeared but in small parties and like robbers.” It was with a bittersweet melancholy that Washington would within the week relieve Gen. Lacey of command. He told Lacey that he recognized that he had done his best with the “fatiguing” task he had been assigned, “considering the smallness of your numbers and the constant motion which you have consequently obliged to be in.” He also understood that the inexperienced Lacey through no fault of his own was in over his head, a quandary all too common in every state’s militia.
For Washington, the similarities between the Battle of Paoli and the Battle of Crooked Billet were palpable—with one striking difference. In the wake of the debacle at Paoli eight months earlier, the American commander in chief had been left to ponder, yet again, the futility of asking amateur citizen-soldiers to stand and fight against trained professionals. Then, with a weakened army and no hope for reinforcements, he had been left to merely watch from across the Schuylkill as Gen. Howe moved on Philadelphia. Now, however, some 24 hours before the news from Crooked Billet had even reached Valley Forge, a breathless courier had arrived at the Potts House with a message that would break over the winter encampment like a mustering thunderclap. France had entered the war.
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Rumors that Louis XVI would formally recognize the United States had been circulating in America since at least the previous November. In the middle of that month Washington had even dropped an apocryphal hint in the last paragraph of a long letter to his stepson Jacky Parke Custis: “War expected every moment between France & Britain.” Over the interim similar unfounded reports had abounded, with at least two Whig newspapers publishing stories asserting that France and Spain had agreed to aid “the Independence of the American States.” But it was not until April 13 that the wishful fantasy became fact when Simeon Deane, Silas’s older brother, disembarked from the fast French frigate Sensible at the docks of what is now Portland, Maine. He carried with him copies of the Treaties of Alliance.
As Simeon Deane made his way to York, he paused at his home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to entrust a friend to convey the news to Valley Forge. The courtesy call to Washington had been the idea of his brother, who was preparing to relinquish his Parisian diplomatic assignment to John Adams later in the year. The commander in chief received Simeon Deane’s letter on the evening of April 30, the same night that Howe, Simcoe, and Abercrombie were plotting to assail John Lacey’s little company. Though exultant at the “glorious News” certain to set “all Europe into a flame,” Washington thought it prudent to refrain from disclosing the pact, except to a few close members of his staff, until an official announcement from Congress.
When he shared the news with John Laurens, the young aide reacted with his typical brio, calling the alliance “the most humiliating stroke that the national pride of Britain ever suffered.” On a more personal level, Laurens also fretted that “France might give a mortal blow to the English” before he had an opportunity to achieve battlefield glory. Lafayette, on the other hand, was so overcome by his nation’s beau geste that he flung open the door to Washington’s study without knocking, smothered the aloof general in a bear hug, kissed him on both cheeks, and burst into tears. The young marquis’s emotion was understandable. The same courier who had delivered the announcement from Simeon Deane also carried a letter from Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne, informing him that their 22-month-old daughter Henriette had died of pneumonia.
The following morning, Washington’s communiqué to the delegates in York betrayed no small sense of relief. “With infinite pleasure I beg leave to congratulate Congress on the very important and interesting advices brought by the frigate Sensible,” he wrote to Henry Laurens. “I believe no event was ever received with more heartfelt joy.” And though he still kept the news hidden from his troops, his General Orders for May 1 instructing the camp’s chaplains to perform special services the next day at 11 a.m., with compulsory attendance of officers of all ranks, hinted that something momentous was afoot.
The whispers grew louder when word spread through camp that Steuben had been summoned to the Potts House and instructed to prepare the army for a “Grand Review.” Deciphering the extra jaunt to Steuben’s step, the jubilant Continentals erected maypoles decorated with spring flowers before each regimental headquarters hut and rushed back from their drills to congregate in the brigade lanes to toast each other with free-flowing spirits purchased from the suddenly pro-republican sutlers’ stocks. It was always the civilians who were the first to sense a change in the wind.
At the same time in York, Henry Laurens was summoning the delegates to a special Saturday session at which the treaties were read aloud. The following days were a blur of giddy festivity. After attending a thanksgiving service on Sunday, the South Carolina congressman William Henry Drayton hurriedly dictated and had printed 100 copies of a broadsheet hailing the alliance. These were for distribution in and around Valley Forge. On Monday, May 4, the delegates unanimously ratified the treaties and sent couriers galloping off in all directions to announce the triumphant news. That evening, upon learning of the vote in York, Washington journeyed from the Potts House to dine at the artillery park with Henry Knox and his senior officers.
Although Drayton’s official notices had yet to reach the encampment, Washington confided to Knox that the following morning’s General Orders would contain the announcement along with his grand good thanks “to the Almighty ruler of the Universe [for] raising us up a powerful friend among the princes of the earth, to establish our liberty and independence upon a lasting foundation.” As Washington was returning to his headquarters he noticed a group of Knox’s young cannoneers gathered in the gloaming for a raucous game of wickets, an Americanized form of cricket. The commander in chief dismounted, and much to the artillerymen’s amazement, deigned to take several swings with the bat. Perhaps he felt that his prayers in that snowy glade had indeed been answered.
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It had been a celebratory French tradition since the fourteenth century, when the Mongols and their Chinese mercenaries introduced gunpowder to Europe. Now it was crossing the Atlantic. George Washington eagerly seized upon Lafayette’s suggestion of the feu de joie, or “fire of joy,” as a most apt tribute to commemorate the official notice of France’s alliance with the United States. At just past nine on the morning of May 6 a booming cannon report summoned all troops to the parade ground in the center of camp. There the Treaties of Alliance were read aloud before Steuben and his subinspectors marched the entire Continental Army, brigade by brigade, to the middle of the drilling fields. Steuben had spent the preceding days literally diagramming the movements of each brigade, regiment, company, and platoon, and now, their thousands of flintlocks polished to a gleam, the troops were arranged into two long, parallel columns by the generals de Kalb, Lafayette, and Lord Stirling.
Washington, astride his white Arabian and surrounded by mounted aides, watched from beneath an arbor erected atop a small hillock as each of the three spectacular discharges from the 13 assembled field pieces was followed, at Steuben’s signal, by a cascade of musket fire that roared sequentially down the forward battle line from right to left and then up the rear line from left to right. The rapid symphony of fire and smoke was accompanied by full-throated huzzahs from nearly 10,000 men.
“Long live the King of France.”
The cannons boomed again as the entire procedure was repeated.
“And long live the friendly European powers.”II
And, finally, a third demonstration.
As the Continentals grounded their weapons, wheeled, and re-formed into their regiments, the consequences of Steuben’s six weeks of drilling and training were more than evident. “The admirable rapidity and precision,” young Laurens told his father, had been “executed to perfection. Through it all,” he added, Washington “wore a countenance of uncommon delight.” Though many of the soldiers remained half-clad, and not a few were still shoeless, these troops resembled nothing so much as an army.
If, as Washington had always believed, survival was the father of success, then here before him was made manifest the projection of his own steely reserve. Whatever the depths of his personal despondency over the previous months, he had never failed to maintain a facade of serene determination that had in turn inspired the men under his command to persevere. Before him on the Valley Forge parade grounds were the fruits of his labor. When the soldiers were dismissed their commander in chief ordered a gill of rum ladled into every man’s canteen.
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The “Grand Review” was followed by an outdoor reception in the center of the artillery park attended by the army’s entire officer corps and their wives, including Martha Washington. Long plank tables arranged beneath a bower of tent marquees groaned under the weight of a profusion of meats and cheeses requisitioned by Quartermaster Greene, and enough barrels of wine and spirits were tapped to slake the thirst of 1,500 men.
Before the festivities began, Washington summoned Steuben to his side and asked for a moment of quiet. A week earlier he had surreptitiously written to Henry Laurens “with regards to the merits of the baron de Steuben” and importuned Congress to appoint the Prussian to the post of inspector general. Now he announced to thunderous cheers that earlier that morning a courier from York had arrived with news that the delegates had acceded to the request. Steuben was now officially a major general in the Continental Army. Steuben, smothered in bear hugs, seemed to swell with pride at his elevation—and not least at the prospect of the salary that accompanied the rank. He did his best to hide his greatest trepidation. For like John Laurens, he was conflicted over the idea of France stealing his glory, and brooded to Henry Laurens “that I may not, perhaps, have the opportunity of drawing my sword in your cause.”
In reply the elder Laurens, having spent time in London and being better acquainted with the British character, assured the Prussian, “It is my opinion that we are not to roll down a green bank and toy away the ensuing summer. There is blood, much blood in our prospect.”
Meanwhile, as his subordinates clanked tin cups and drank in their newfound circumstances, Washington retired early. When he and his guard cantered to the top of a rise overlooking the artillery park, the commander in chief wheeled his horse, waved his hat, and shouted one final “Huzzah” to the officers whose spirit and morale he had kept buoyant through looming crisis after crisis. It was a telling gesture from the sober Virginian, as it masked a sense of gnawing doubt. The cold pragmatist in Washington was already looking ahead to the potential ramifications of Louis’s XVI’s profoundly consequential decision.
The man who only two days earlier had lost himself if only for a moment in the revelry of a game of wickets now worried that an infectious overconfidence “shall relapse [us] into a state of supineness and perfect security.” He well knew that despite the professional precision his soldiers had demonstrated during the feu de joie, it would take more than Steuben’s histrionic oaths to transfer that discipline from the parade ground to the battleground. This was particularly salient now that France would be watching with a much more critical eye. Moreover, what of the British? Rumors were already circulating that Gen. Clinton planned to quit Philadelphia for New York. But Washington had to consider that the engagement at Crooked Billet might have been not just an isolated incident but the opening foray of an all-out assault on Valley Forge. He could not put it past the bellicose Clinton to attempt to foreclose the conflict before French reinforcements even reached American shores. It was the savvy strategy; it was what he himself would do.
That night Washington ordered Dan Morgan’s riflemen to supplement the pickets patrolling the camp’s perimeter.
I. That officer, Lt. William Nielson, was subsequently court-martialed and cashiered from the army.
II. This in honor of Spain and Prussia, which most expected to join the fight.