The sun had barely crested the eastern horizon when Gen. William Maxwell’s chestnut mare loped across the temporary bridge spanning the Schuylkill. Maxwell reined to the side of the trail on the river’s eastern bank and watched as four regiments of New Jersey regulars, some 1,200 men, crossed behind him. Soon they had disappeared into the demilitarized zone that arced all the way to Trenton. It was May 7, the day after the Grand Review, and Maxwell’s orders were succinct—to succeed where John Lacey’s militia had failed. Maxwell was to rendezvous with what was left of the militiamen, now under the command of Gen. James Potter, incorporate them into his force, and take the fight to the enemy. George Washington was tired of running.
Washington liked and trusted the Irish-born Maxwell. The two had served together as junior officers during the Braddock campaign in the French and Indian War, and at 45 the general remained as hardy as a Connemara pony. Maxwell’s hollow cheeks and rose-red nose studded with gin blossoms were a testament to his reputation as a man who drank as hard as he fought. Yet Washington had enough faith in his old companion to place him at the head of a select regiment of hit-and-run shock troops during the fights at Trenton and Brandywine. A week before the latter, Maxwell had led his light infantry deep into enemy-held territory to form an advance skirmish line along a height named Iron Hill. There his undermanned infantry had held off an early British advance until the Continentals “had shot themselves out of ammunition” and were forced to retreat. His present task was equally unenviable.
On the very morning that Maxwell and his troops forded the Schuylkill, news reached Valley Forge that a battalion of British infantry had sailed up the Delaware and disembarked on the New Jersey side of the river at Bordentown, just below the Trenton Falls. They had encountered no resistance, and destroyed a number of Continental storehouses and burned some 40 American vessels to the waterline. Maxwell sent word to Washington that he was racing the 50 miles to the scene. Perhaps the Redcoats were not finished raiding along the New Jersey side of the river. The commander in chief immediately recognized that the move would open a large and undefended gap in the eastern cordon between Philadelphia and Valley Forge. Yes, there were rumors that the British were preparing to evacuate Philadelphia—for what purpose, no one knew. But if they marched on his winter camp, their path was now clear.
That night Washington again redoubled his sentries and pickets and carried those burdensome thoughts to bed as he prepared to convene the next morning’s Council of War.
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During the informal war conference held nearly three weeks earlier, it had been Gen. Greene who argued most vociferously against an impulsive flight into combat. Even now, with the French alliance transforming the chemistry of the war, Greene continued to advise against an offensive. It was his position that the troops who had survived the winter, as well as the new recruits drifting into camp, needed more training. Further, his procurement department may have been running efficiently enough to supply a stationary army with a modicum of food, clothing, and arms. But it was not nearly prepared to provision an entire army on the move. Washington did not need to be told that while tactics win battles, logistics win wars. Yet he also recognized that at the very least he needed a contingency plan in place.
Since his April meeting with his brigadiers, Washington had put to paper, in order of desirability, the proposals discussed at that assembly as well as his officers’ reaction to them. He’d entitled his private manifesto “Thoughts upon a Plan of Operation for Campaign 1778,” and shared it with only his closest aides. Now, anticipating that the conflict was about to enter a new and perhaps ultimate stage, he intended to present these priorities to his general officers for “mature consideration.”
The first was an assault on Philadelphia, or at the very least a strangling blockade. As much as it pained him to relegate an attack on New York to a lower rung—his inglorious retreat from that city was never far from his mind—he was nothing if not a realist. Any attempt to surreptitiously move 15,000 troops north was doomed to failure. Now, as then, his third alternative was the least enticing—“to lay quiet in a secure Camp and endeavor by every possible means to train and discipline our Army.” Like Greene, Washington understood well the difficulties posed by the choices. The first two, he wrote, would “be attended with considerable expense—great waste of Military Stores, and Arms.” A retrenchment at Valley Forge, on the other hand, “would be giving the Enemy time to receive their reinforcements, spread their baneful influence more extensively—and be a means of disgusting our own People by our apparent inactivity.” To sift through these options was precisely why he had summoned his most senior officers to the formal Council of War.
Though Greene, Lord Stirling, Steuben, Knox, and the Frenchmen Lafayette and Duportail were again present, excluded were six of the brigadiers who had taken part in the earlier meeting—Anthony Wayne, James Varnum, Enoch Poor, John Patterson, Peter Muhlenberg, and the departed Maxwell. In their stead stood the major generals Mifflin, de Kalb, and Armstrong—the last having left his sickbed to journey the 100 miles from his home in Carlisle. General Gates, who had postponed his journey north to attend at Washington’s request, was also present. This was the first meeting between Washington and Gates and Mifflin since what the commander in chief euphemistically described as “the cloud of darkness [that] hung heavy” over the so-called Conway Cabal. Yet as was his wont, in both his written invitations and his physical welcome he betrayed no outward enmity toward the colluders. He “was determined out of respect for congress,” he wrote to his ally Gouverneur Morris, “to treat the New members with civility.” The former conspirators, in turn, acted as if the entire affair had never occurred.
Washington was brisk in his opening statements. His spy network in Philadelphia placed between 15,000 and 20,000 enemy troops in the city, he said, “exclusive of marines and seamen.” Another 4,000 were thought to occupy New York, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 were scattered about Rhode Island. He could only guess if enemy reinforcements were on their way from England, but he suspected that with France’s intentions now public, Whitehall would at the very least look to buttress its holdings in Canada and perhaps in the Floridas as well. He told the council that over the past month the dribble of returning convalescents and new recruits signed “for the duration” into his own army’s ranks had held at a steady if languorous level. When all was said and done, he was still unlikely to have more than 17,000 regulars under his command by the end of the month. At their core would be some 5,000 battle-hardened veterans. These included all troops not only at Valley Forge, but scattered about upstate New York from Fishkill to Albany.
No matter what future course of action they decided upon, he went on, some 2,000 Continentals would need to remain on the Hudson in order to keep open the supply lines from New England. That left about 15,000 effectives at his disposal. He was not certain if his Commissary and Quartermaster Departments could provision such a force for an extended campaign, much less feed and clothe the supplementary militia detachments he required. This was the unvarnished, bleak picture.
This time Washington did not invite his general officers to state a preference for a specific plan of action. Instead, before yielding the floor he merely asked each man to present his own written assessment for a broad-based spring campaign. Although he emphasized that the speed of their reckonings was of the essence, he was surely shaken not only by their feedback, but by the rapidity with which it was reached. The next day the participants, forgoing Washington’s request for individual responses, replied with a per curiam written recommendation. The written consensus was that the army required more provisioning and training, and for the time being it “should remain on the defensive and wait events.” This was the very option that had garnered the least support in the balloting three weeks earlier.
Washington might have expected Gates, Mifflin, Patterson, and de Kalb to stand with the previous dissenters Greene, Steuben, and Duportail against an immediate assault on the British. Just as his quartermaster general, his new inspector general, and his chief engineer had now voted twice for the natural priorities of their respective departments, so the more experienced men present were content to deliberate the when of an opening salvo as opposed to the where. Moreover, in electing to keep the army bivouacked at Valley Forge, the Pennsylvanians Mifflin and Armstrong were probably displaying the same geographical bias as the New England brigadiers had expressed during the earlier poll, only in this case in the form of a defensive posture for their home state.
But Lord Stirling and Henry Knox? Only 20 days earlier they had been vociferous proponents of attacks on Philadelphia and New York City. Now, like Lafayette, they had endorsed a wait-and-see approach, “put[ting] nothing to the hazard,” while the army grew in strength. The announced alliance with France, the generals wrote, “may oblige the enemy to withdraw their force, without any further troubles to us.” There also seems to have been an underlying agreement among them that the ramifications of a failed spring offensive could redound all the way to Versailles. In truth, we will never know, as the dearth of minutes recording the Council of War’s deliberations over those 48 hours leaves much room for speculation. Even the single document proffered to Washington includes few notes on any officers’ individual thought processes, much less hints of competing views. The attendees were, however, unanimous in one other aspect—each considered 15,000 soldiers an inadequate force for either an assault on or a siege of Philadelphia or for an attack on New York.
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As it happened, even as Washington’s general officers were urging caution, the tempo of activity at Valley Forge increased dramatically. Work began anew on the fortifications and palisades left half-completed owing to the months of horrid weather, ill health, and frozen ground; and the sounds of banging hammers, scraping shovels, and grunting men echoed through camp. The labor gangs restoring the redoubts competed for the use of the few horses, wagons, and building tools with crews charged with the construction of more huts to house the camp’s growing rosters. And the Commissary Department was ordered to install more bread ovens to feed the new troops. For a brief moment in mid-May a beef shortage appeared imminent, and the cantonment was momentarily racked by memories of the December and February food crises. In the end, however, Jeremiah Wadsworth alleviated the scare by rushing several droves of cattle south from New England.
General Steuben, meanwhile, took advantage of the mild weather and drying mud to step up his twice-daily training regimen. He boasted to Henry Laurens that the Continentals “have made a more rapid progress than any other Army would have made in so Short a time,” and his enthusiasm proved contagious even beyond the camp’s boundaries. Articles began to appear in Whig broadsheets lauding not only the surging morale of Washington’s soldiery but also its newfound professionalism. Perhaps nothing reflected the citizenry’s changed attitude as dramatically as the sudden about-face of the local populace. Once-empty sutlers’ stalls on the outskirts of camp now overflowed with early spring vegetables and freshwater shellfish gathered from thawed rivers and streams. Even among the cantankerous men in the artillery park, one officer took note of “the great change in this state since the news from France—the Tories all turned Whigs; as eager now for Continental money as they were a few weeks ago for [British] gold.”
This shift in mood naturally engendered an eagerness to strike at the enemy immediately among Washington’s more precocious junior officers, not least John Laurens. Laurens was fully aware of the outcome of the commander in chief’s war council. That did not mean he had to like it. Still brooding over the possibility that the French would end the conflict before he had earned his martial glory, he wrote to his father, “It gives me concern that there is no immediate prospect of closing the war with brilliancy. A successful general action, or some happy stroke upon one of the important points of which the enemy are at present in possession would be very desirable, as it would clearly establish the military reputation of our country, render us more independent of our allies, raise the character of our General, and give all young soldiers one more opportunity of distinguishing themselves in the dear cause of their country.”
For Washington, however, there remained one major piece of unfinished political business before he could turn his full attention to the battlefield—Congress’s reluctance to adopt his proposed half-pay pension. Although the pension plan had been endorsed by the Camp Committee, the majority of delegates in York refused to budge. They had floated several alternatives, including interest-free loans to veterans, tax exemptions, and the sale of federal lands, with the profits to be placed in a sort of pension escrow. None of these schemes satisfied either Washington’s officer corps or the commander in chief himself. In an attempt to calm the disquiet that he sensed was resurfacing, on Monday, May 11, Washington ordered a performance of the play Cato, which had for years been the most popular drama in America.
Addison’s narrative of a patriot prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause of liberty was performed in a hastily constructed open-air theater on the banks of the Schuylkill. Washington and Martha both attended, as did Nathanael Greene and his coquettish wife, Caty, and Henry and Lucy Knox. By all accounts it was a soft spring night, with a gentle breeze off the river keeping at bay the fetid smells of thousands of dilapidated huts. Officers in their best uniforms crowded around the little stage while enlisted men, though not within earshot of the actors’ lines, milled in the shadows beyond the firepits serving as footlights. Following the dramatic depiction, four more officers tendered their resignations.
Whether word of this embarrassment reached York remains unrecorded. What is known is that, one week later, Congress finally agreed to a compromise on the pension pay conundrum that proved acceptable to both the soldiers and the most parsimonious of the politicians. In addition to granting each noncommissioned officer and private a onetime payment of $80, the delegates would appropriate funds for each officer’s half-pay pension for the period of seven years following the war’s end. “Joy,” wrote one artillery officer, “sparkles in the Eyes of our whole Army.”
Not a moment too soon, he might have added. For just as news of the pension agreement reached Valley Forge, rumors from Philadelphia had the British again stirring.