Ten days after Gen. Clinton’s army sailed from Sandy Hook to New York—and only weeks after British and French vessels exchanged gunfire in the English Channel, marking the official beginning of hostilities between their two countries—the Comte d’Estaing’s 12 ships of the line carrying 4,000 French troops hove over the eastern horizon and dropped anchor in Delaware Bay. This event may not have been the precise beginning of the end for Great Britain’s colonial rule in America. But it certainly represented, as a future British prime minister would put it, “the end of the beginning.”
As noted, George Washington would not personally participate in another military engagement until Gen. Charles Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, three years after the Battle of Monmouth Court House. There were two underlying reasons for this. One was his obsession with recapturing New York, the loss of which remained, to his mind, the most ignominious chapter of his military career. Equally important was the insistence by the French that, as the British carried out their “southern strategy,” they be met with armed resistance at every turn throughout Georgia and the Carolinas. Washington, recognizing that the revolution relied on France’s navy and expeditionary force, was in no position to argue the point.
Not surprisingly, Gen. Charles Lee’s advice prior to the Battle of Monmouth Court House that the Continentals should construct for the withdrawing enemy a “Bridge of Gold” to hasten their flight from New York proved, once again, erroneous. In fact, the British would not abandon the city until the ratification of the 1783 Treaties of Paris in which a sullen King George III—who drafted an abdication notice but never delivered it—recognized an independent United States. Washington could and did take solace, however, in having turned the tables on the British in New York. As he wrote to the Virginia statesman and militia commander Gen. Thomas Nelson not long after Monmouth, “It is not a little pleasing, nor less wonderful to contemplate, that after two years of Maneuvering . . . the British are reduced to the use of the spade and pick axe for defense.”
Over the eight years of America’s Revolutionary War, including the five that followed the fateful winter at Valley Forge, George Washington was a paradox. He was a man of few words in person, but during the conflict he and the 32 aides he employed produced some 17,000 official documents, including 12,000 letters and orders. This coheres with the historian Garry Wills’s observation, “Before there was a United States, before there was any symbol of that nation—a flag, a Constitution, a national seal—there was Washington.” This was never more evident than at Valley Forge. The contrast between Washington’s larger-than-life leadership, as shown during that horrid winter, and his verbal tendency toward the terse characterized him for the rest of his life. His second presidential inaugural address remains, at 135 words, the shortest in American history. But it was his valedictory speech of 1796, upon his refusal of a third term, in which he warned the country that the most serious threat to our democracy—“the most frightful . . . and permanent despotism . . . at the expense of public liberty”—could well come from within is not only relevant today, but was so at the time. One need look no further than to the fate of the British officers whom he vanquished.
Upon his return to England in July 1778 Gen. William Howe continued to receive public opprobrium over the loss of Gen. John Burgoyne’s army, criticism that would hound him to his grave. He also faced censure for his actions, or, more specifically, the lack thereof, during the Pennsylvania campaign. To clear his name, Howe demanded a parliamentary inquiry into his and his brother Richard’s conduct. Though the official probe was unable to confirm any charges of mismanagement or impropriety on either brother’s part, conventional sentiment had already hardened. General Howe published a narrative journal defending himself, to little avail. After losing a bid for reelection to the House of Commons, he spent the next decade or so on the fringes of various branches of British public service—including an appointment to the king’s privy council—until, in 1793, he was reinstated in the army as the French Revolutionary Wars swept the Continent. He saw no action. When his brother Richard died without leaving a male heir, he assumed the title, becoming the fifth Viscount Howe. As he was himself childless, the title died with him in 1814.
Admiral Richard Howe lived out his final years with his reputation somewhat more intact. Long out of favor with the government of Lord North—whom the admiral accused of failing to supply him and his brother with the matériel support to properly put down the rebellion—Adm. Howe was called back to England in September 1778, and spent the next three years campaigning against what he saw as the maladministration of the Royal Navy as the conflict with the Americans escalated into a world war. With the fall of North’s government in the wake of the surrender at Yorktown, Howe returned to the Admiralty in 1782 and accepted command of the Channel Fleet. He distinguished himself during various engagements against the French, Spanish, and Dutch navies and, sailing with an outnumbered squadron, led a heroic relief mission to the besieged Gibraltar peninsula. The following year, Howe was appointed first lord of the admiralty, a post from which he spearheaded a naval arms race against France and Spain. In 1788 he resigned the position after a political rift with Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, but he returned to duty two years later when a territorial dispute with Spain raised the threat of another war. When that conflict was averted, Howe continued to serve through the hostilities brought upon by the French Revolution before dying at the age of 73 in his London home in August 1799. For his lifelong service to the Crown he was posthumously honored with a monument at Saint Paul’s Cathedral.
Though Gen. Henry Clinton remained the commander in chief of British forces in the Americas for three more years, his relationship with his subordinate Gen. Charles Cornwallis deteriorated steadily until it finally broke with Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. After that disaster, Clinton was recalled to England, where like Gen. Howe he published a defensive tract. His Narrative of the Campaign of 1781 in North America rather unsuccessfully attempted to blame the loss of the American colonies on Cornwallis, and the bitter diatribe exacerbated their feud. Cornwallis’s star inexplicably rose while Clinton spent his final years serving in and out of Parliament before dying just as he was about to assume the governorship of Gibraltar in 1794.
John André’s demise was a bit more abrupt. On October 2, 1780, he was hanged as a spy. General Clinton had promoted André from captain to major following the British retreat from Philadelphia, and charged him with organizing all British intelligence activities in America. In that capacity André used his ongoing friendship with Peggy Shippen, who had remained in Philadelphia, to ensnare Benedict Arnold in the most notorious case of espionage in American history. After entering Philadelphia, Arnold conducted a whirlwind romance with Shippen which ended in their marriage less than a year after he had taken over as temporary “governor” of the city. Corrupted by Philadelphia’s high society, he lived well above his means and had accrued huge debts by the time he was transferred to command of the American fort at West Point. He also remained bitter over the lack of recognition for his accomplishments at Saratoga.
With his new wife shuttling messages between him and André, in July 1780 Arnold offered to surrender West Point, the most strategic Continental outpost on the Hudson, to the British for a fee. At André’s urging, Gen. Clinton reluctantly allowed his spymaster to sail up the Hudson to personally negotiate the turnover. On September 21, the two had a secret meeting during which Arnold handed over a sheaf of papers, including a map of West Point detailing how he had systematically weakened the stockade’s defenses. André, wearing civilian clothes, was detained and questioned by a Continental patrol on his way back to his schooner. His captors discovered the papers in his boot—a British officer’s boot, no less—and he was arrested.
When Arnold learned that André had been taken, he fled West Point on the very day that Washington arrived at the redoubt, leaving his wife to face the commander in chief. In a letter to John Laurens, Washington railed against Arnold’s “villainous perfidy” while acknowledging André as “an accomplished man and gallant officer.” He then ordered him tried by a military court. One week later André was hanged and buried beneath the scaffold from which he had swung. When confronted by Washington, Peggy Shippen Arnold feigned madness, and was eventually reunited with her husband in New York City. The two moved to London, where Arnold died in 1801. Peggy Shippen Arnold, whose Philadelphia family renounced her, outlived her husband by three years. They are buried in adjoining plots at Saint Mary’s Church in Battersea. André’s remains were disinterred in 1821, removed to England, and reburied beneath a marble monument among the kings and poets of Westminster Abbey’s “Heroes’ Corner.”
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No such splendid fate awaited the coconspirator who lent his name to the so-called Conway Cabal. After recovering from the wounds received in his duel with John Cadwalader, the Irish-born Thomas Conway returned to France in November 1778. He was assigned to its army’s colonial service, and thereafter assumed the governorship of the French holdings in India. He was called back to France following the overthrow of Louis XVI, and commanded a royalist army in the south of the country before his capture by French revolutionaries. Condemned to the guillotine, he was granted a last-minute reprieve under mysterious circumstances probably stemming from France’s centuries-old solidarity with Ireland. From there Conway faded into the fog of history. He was rumored to have died in poverty somewhere in his home country around 1800.
Thomas Mifflin, by contrast, became a leading figure in the formation of the political system of the United States. Continually dogged by charges of corruption during his tenure as the Continental Army’s quartermaster general, Mifflin resigned his military commission seven months after the Battle of Monmouth Court House in order to clear his name and return to politics. He never quite accomplished the first objective. He excelled at the second. Reelected to the Continental Congress as a Pennsylvania delegate in 1783, Mifflin, as the body’s presiding officer, personally accepted Washington’s resignation as commander in chief in December of that year. Six months later he appointed Thomas Jefferson as America’s minister to France. Mifflin went on to represent Pennsylvania as a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 before being elected as the first official governor of the state in 1790. He served in that capacity until his death in Lancaster in January 1800.
Horatio Gates could only have wished for such a second act. After the American southern army’s disastrous defeat at the Battle of Camden, South Carolina, in 1780—arguably Britain’s greatest victory of the Revolutionary War—Gates’s reputation lay in tatters. His cowardly performance—he and several units of southern militiamen fled nearly 200 miles in three days while his 900 or so regular troops from the north stood fast to be slaughtered—was put in further relief by the heroism of his second in command Johann de Kalb. After Gates fled, it was Gen. de Kalb who attempted to rally the outnumbered Continentals in the face of successively more murderous bayonet charges. De Kalb fought hard to the end, receiving 11 wounds before finally falling. Like Casimir Pulaski, who died in his saddle after being riddled with grapeshot defending Charleston a year earlier, de Kalb’s legacy lives on in the numerous American streets, monuments, bridges, and even a city in Illinois named in his honor.
Washington relieved Gates of command following Camden, and though the Continental Congress briefly reinstated him two years later, his tenure proved uneventful. He never again took the field. He retired from military service in 1783. History does not, but should, remember Gates for one sterling act—in 1790 he sold his Virginia plantation and, at the urging of John Adams, freed his slaves. He then moved to a farm in what are today the upper reaches of New York City’s Manhattan Island and served a term in the New York state legislature. He died in April 1806 and is buried in an unmarked grave in New York City’s Trinity Church cemetery.
Gates, it will be recalled, was merely the second pretender to Washington’s position as commander in chief. The first, Gen. Charles Lee, remained a carbuncle of a creature until the end. Lee recovered rapidly from his stupor at the Battle of Monmouth Court House. Within days he was alternately bragging that his strategy and tactics had placed his force on the brink of total victory when Washington’s arrival ruined all, and complaining that Washington had taken command in the field only when “victory was assured.” He then wrote to Washington blaming the “stupid” and “wicked” generals and aides surrounding him for misrepresenting his battlefield actions. “The success of the day,” he asserted,” “was entirely owing” to his own martial maneuvering. This final insolence sealed his fate.
Washington accused Lee of misbehavior and a breach of orders during his “shameful retreat,” and ordered the general arrested and brought before a court-martial presided over by Lord Stirling. Lord Stirling and 11 of his fellow officers listened to testimony for six weeks before finding Lee guilty of disobeying orders, permitting a disorderly retreat, and disrespecting the commander in chief. Lee’s sentence, eventually certified by Congress, was a suspension from the army for one year. The verdict ended his military career. Not atypically, Lee labeled the proceedings a sham and soon thereafter published a self-vindicating tract that further insulted his former superior officer. This was too much for John Laurens.
In late December 1778, with Alexander Hamilton acting as his second, young Laurens challenged Lee to a duel. Whether Washington condoned his aide’s action remains inconclusive, although he certainly could have stopped it. In any case, Lee accepted the ultimatum, and on the appointed morning a ball from Laurens’s pistol pierced Lee’s side, wounding but not killing him. Lee retired to his Shenandoah Valley farm to recover among his beloved dogs, and soon afterward sent to Congress a letter which so offended the delegates that they cashiered him from the army for good. Two years later, on a visit to Philadelphia, he was struck by a sudden fever. As he lay dying on the upper floor of a tavern, Lee requested that he be buried anywhere except a churchyard. Since throwing his lot in with the American cause for liberty, he wrote in a hastily dictated last will and testament, “I have kept so much bad company while living, that I do not choose to continue it when dead.” Fittingly, Lee’s final order was ignored. He was interred in the cemetery of Philadelphia’s Episcopal Christ Church, not far from the graves of Benjamin Franklin and four other signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Seventy-five years later, in 1857, the official librarian of the New York State Historical Society was rummaging through a dusty file of Revolutionary War–era papers when he discovered a letter in what was later proved to be Charles Lee’s handwriting. It was addressed to the commander of all British forces in America, Gen. William Howe, and contained Lee’s detailed strategy for the subjugation of the colonial rebellion. That Charles Lee was a traitor surprised few. That he had refrained from boasting about it shocked many.
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Just as there is no reliably precise figure for the number of troops who spent the winter of 1777–1778 at Valley Forge, so does the total number of men who fought for the Continental Army between April 19, 1775, and September 3, 1783, vary. The most accurate rolls indicate that some 232,000 men enlisted during those eight years, although those same rosters do not differentiate among the legions of multiple reenlistees. Historians generally agree that around 170,000 officers, noncommissioned officers, and privates took part in the conflict. In contrast to the many officers who published personal histories of their experiences, the unsung foot soldiers who fought for independence left little for posterity to ponder. Like the majority of warfighters from time immemorial, they marched or sailed into battle, served their country to the best of their abilities, and those lucky enough to return home went about their lives. With several notable exceptions.
Many of the survivors among the 5,000 or so African Americans who took up the cause of American liberty were left bitterly disappointed when denied citizenship upon the ratification of a United States Constitution in 1787. Incredibly, when that document formally incorporated slavery into the law of the land, hundreds of black men who had stood side by side with white Continentals from Bunker Hill to Yorktown were cast back into chains. This blight on the nation’s founding was loudly protested by foreigners such as Lafayette and Kosciuszko, to no avail. The southern planters—including Washington and Jefferson—convinced the northern businessmen to continue to abide by the African Americans’ chattel status in the peculiar institution. Equally galling is the gap in the postwar histories pertaining to black soldiers who enlisted to free the country from British rule. As the Rev. William Howard Day put it in 1852 while addressing a convention of black veterans who had fought in the War of 1812, “Of the services and sufferings of the colored soldiers of the Revolution, no attempt has, to our knowledge, been made to preserve a record. Their history is not written; it lies upon the soil watered with their blood.”
By contrast, the same cannot be said for the ordinary and obscure diarists such as Albigence Waldo and Joseph Plumb Martin who did put their experiences to paper with such erudite panache. Subsequent to the war, the surgeon Waldo continued his medical practice throughout New England—there are recovered letters addressed to him in Plainfield, Connecticut; in Foster, Rhode Island; and in Worcester, Massachusetts—before his death in 1793. It is thanks to Waldo’s journal that we can today envision the starving and half-naked Continental soldier at Valley Forge who “labors thro’ the Mud & Cold with a Song in his mouth extolling War and Washington.”
“The sufferings of the Body naturally gain the Attention of the Mind,” the insightful Waldo wrote in that same diary entry. “And this Attention is more or less strong, in greater or lesser souls, altho’ I believe that Ambition & a high Opinion of Fame, makes many People endure hardships and pains with that fortitude we after Times observe them to do.”
It is hard to imagine any trooper enduring with such fortitude more hardships than the perspicacious Joseph Plumb Martin. He went on to serve admirably through the conclusion of the American War for Independence, rising to the rank of sergeant. True to his Zelig-like character, in 1781 he was one of the sappers and miners digging siege lines around the British fortifications at Yorktown. Regarding the signal to open the bombardment of Cornwallis’s cornered army, he wrote that the sight of the American flag “waving majestically in the very faces of our implacable adversaries” evoked a spontaneous and continuous cheer from the nearly 8,000 French troops on hand, all shouting “Huzzah for the Americans.”
Joseph Plumb Martin was honorably discharged in June 1783, and after several months wandering in New York state, he settled in Maine—then a northwestern province of Massachusetts—to take up farming in the frontier town of Prospect. Over his long life—he died in 1850 at the age of 89—he served variously as a Prospect selectman, justice of the peace, and town clerk while fathering five children with the former Lucy Clewley. He published his war recollections anonymously in 1830 to little acclaim. It was only after his death that A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier, originally entitled Yankee Doodle Dandy, was recognized as one of the most extraordinary memoirs of the era. An odd sidebar to Joseph Plumb Martin’s life story was a land dispute he engaged in with the Continental Army’s former chief artillery officer Gen. Henry Knox.
After stepping down from his position as President Washington’s secretary of war in 1794, Knox maintained that 100 acres of land to which Joseph Plumb Martin had laid claim were in fact part of a 600,000-acre land grant seized from his Loyalist in-laws that rightly belonged to him. Knox’s argument was upheld in court, and Martin was ordered to pay Knox $170, over $3,200 in today’s dollars. Martin did not have the money, and in several plaintive letters begged Knox to allow him to keep the land, particularly the mere eight acres that he actually tilled. Knox never acknowledged these appeals, but neither did he ever take any action to collect the fee before his death in 1806.
Before resigning from the army in 1784, Knox was the guiding force behind the establishment of a national naval academy and the Military Academy at West Point, where he was briefly commandant. He was also a vigorous proponent of a strong national government and a standing peacetime army, both concepts strongly opposed by political leaders like Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock. When the latter forces prevailed, Knox left military service, returned to Boston, and engaged in sketchy land speculation deals, including the scheme to acquire the parcel upon which Joseph Plumb Martin had settled in Maine. His business acumen, however, stood in stark contrast to his military mastery, and in hindsight Knox was probably fortunate to be plucked from civilian life in 1789 to serve as Washington’s secretary of war.
During his early tenure in that office he argued that dispossessing the Native Americans from their traditional homelands on the western fringes of the United States violated the fundamental laws of God and nature. His rhetoric was largely ignored as the nation expanded west along a line from western Georgia to Kentucky to the Old Northwest Territories of the Ohio Country. Nonetheless, Knox’s early calls for the benevolent treatment of the tribes could have been his lasting legacy. It was not to be. In time and at Washington’s urging, Knox came around to side with and oversee the nascent country’s “Indian Removal” policies of broken treaties, relocations, and exterminations. When Knox left government and returned to Maine, his attempts at cattle ranching, shipbuilding, brick making, lumber milling, and further real estate speculation as far west as the Ohio Valley all failed. He had fathered 13 children with his wife Lucy when, in 1806, he swallowed a chicken bone that lodged in his throat and became infected. He died three days later at the age of 56, leaving Lucy to sell off what remained of his insolvent estate to pay his creditors.
It was during Knox’s Indian wars that Gen. Anthony Wayne capped his aggressive military career. In the aftermath of the Battle of Monmouth Court House, Wayne’s daredevil personal heroics were encapsulated by the nighttime bayonet charge he personally led to capture what was considered an impenetrable British fort at Stony Point on the Hudson River north of New York City. Thereafter ordered south by Washington, he never forgot the lessons of the Paoli Massacre, and cut a bloody swath through the British lines across the deep south before the war’s end. Such was his renown that the state of Georgia gave him a rice plantation for negotiating peace treaties—soon to be broken—with the Cherokee and Creek tribes who had been allies of the British. Along the way he acquired the sobriquet “Mad Anthony” Wayne, in part for the manner in which he put down mutinies by trying and executing the ringleaders on the spot in view of his entire force.
Hard living and hard charging, a bout of malaria, and the two musket balls lodged in his body had left Wayne in poor health. He retired from the Continental Army in 1783 and returned home to Chester County with the rank of major general. Upon his recovery he played an active part in the Pennsylvania state assembly as well as at the Constitutional Convention. Like Henry Knox, Wayne was an outstanding soldier and a poor businessman. He lost his Georgia plantation to financial mismanagement and was rescued from further malefactions when, in 1792, President Washington called him out of retirement and appointed him commander of America’s fledgling professional army, the Legion of the United States. His first task was to extinguish the Northwest Indian War then raging across the territory destined to become the state of Ohio.
After a series of brutal skirmishes, in the summer of 1794 Wayne’s forces crushed a combined American Indian army of Shawnee and Miami at the Battle of Fallen Timbers just south of present-day Toledo. After a two-year respite at his Pennsylvania home, in 1796 he again headed west on an inspection tour of the camps and outposts he had stood up during his Indian campaigns. These included the United States Army’s first formal basic training facility at Legionville, just outside Pittsburgh. It was during this journey that Wayne took ill near Detroit. His subordinates managed to transfer him to better medical facilities at Fort Presque Isle, now Erie, Pennsylvania. For naught. He died there on December 15, 1796, at the age of 51 from a combination of severe gout and what may have been infected stomach ulcers. But “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s eerie legend does not conclude at that frontier outpost.
In 1809 Wayne’s son, Col. Isaac Wayne, journeyed to Fort Presque Isle to disinter his father and return his remains to the family plot in Pennsylvania. The physician whom Isaac Wayne hired to exhume the body found it in surprisingly good shape and, as embalming fluid was unavailable at the site, he decided to boil the flesh off the cadaver’s bones for easier transport. Isaac Wayne then carted his father’s skeleton some 300 miles across the state of Pennsylvania. It was interred with full military honors at Saint David’s Episcopal Church in Radnor Township. According to legend, Isaac Wayne’s wagon bounced so mightily across the state’s rough frontier roads that many of his father’s bones were jounced from the cart. Every January 1, on the anniversary of his birthday, Anthony Wayne’s ghost is said to rise from his grave to ride along what is now U.S. Route 322 between Radnor and Erie in search of his lost bones.
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Of all the strategic camps Wayne established across the Old Northwest Territories during his Indian campaigns, he may have been most attached to Fort Greeneville, where he had signed the final treaty with the defeated tribal confederacy. It was of course named in honor of his old friend and fellow Valley Forge survivor Nathanael Greene. Following Benedict Arnold’s betrayal, Washington appointed Greene as the commandant of West Point, where he oversaw the military court’s decision to execute John André. After Gen. Gates’s defeat at the Battle of Camden, Washington ordered Greene to take command of the southern theater of war, handing him total authority over all Continental troops from Delaware to Georgia. It was a splendid selection.
Greene, who arrived in the Carolinas in late 1780, rapidly brought order to the chaotic skeleton force that had lost Savannah, lost Charleston, and finally been devastated at Camden. General Gates’s cowardice might well have opened the door for Gen. Cornwallis to execute Britain’s “southern strategy” of recruiting Loyalists throughout the deep south and taking the war to Virginia. Only Greene’s self-taught organizational and military skills stood in the way of that strategy. Greene’s first move was to divide his own troops, forcing Cornwallis to do the same with his superior force. Greene then proceeded to elude the enemy with a series of feints and strategic retreats until, in January 1781, his grand design paid off when a portion of his army under the command of Dan Morgan, by now promoted to general, virtually wiped out a force of over 1,000 British soldiers led by the hated Banastre Tarleton at the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina. Greene joined his forces with Morgan’s soon afterward and, after four months of recruiting and refitting, finally thought the time right for a full-scale confrontation.
In mid-March 1781, Greene lured Cornwallis and his seasoned army of veterans to a hilly, forested battleground in the center of North Carolina far from the British supply depot on the state’s southern coastline. There, at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, rifle fire from the outnumbered Continentals so devastated Cornwallis’s lines that at the height of the battle the British general ordered grapeshot fired into the mass of men fighting hand-to-hand, killing Americans and his own soldiers indiscriminately. At this Greene ordered a tactical retreat, and though the Americans were the first to leave the field, Cornwallis’s bruised and battered forces were left with no choice but to make a run for Virginia via the North Carolina coast. While Cornwallis swerved north, Greene turned south to concentrate on reconquering South Carolina. Within two months the British were so weakened in both Carolinas that their occupation of Georgia became untenable. With the lower south in Continental hands, all that was left was for Cornwallis and his army to be bottled up at Yorktown.
At the war’s end in 1783, the 40-year-old Nathanael Greene retired from the Continental Army. He returned briefly to his home state, Rhode Island, but, like Anthony Wayne, he had received as a gift from the state of Georgia a 24,000-acre expanse of choice bottomland along the Savannah River as a gesture of appreciation for his services. In 1785 Greene; his wife, Caty; and their six children relocated to their new plantation, which they dubbed Mulberry Grove. In June of the following year Greene visited a nearby plantation to learn the mechanics of growing rice. There, in no small irony, he was felled by the heatstroke that had taken the lives of so many Continentals at the Battle of Monmouth Court House. Five days later, on June 19, 1786, he was dead at the age of 43. A shocked nation mourned the passing of the general who was one of only three—the others were Washington and Henry Knox—to serve during the entire eight years of the Revolutionary War. Greene was buried in a cemetery outside Savannah until 1901, when his remains were removed and interred beneath a monument in his honor in what is now the city’s financial district.
Naturally, as with so many other Valley Forge survivors, Greene’s life story has a strange coda. Nearly a decade after the death of her husband, Caty Greene was introduced to a shipmate while sailing from New England to Savannah. The young man, a recent Yale graduate from Massachusetts named Eli Whitney, had agreed to take a job as a tutor in South Carolina in order to save money for law school. Caty Greene invited Whitney to visit her at Mulberry Grove, which he did when he left his tutoring position because of a dispute over salary. It was at the Greene plantation that Whitney invented the cotton gin, which not only solved the south’s long-standing problem of speeding up cotton production, but not incidentally led to an almost immediate intensification of American slavery as the cotton crop became a profit machine. With the invention of the “gin”—short for “engine”—what little emancipation rhetoric that had existed below the Mason-Dixon Line was quickly drowned out by the roaring cataracts of money pouring into the southern states.
One southerner who did not live to partake of this “cotton rush” was Henry Laurens. The senior Laurens resigned from his position as president of the Continental Congress in December 1778 in order to return to South Carolina and restore his failing business empire. It is estimated that during the war years Henry Laurens accumulated losses of close to four million in today’s dollars. These included the burning of his plantation outside Charleston by the British. The pull of public service proved too much for Laurens, however, and in the fall of 1780 he was named America’s minister to the Netherlands with a brief to obtain loans from the Dutch republic.
Days after setting sail from Philadelphia, Laurens’s packet ship was intercepted by a British frigate off the coast of Newfoundland. When Royal Navy officers discovered a cache of papers in his possession containing the outlines of trade agreements and a treaty between the United States and the Netherlands, Laurens was taken to England, charged with treason, and imprisoned in the Tower of London—the first and only American ever incarcerated there. While Laurens languished in confinement for 15 months, Britain declared war on the Netherlands. He was finally freed on the last day of December 1781, in a prisoner exchange for Gen. Cornwallis. Two years later he was again sent overseas, as a member of the American contingent negotiating the Treaties of Paris with the British Crown. Spurning entreaties to return to Congress and take part in the Constitutional Convention, he retired permanently from public life and died in December 1792 at the age of 68. It is reported that his was the first formal cremation to be performed in the United States. His ashes were scattered on the grounds of his rebuilt estate, parts of which are still in use today as a Trappist monastery.
While he was held in the Tower of London, Henry Laurens was visited often by his son John’s wife, Martha, who was sometimes accompanied by his granddaughter Frances, the daughter John had never met. No doubt Henry and Martha spoke often of Henry’s meetings with John in Philadelphia. For while Henry was making his preparations to sail to Amsterdam, John had arrived in the capital city on parole after being captured by the British in May 1780. Neither father nor son suspected that their meetings in Philadelphia would be the last time they ever saw one another.
Following the Battle of Monmouth Court House, John Laurens sensed—perhaps even before Washington—that the conflict would now turn south. He badgered his commander in chief to be released from his duties as aide-de-camp in order to fight. After his duel with Charles Lee, Washington acceded to the young man’s requests, and with Congress’s blessing John Laurens was sent home to South Carolina with permission to raise a regiment of slaves who would be promised their postwar freedom. The state’s governor and other local politicians, however, saw no good coming of that scheme, and forbade Laurens to even attempt the endeavor. Stymied at one turn, Laurens took another, and was easily elected to South Carolina’s house of representatives where, he felt, he could argue his cause more authoritatively. Three times he would introduce a bill to fold a brigade of slaves into the Continental Army. Three times it would be voted down overwhelmingly.
While serving as a representative Laurens retained the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he fought with Continental forces in and around the Charleston area. In his thirst for glory Laurens foolishly disobeyed an order to retreat during an engagement in May 1779, and was wounded in the arm by shrapnel while another unlucky horse was blown out from under him. Upon his recovery he commanded an infantry regiment in the failed assault on Savannah, and in May 1780 he was taken prisoner after the fall of Charleston. He was paroled to Philadelphia on the gentleman’s condition that he not leave the state of Pennsylvania.
Laurens was released from his parole in a prisoner exchange in December of that year. He chafed to return south, but was instead persuaded by Alexander Hamilton to join Thomas Paine on a special mission to France. He and Paine returned from Europe three months later with over one third of a promised French gift of six million livres of silver as well as an even larger loan guarantee from Versailles. Laurens was at Washington’s side when the French fleet arrived in the waters off Yorktown in the fall of 1781, and along with Hamilton participated in the siege. Upon the ensuing British surrender, he was appointed by Washington to join Lafayette’s brother-in-law the Vicomte de Noailles to negotiate terms with Cornwallis. He then returned to South Carolina, where he organized a spy network for Gen. Greene.
On August 27, 1782, mere weeks before the British withdrew from Charleston for good, Laurens—who had malaria—dragged himself from his sickbed to lead a platoon of light infantry against a British foraging party. His detail was ambushed along the Combahee River, and Laurens fell from his saddle mortally wounded at the first volley. He was 27 years old. Only a month earlier Alexander Hamilton had begged his good friend to “quit your sword, put on a toga, come to congress.” But, as with Lear, all the power of John Laurens’s wits had given way to his impatience. With him died the seeds of whatever vision he carried for the future United States.
John Laurens was interred on the grounds of the plantation where he had spent his last night alive. When Henry Laurens returned from Europe, he had his son’s remains unearthed and laid to rest on his own estate outside Charleston. The elder Laurens was an educated man who surely knew his Cicero—“In peace, sons bury fathers; in war, fathers bury sons.” One can only hope that he was equally familiar with, and took solace in, the words of Cicero’s rediscoverer Petrarch, who observed that “a good death does honor to a whole life.”
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Following the Battle of Monmouth Court House, Baron Friedrich von Steuben spent the winter of 1778–1779 in Philadelphia preparing and editing his military instruction manual. On March 29, 1779, the Continental Congress ordered published Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States. Steuben’s “Blue Book,” a work of martial art, encompassed “drill instructions, tactical maneuvers, procedures for marches, the establishment and maintenance of encampments, roll calls, inspections, drumbeats, guard duty, care of arms and ammunition, treatment of the sick, military reviews, and duties of officers and men.”
The following year Steuben served on the court-martial that convicted John André, and then accompanied Nathanael Greene to the south. From his post in Virginia he kept a steady stream of trained regulars flowing into Greene’s ranks. He was briefly felled by a bout of malaria, but recovered in time to take command of one of the three American divisions besieging Yorktown. At the war’s end he advised Washington on how to demobilize the Continental Army and also helped to draw up plans for the new nation’s defense.
Steuben’s tutelage proved the exception to the rule that actual war separates the parade ground from the battleground. Some respected revolutionary-era historians, Wayne Bodle in particular, downplay the Prussian’s role in transforming the Continental Army. They argue that, as the last major northern engagement, the Battle of Monmouth Court House was, in modern parlance, too small a sample size to truly gauge Steuben’s influence. More sympathetic voices rise in Steuben’s defense, pointing to the army’s newfound professionalism displayed not only by the rank and file at Monmouth, but in the too often ignored battles that raged across the south in 1780 and 1781. Even Bodle concedes that Steuben’s training regimen imbued Washington’s troops with “a deeper identification with and pride in their craft.” Further, the archivist and author John Buchanan cites several instances that make a strong case for Steuben’s impact.
The first instance occurred in defeat, at the battle of Camden. Buchanan notes that after the Virginia and North Carolina militiamen fled with Gen. Gates, the outnumbered northern regulars from Maryland and Delaware who had drilled under Steuben remained to fight and die with Johann de Kalb. “In the old days the Continentals probably would have fled when they saw the militia desert them,” writes Buchanan. Similarly, six months later during the victorious Battle of Cowpens, the tactics employed by Gen. Dan Morgan and Col. John Howard—including a crisply executed bayonet charge that turned the tide of the fight—were the very model of training and discipline that Steuben had instilled at Valley Forge and laid out in his Blue Book. Finally, at the crucial Battle of Guilford Courthouse, it was again regulars from Delaware and Maryland who stood stalwart against a wild charge from crack British and Hessian troops, holding their lines until the enemy was within 100 feet before unleashing a thunderous volley and counterattack that broke the British.
The greater weight of Steuben’s training regimen might best be attributed to the man whose army he rebirthed in the mud and snow of Valley Forge. George Washington, in his last official act before tendering his resignation as the Continental Army’s commander in chief, penned a note to Steuben to express his “Sincere Friendship and Esteem for you.”
“Acknowledging your great Zeal, Attention and Abilities in performing the duties of your Office,” Washington concluded, “I wish to make use of this Last moment of my public Life to Signify in the strongest terms, my intire Approbation of your Conduct, and to express my Sense of the Obligations the public is under to you for your faithful and Meritorious Services.”
Steuben was discharged in March 1784, the same month he was granted his American citizenship. He settled in New York and moved with the seasons, spending winters in New York City and summering farther north in the Mohawk Valley, in a two-room cabin set on a tract of land, both gifts from the Empire State. The state of New Jersey also eventually deeded to him a 40-acre estate and gristmill across the Hudson River from Manhattan Island. Yet like so many of his Valley Forge compatriots, he fell on hard financial times. Expecting that his long-ago request for postwar financial compensation would be forthcoming from Congress, he borrowed heavily—accumulating debts he could repay only by selling his New Jersey farm and mill. Alexander Hamilton and a coterie of veteran officers stepped in to help when they could, but it was not until 1790 that the United States government granted Steuben a yearly pension of $2,500—nearly $65,000 today.
Steuben never married, and died childless in 1794 at the age of 64. He was buried in a grove near his upstate New York log cabin in Oneida County. He left his estate to two junior aides, both presumed now to have been homosexual, whom he had met at Valley Forge and whom he adopted after the war. A third young “adopted son,” also a former military aide, was named an heir to Steuben’s library and collection of maps. Various statues, parades, social and charitable societies, county names across the United States, and even a city in Ohio honor Steuben. His grave, in what became the town of Steuben, New York, is now commemorated by a historical site that bears his name. Although he is most closely associated with his training techniques, as one biographer notes, “At heart [Steuben] was a soldier, not an administrator,” with a desire to lead troops into battle, a desire honed since his childhood in northern Europe and fulfilled on the battlefields of the United States.
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Not quite in the same league as Henry Knox’s about-face on American Indian policy, but for all of Baron von Steuben’s professed love of democracy, there was to his mind one fatal flaw in the ideals with which the signers of the Declaration of Independence had established their new nation. A republic, he felt, was only as virtuous as the men who led it. Perhaps owing to the lack of movement on his pleas for a pension, by the late 1780s he had grown increasingly disenchanted with many of the politicians replacing the men who had embodied the spirit of 1776. His proposed answer to this deficiency, discussed at length with Alexander Hamilton, was the notion of installing a constitutional monarchy in the United States. His choice for the throne was Frederick the Great’s younger brother Prince Henry. Steuben even wrote to the cultured and liberal-minded—and wonderfully ostentatiously homosexual—prince to gauge his interest. With the onset of the Constitutional Convention, however, the scheme died so quick a death that it does not even merit a mention in the hit Broadway musical based on Hamilton’s life.
It hardly needs to be said that what Lin-Manuel Miranda’s reimagination of Hamilton’s life, as well as the overall renewed interest in his biography, does emphasize is Hamilton’s outsize roles in the nation’s founding as a soldier, economist, political philosopher, constitutional lawyer, and abolitionist. During the war, Hamilton served for four years as George Washington’s principal aide, in every sense lending his voice to the commander in chief’s thousands of pages of writings. Washington finally granted Hamilton’s request for a field command during the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. With Laurens by his side, he captured a critical redoubt held by the British, and this action was credited with accelerating Gen. Cornwallis’s decision to surrender.
Hamilton relinquished his military commission after Yorktown and, in 1782, was appointed to the new Congress of the Confederation—the successor to the Second Continental Congress. He never lost his antipathy toward the decentralized leanings of both political bodies, however, and resigned that same year to open a law practice in Albany. When the British evacuated New York City at the war’s end he moved south, and in 1784 founded the Bank of New York. The following year, in honor of his fallen friend John Laurens, he established the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves.
Some contend that Hamilton never really recovered from Laurens’s death. As mentioned, there have even been attempts to elevate their Damon and Pythias friendship into a love affair. The evidence is speculative. It is true that throughout their service together Hamilton and Laurens continued to pore over sources as disparate as Plutarch and Demosthenes and record passages from them to give as gifts to one another. But a rumored gay relationship sidesteps the fact that in 1780—two years prior to Laurens’s death—Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of Washington’s old ally Gen. Philip Schuyler, and went on to father eight children with her. In this regard one must also contend with the fact that Hamilton was the first major American politician to become involved in a sex scandal when, in 1797, he admitted to having carried on a yearlong affair with a 23-year-old married woman some six years earlier.
Less salacious, but perhaps more pertinent, was Hamilton’s composition of 51 of the 85 Federalist Papers—James Madison and John Jay were the other anonymous authors—which were published in 1787 and 1788. The arguments put forth in the documents were key to the ratification of the Constitution, and Hamilton took part in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as a New York delegate. In 1789, President Washington tabbed Hamilton as the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, a post he held for over six years. It was from this position that he formed and enacted the primary economic policies of the administration that we are so familiar with today—the establishment of a national bank, the funding of state debts by the federal government, and open mercantile relationships with Europe, most notably his old adversary England, to name a few. All this led to his leadership of the Federalist Party, which was created in great part to support his centralized monetary views. It also likely led to his premature death.
During the 1800 presidential election, Hamilton headed the successful Federalist Party campaign against John Adams. When Adams’s support fell off and Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr amassed an equal number of electoral college votes, Hamilton broke with his party’s orthodoxy by casting the tie-breaking vote for Jefferson on the thirty-sixth ballot. Burr never forgave him, and the enmity between the two escalated when Hamilton lobbied hard against Burr’s 1804 run for the governorship of New York state. Burr, taking issue with what he felt was Hamilton’s calumny in a series of letters and gossipy conversations, challenged him to a duel.
On July 11, 1804, atop a rocky ledge on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River—not far from where Hamilton’s oldest son Philip had died in a duel three years earlier—the antagonists paced off their flintlock pistol range, turned, and fired. No one knows who pulled his trigger first. Hamilton’s ball cracked a tree branch high above Burr’s head. Burr’s found its mark in Hamilton’s abdomen, breaking several ribs and tearing through his liver and diaphragm before lodging in his spine. All present, including Hamilton, recognized it as a mortal blow. Hamilton, 49, was transported back to a friend’s home in New York City where, anesthetized with heavy doses of laudanum, he died the following afternoon surrounded by family and friends. He was, and remains, entombed in the cemetery at lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church.
Though Hamilton’s biography has been recounted well and often in many venues, perhaps less well known to most Americans is the postwar fate of the Marquis de Lafayette. In the aftermath of the Battle of Monmouth Court House, Lafayette beseeched both Washington and Versailles to allow him to attempt another invasion of Quebec. The American commander in chief, taking his usual long view, privately questioned if the presence of a second “New France” on the United States’ northern border might not potentially amount to simply trading one European master for another. Without disparaging Lafayette’s motives, Washington diplomatically rejected the idea, noting that the war in the southern states was far from over, and Lafayette might be needed there. Louis XVI and his foreign minister the Comte de Vergennes, meanwhile, recognized that they had spread their troops far too thin fighting the British around the world to consider opening a Canadian front.
After his request was rebuffed, in late 1778 Washington granted Lafayette permission to return to France, where he lobbied to organize a French invasion of the British Isles. When the French king and his ministers dismissed that idea, Lafayette returned to America in April 1780 to act as a liaison for the additional 6,000-man force that Louis XVI had decided to dispatch to Washington’s command. In the meanwhile, back in France, Adrienne gave birth to their first and only son, whom the couple named Georges Washington Lafayette.
In early 1781, while Lafayette awaited the arrival of the promised French troops, Washington sent him south with a division of Continentals to join Steuben in Virginia. Vastly outnumbered by Cornwallis, the marquis nipped at the British heels as best he could until, joined by Washington, Greene, and the French reinforcements, the Americans finally cornered the Redcoats at Yorktown. After Yorktown, Congress appointed Lafayette as an official adviser to its European diplomats—Benjamin Franklin in Paris, John Jay in Madrid, and John Adams at The Hague. He also eventually became part of the Paris delegation negotiating the British capitulation. Lafayette’s parting with Washington at Mount Vernon in 1784 was a tearful affair, for despite the young Frenchman’s protestations the commander in chief suspected that this would be the last time they would ever see each other. Again, Washington’s premonition proved prescient. Returning to Paris a hero on two continents, feted by kings, statesmen, and generals at home and abroad, the world as Lafayette knew it came crashing down with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789.
Lafayette was originally caught in the middle by the French Revolution. Viewed by the radicals as a royal ally, he had also fallen out of favor with Louis XVI for his efforts to provide the serfs and burgeoning middle class with a more potent voice in a French Assembly dominated by the nobility and the clergy. To that end he had stopped using his title of marquis. During the revolution’s infancy he continued to attempt to thread this needle, but by mid-1791 he was being denounced by leading insurgents such as Maximilien Robespierre and Georges-Jacques Danton. Given command of an army when France declared war on Austria the following year, Lafayette saw firsthand the effects of the slow-rolling revolution when the common soldiers displayed more animosity toward their own officers than toward enemy troops. While he was in the field, the Jacobins took control of Paris, and Danton, the new Minister of Justice, issued a warrant for his arrest.
Lafayette attempted to flee to the United States, but was captured by the Austrians in present-day Belgium. Ironically, in the eyes of the Austrians and their Prussian allies, Lafayette’s earlier, measured steps to steer a middle course between the French radicals and the nobility were proof of his antimonarchical tendencies. While he was held in various Prussian and Austrian prisons from September 1792 to September 1797, the Parisian radicals had also jailed his wife, Adrienne. She was spared the guillotine only by the impassioned pleas of the American minister to France, James Monroe, who managed to smuggle her son Georges Washington Lafayette to Connecticut. Similar American efforts to free Lafayette were futile, as the United States had no formal ties or treaties with Austria and Prussia. And though the Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, did manage to push an act through Congress awarding Lafayette back pay for his service to the country—the funds eased the severity of his imprisonment for a time—President Washington, despite his deep personal empathy, was determined to avoid any actions that could embroil America in intramural European affairs. Even a freelance escape attempt organized by Alexander Hamilton’s sister-in-law went awry.
In October 1795, Ambassador Monroe managed to obtain American passports for Adrienne Lafayette and her two daughters on the basis of the many states that had granted her husband United States citizenship. With this, she and her girls traveled to Vienna, where she convinced Emperor Francis II to allow them to join Lafayette in confinement. The four lived together in his cell for the next two years until the young General Napoleon Bonaparte helped to negotiate their release.
Lafayette and Adrienne were reunited with their son, and they and their daughters were allowed to return to France upon Lafayette’s promise to refrain from any political activities. Even when Napoleon held a memorial service in Paris for the recently deceased George Washington, Lafayette was not invited. Lafayette’s relationship with Bonaparte remained icy even after the soon-to-be “emperor for life” restored his French citizenship in 1800. And when President Thomas Jefferson offered Lafayette the governorship of the newly acquired territory of Louisiana he declined, citing his determination to work quietly to build a democratic France in the shape of a constitutional monarchy.
In 1814—seven years after Adrienne’s death on Christmas Day, 1807—the French monarchy was restored and the Comte de Provence, brother of Louis XVI, was placed on the throne. It is said that in their long exile the Bourbons neither learned anything nor forgot anything, and Lafayette reacted as coolly toward his country’s autocratic new ruler as he had toward Napoleon. Ever the idealist, he kept hoping that he could in some way effect a more democratic ruling system by means of a strong and diverse National Assembly. When Napoleon escaped Elba a year later and regained power, Lafayette again refused any role in his government. Yet four months later, upon the emperor’s abdication in the wake of Waterloo, Lafayette magnanimously arranged with President James Madison for Napoleon’s retirement in America. The victorious British, having none of that, instead escorted him to Saint Helena. Over the ensuing years Lafayette stealthily threw his influence into causes ranging from Greek democracy to American abolitionism.
In 1824, at the age of 66, Lafayette returned to the United States to a hero’s welcome as the only living general who had fought in the Revolutionary War. Traveling with his son, he was feted in scores of cities and towns in all 24 states of the union. Over the course of his 14-month tour he dined with President James Monroe, traveled on the Ohio River and that modern marvel the Erie Canal by steamboat, took in Niagara Falls, visited with Gen. Andrew Jackson in Tennessee, witnessed the inauguration of President John Quincy Adams, and laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument before scooping up a handful of dirt he wanted spread on his grave. Arriving at the foot of Manhattan, he is said to have steadied himself on his cane, taken in the rapturous throngs, and burst into tears.
Back in France, Lafayette spent the next decade promoting the same republican impulses he had always hoped to plant in his native soil. To little avail. France was still under the heel of an all-powerful king and noble class when, on May 20, 1834, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette died in Paris, felled by pneumonia. He was buried next to Adrienne in Picpus Cemetery in what is now the city’s eighth arrondissement. The French king ordered Lafayette buried with full military honors in order to prevent mob riots, and toward the end of the ceremony Georges Washington Lafayette sprinkled the dirt from Bunker Hill over his father’s grave. Each Fourth of July thereafter representatives and military attachés from the French and American governments join Lafayette’s descendants in watching the American flag flying over his grave replaced by a new Stars and Stripes. One such commemoration in particular stands out.
On July 4, 1917, at the height of World War I, the initial 200 soldiers of the first American Expeditionary Force to land in Europe entered Paris. Among the delegation led by Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing to Lafayette’s tomb was Col. Charles Stanton, the nephew of Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. “America has joined forces with the Allied Powers,” Stanton pronounced, “and what we have of blood and treasure are yours.”
Speaking in French, Stanton concluded, “Lafayette, we are here!”
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When Victor Emmanuel united the warring principalities and city-states of the Italian peninsula into a consolidated nation some 85 years after the American Revolution, it was estimated that less than three percent of the population spoke standard Italian. “We have made Italy,” the Piedmontese statesman Massimo d’Azeglio was said to have remarked, “now we must make Italians.”
George Washington faced the opposite problem at Valley Forge. There, Americans understood each other perfectly but all too often worked at cross-purposes. Yet despite any technical limitations Washington may have had as a battlefield general, at Valley Forge he displayed a personal quality of steely leadership that is difficult to imagine being matched by any other soldier or statesman of the era.
On December 4, 1783—almost precisely six years from the day he had led the Continental Army out of the dank, rugged Gulph and onto that bleak plateau in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania—Washington acknowledged how far that army had come, during a private farewell address to some 30 of his commanding officers. Nine days earlier he had ridden into New York City at the head of a procession that reclaimed his long-lost prize even as the last of the British occupiers scurried onto transports in the harbor. Now, with Henry Knox and Friedrich von Steuben seated to either side of him at the head of the long banquet table on the second floor of Samuel Fraunces’s tavern in Lower Manhattan, Washington—dressed in his finest blue-and-buff uniform—raised his glass with a trembling hand.
“With a heart filled with love and gratitude, I now take leave of you,” he said, his voice catching in a rare show of emotion. “I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.”
He paused, and tears began to stream down his cheeks. He then concluded his toast: “I cannot come to each of you, but shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.”
At this all the officers stood to embrace their commander in chief. When the last man had brushed his cheek with a solemn kiss, Washington crossed the room and lifted his hand in a gesture of farewell. He then turned and walked through the door without looking back.