The Discipline of the Leggs
1778
“You might have tracked the army from White Marsh to Valley Forge by the blood of their feet,” George Washington wrote.1 A private who endured the march to winter quarters remembered the trail of “blood upon the rough frozen ground” left by his shoeless companions.
The image is iconic—the reality of walking barefoot in the snow was excruciating, humiliating, and disheartening. News of the defeat of General Burgoyne’s army proved a brief solace. An autumn of unsuccessful fighting had culminated in the enemy occupation of the new nation’s capital, a disintegrating Continental Army, and a dispirited populace. Rather than pull back to more comfortable lodgings in inland cities, Washington installed the army in a makeshift camp at Valley Forge, twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. Protected by the Schuylkill River, the troops would be far enough from the British for safety but close enough for vigilance.
While Howe and his officers savored the comforts of town, danced at balls, gambled in taverns, and fraternized with the city’s many loyalists, Washington’s ragged soldiers chopped down trees, notched logs, and plastered the chinks with mud to create their primitive, dirt-floor huts. The men compared them to dungeon cells.
Their suffering in the midst of one of the most productive areas of the country baffled the soldiers. One explanation was that they were fighting a war during a revolution. The break with Britain had brought an upheaval of public administration and order. Congress, a flimsy deliberative body, was guided by no traditions and few formal structures. The inexperienced state governments were often inept. The notion of paying taxes repelled many inhabitants, and the largely agricultural colonies lacked a surplus of wealth.
But the administrative tangle was only part of the explanation. The meanness, indecision, delay, and general contrariness of citizens in each of the thirteen states amplified the army’s burden. The citizen soldiers who had rushed to fight early in the war were mostly gone from the army now. The Valley Forge soldiers, many of whom had signed on for three years or the duration of the war, were drawn largely from the young, the landless, the footloose, the poor. The people, as much as their representatives in Congress, had lost interest in the troops, whom they could look down on as the dregs of society.
The ongoing supply problems drove Washington to distraction. Pushing through brush and brambles, men quickly wore their clothing to rags. The garments continued to disintegrate until some men were literally naked, unable to emerge from their huts. Thousands lacked blankets. Three thousand were barefoot—frost-blackened toes required amputation. Hunger gripped bellies. “No meat! No meat!” the soldiers chanted, imitating crows. Receiving no meat, they cried: “No bread, no soldier!” They survived on a flour-and-water mixture baked into “fire cake” on hot rocks. Blanketless men sat shivering and coughing around smoldering green wood. They gagged on the smell of dead horses that lay decomposing in camp. They drew water from turbid, infected creeks. They fell to disease: putrid fever, pneumonia, and dysentery. In the hospital, they were thrown together with those still agonizing from battle wounds. Even there, blankets were scarce. More than two thousand men would die over the winter, twice as many Americans as had fallen in the battles around Philadelphia.
Pennsylvania farms had yielded a bumper crop in 1777. But the opposing armies had devoured the surplus food and forage. The British had captured a number of rebel supply depots. Ensconced in Philadelphia, they offered local farmers payment in silver coinage rather than the steadily deteriorating paper currency of the rebels.
The bungling of Congress amplified the supply crisis. The representatives—they were now meeting in York, Pennsylvania—neglected the army’s needs until prodded by Washington and other officers. General Enoch Poor wrote angrily to officials back home in New Hampshire: “If any of them desert how can I punish them when they plead in their justification that on your part the Contract is broken?” The men needed supplies immediately or it would be “impracticable to keep them much longer in the field.”2
“Poor food—,” a camp physician summed up in his diary, “hard lodging—Cold Weather—fatigue—Nasty cloaths—nasty Cookery—Vomit half my time—smoak’d out my senses—the Devil’s in’t—I can’t Endure it.”3
Before Christmas, Washington wrote a blistering letter to Congress, laying out the army’s difficulties in the starkest of terms. Unless supplies started flowing immediately, he said, “this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse.” He added, “Rest assured Sir this is not an exaggerated picture.” He concluded with a biting sentence: “I can assure those Gentlemen that it is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fire side than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and Snow without Cloaths or Blankets.”4
Their fellow citizens offered the Continental soldiers scant respect and little sympathy. Washington, however, wrote, “I feel superabundantly for them.”5
* * *
Congress slowly creaked into motion. The commander in chief turned to his most trusted lieutenant to take the matter in hand. Nathanael Greene, a businessman before the war, organized foraging parties to scour the surrounding countryside. Both Washington and Greene loathed the confiscation of civilian property, but no other choice remained. “Inhabitants cry out and beset me from all quarters,” Greene wrote to Washington, “but like Pharoh I harden my heart.” He was determined to “forage the Country naked.” He had civilians whipped for transporting produce to the British.6
Washington persuaded Greene to give up his field command and to assume the position of quartermaster general. Craving martial glory, the Rhode Island general bitterly resented the assignment. “Nobody ever heard of a quarter master in history,” he complained to Washington. To his friend Henry Knox he bemoaned being “taken out of the line of splendor.”7
Greene, who found the position “humiliating to my Military pride,” spent the two years following the Valley Forge winter of 1778 laboring over accounting books, contracts, and shipping problems as he tried to keep the Continental Army in shoes, axes, blankets, and the thousand other supplies needed to wage war. Overseeing a battalion of three thousand clerks, buyers, and haulers, he was continually chagrined by inadequate finances and lack of cooperation. “The Growing avarice, and a declining currency,” he observed, “are poor materials to build our Independence on.”8
He hated the job and he was good at it. He brought discipline to the department, insisting that foragers display “proper deportment.” He set up grain depots and improved logistics by sending men to repair bridges, improve roads, and commandeer wagons. Greene, like Washington, knew that keeping an army supplied in the field was just as crucial as winning battles. His business skills and common sense saved the army from dissolution. By the spring of 1778, conditions at Valley Forge had begun to inch toward improvement, but problems of supply would vex commanders until the very end of the war.
* * *
The army’s senior officers lived in houses in the area surrounding the Valley Forge camp. Some were joined by their wives. Martha Washington came in time for her husband’s forty-sixth birthday in February. She boosted the commander’s spirits. The soldiers loved her. She was “busy from early morning until late at night” knitting stockings and sewing shirts for the troops. Martha was no stranger to death, having lost her first husband, three of her four children, and five younger siblings, including her dear sister Fanny, who had died in December. She organized a band of women who delivered food to soldiers and cared for the sick and wounded. Just the sight of the women heartened the troops.
Lord Stirling’s wife came, as did his daughter, Lady Kitty, a favorite of Washington. Lucy Knox, with her baby daughter, arrived, escorted by a limping Benedict Arnold, for whom she had acted as go-between with an eligible young lady. An inveterate card player, Lucy loved the social life of camp. Nathanael Greene observed that she was mortified by her obesity, but that Henry was just as fat. The couple lacked a permanent home during the entire course of the war. When they were together, they slept in an iron bed that could hold their combined weight. They were, Greene thought, the ideal of marital bliss.
Greene’s own young wife, Caty, had left her children with relatives to journey to camp. “The lady of General Greene,” a soldier recorded, “is a handsome, elegant, and accomplished woman.”9 She conversed with French officers in their own tongue and flirted quite brazenly. Washington was not immune to her charms. He would, during one winter ball, dance with Caty for three hours straight. Anthony Wayne was another of her admirers. His own marriage had become a cinder—Polly declined to visit him, though she lived only a few miles away. Caty’s loose behavior might have rankled Greene, as Lucy Knox reported that “all was not well with Greene [and] his lady.”10
Modest dinner parties and communal songfests helped pass the winter days for the generals and their families. Some junior officers put on a performance of Washington’s favorite play, Joseph Addison’s Cato. The Enlightenment drama about Cato the Younger’s resistance to Julius Caesar’s tyranny, written in 1712, had already contributed to the rhetoric of the revolution. The lines rang out that winter:
What pity is it
That we can die but once to serve our country.
It is not now a time to talk of aught
But chains or conquest, liberty or death.
* * *
Help arrived from abroad. Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, American envoys in Paris, had recruited the most talented officers from among those who volunteered. In addition to engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko, they sent over the Polish cavalry expert Casimir Pulaski and the experienced German officer Johann de Kalb. The veterans provided the army the experience, military insight, and leadership it was sorely lacking. Some came because they needed work, but many were inspired by a cause they saw as the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals. One European recruit would prove to be the most luminous of all the Revolutionary fighters. He was the nineteen-year-old French nobleman Gilbert de Motier, known as the Marquis de Lafayette.
Portraits from that time show Lafayette a slender, homely, effeminate, and impossibly youthful soldier. Possessed of enormous inherited wealth, he came to America at his own expense. He instantly charmed Washington and the entire high command with his affability, modesty, and sheer brilliance. Congress named him a major general but did not intend him to lead troops. Washington loved him and recognized his preternatural ability. Nathanael Greene found him irresistible due to “an inexplicable charm.”
In September 1777, Lafayette had seen his first action at Brandywine Creek, where he had been shot in the leg. “Take care of him as if he were my son,” Washington admonished those attending him.11 By December the youth had assumed a role as one of Washington’s most trusted confidants and was in command of an entire army division.
Given the defeats the army had endured, it was not surprising that grumbling about Washington’s leadership rustled through the ranks and ignited whispers in Congress. He’d been outgeneraled, then outgeneraled again. By contrast, Horatio Gates had bagged an entire British army. Some thought Gates might be the man to take charge. A Congressional committee accused Washington of “Want of Genius & Activity.” Even Anthony Wayne, a Washington supporter, detected in the commander “an over stretched caution, which is oftentimes attended with as fatal Consequences, as too much rashness.”12
Congress formed a Board of War to look over Washington’s shoulder, with Gates at its head. They sent a committee to Valley Forge to investigate the condition of the army. They appointed Thomas Conway, an Irish volunteer and critic of Washington, to the new post of inspector general, putting him in charge of training the troops.
To Washington and his close supporters, including Greene, Knox, Lafayette, and aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton, these actions amounted to a “cabal” aimed at deposing the commander. Washington feared that Gates would “be exalted, on the ruin of my reputation and influence.”13 Showing his aptitude for political infighting, Washington deftly outmaneuvered his opponents. By spring, Congress had accepted Conway’s resignation and Washington was again firmly in charge.
* * *
As winter began to relent, a foreign officer arrived in camp who would transform the beleaguered army almost overnight. At first glance, Baron Friedrich von Steuben appeared to be the most experienced and prestigious officer of any to join the American cause. In Europe, he held the exalted rank of lieutenant general. He had served as aide-de-camp to Frederick the Great, the Prussian king widely considered the military mastermind of the century. He traveled with an entourage of handsome young French officers, as befitted a personage of great stature. He bragged about his European estates.
It was a show. Yes, Steuben was a baron—a Germanic prince had made him a knight in the Order of Fidelity and given him the title Freiherr. He wore a large star on his breast to prove his nobility. Yes, he had served under Frederick the Great—he had been wounded twice during the Seven Years’ War. But the highest rank Steuben had gained in Frederick’s army was captain. After the war ended, he had been dismissed from the service. He owned no estates. He had filled the past fourteen years managing the household of a prince in a minuscule German dominion. His prospects had been marred by a rumor that he had once “taken familiarities with young boys.”14
Desperate for work, Steuben came to the attention of playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a former watchmaker who had transformed himself into a brilliant courtier at Versailles. The author of the satires The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, Beaumarchais was an idealist and an intriguer. He had been helping to funnel French money and gunpowder to the Americans through the West Indies. Steuben might win a position in America, Beaumarchais told him, if he was willing to play a role. Steuben loved theater and agreed to assume the part his French friends created for him. They supplied him with the entourage and with travel expenses.
Steuben’s sparkling credentials impressed Congress. His modesty and sincerity made their mark on Washington, who probably suspected that he was less than what he claimed to be. A gallant knight at heart, Steuben used his charm and refined social skills to win over the top American officers.
When he arrived in Valley Forge in late winter, 1778, he found that he was desperately needed. Order in the camp was missing, sentries not always posted, sanitation deficient, drunkenness common, marching sloppy. The Americans were novices, as a young patriot captain admitted, who “had everything to learn, and no one to instruct us who knew any better than ourselves.”15
Washington had already been planning to put the army on a more professional footing. Greene’s efforts as quartermaster were part of it. Someone had to oversee the rigorous training in a uniform method of drill that would shape the troops into a more efficient fighting force. That was Steuben’s job.
In March, the baron began the daunting and urgent task of imparting military basics to ten thousand men in two months. Starting with a “model company” of a hundred men drawn from Washington’s personal guard, Steuben began to train those who would in turn serve as trainers in their own regiments. He taught them how to stand at attention, their heads turned to a precise angle so that each man’s left eye lined up with his coat buttons. He drilled them in uniform march: seventy-five paces a minute, each step twenty-eight inches long. Then he imparted more complicated maneuvers like wheeling, advancing obliquely, and deploying from a column of march into a line of battle. This last was an exercise that could easily descend into chaos. He taught them to wield the bayonet.
Steuben wandered the camp, asking questions through an interpreter and listening carefully to the answers. He came to empathize with the American soldiers, to admire them, and to understand the way that pride could mesh with patriotism in a republic. He strictly forbade officers to abuse their men, insisting that “their faults are to be pointed out with patience.”16
He slowly turned the troops into a semblance of the disciplined, agile, and lethal infantry that had given Prussia its edge in European fighting. He understood that American soldiers responded more readily when they were told why to do something, not just given an order. He admired the men’s perseverance. “No European army could have been kept together under such dreadful deprivations.”17
The Prussian, who had put on a show to get his job, understood that spectacle was a critical part of military affairs. His alleged rank, his spruce uniform, and the shining star on his chest inspired awe. “Never before, or since, have I had such an impression of the ancient fabled God of War as when I looked on the baron,” a private wrote.18
When necessary, Steuben swore. “Goddamn!” was one of his few English words. The French and German oaths he spouted amused the troops, who, like all soldiers, were connoisseurs of profanity. His rants prompted them to try and try again. Steuben made a show of his anger, and when it reached the point of absurdity, joined in the laughter.
Drilling the troops by day and feverishly writing out new instructions to be shared with the army by night, Steuben impressed his system on the forces. The men learned what Horatio Gates called “the Discipline of the Leggs.”19 They learned to respond instantly to an order or to the compelling tattoo of a drum. The Baron trained majors, captains, and lieutenants as if they were privates and insisted that officers participate in drilling their men, not leave the duty to sergeants. “My task,” he wrote later, “has not been an easy one.” He embraced it as a passion, not a job. “He is exerting himself like a Lieutenant anxious for promotion,” an officer reported.20
* * *
At the end of April, word arrived that Benjamin Franklin had secured a treaty of alliance with France. The news gave Washington “the most sensible pleasure.” Patriots were ecstatic. The alliance “puts our Independence beyond a doubt,” one gloated.21
On a green day in May, Washington’s entire army turned out on the grand parade ground at Valley Forge to celebrate the alliance. Knox’s gunners fired off salutes from thirteen cannon. Baron von Steuben choreographed a rolling volley, with the ten thousand men firing their muskets in quick succession. The sound went twice around the lines like an earsplitting drumroll. Vive la France! The men were given extra rations of whiskey. Officers and guests feasted at an outdoor buffet. Through the whole affair, Washington “wore a countenance of uncommon delight.” He even joined in a cricket game with some younger officers.22
More good news arrived. The British were planning to depart from Philadelphia. The taciturn Henry Clinton had replaced William Howe as commander. The threat of a French fleet coming up the Delaware to trap his army in the city made Clinton nervous. He understood that Howe had been wrong to think that capturing the rebel capital would strike a fatal blow. This was not Europe, where capital cities were the nerve centers of nations. America had no nerve center. Clinton decided to consolidate his army in the more defensible bastion of New York City.
Just as many of Boston’s loyalists had fled with the evacuation of that city, the Philadelphians who had enthusiastically collaborated with the British were struck with “Horror & melancholy” at the prospect of being abandoned. Thousands demanded to be shipped to safety in New York. The civilian cargo would leave little room on the ships for Clinton’s army, baggage, or horses. These he would have to transport to New York by trekking the ninety miles across New Jersey.
When word of this impending hegira reached Washington, he saw a ripe opportunity to test his newly trained army. Each side had about twelve thousand troops. Washington could additionally count on several thousand New Jersey militiamen to harass Clinton as he crossed their state.
During the early weeks of June, Washington held several councils of war to listen to the opinions of his generals. They split into two factions on the advisability of an attack. Leading one was General Charles Lee, the distinguished, crotchety former British officer who had helped Washington in the early days of the war, and who had resisted his orders during the retreat from New York in 1776. Washington had warmly welcomed Lee when he finally returned to the American camp in April following a prisoner exchange. The story circulated that Lee, who initially occupied a room in the quarters Washington shared with Martha, appeared late and disheveled at breakfast on his first morning back, having snuck “a miserable dirty hussy” into his bed.23
Washington did not know—no one knew until a document turned up in Henry Clinton’s papers many decades later—that Lee, while held by the British, had suggested to them a plan by which their forces could most effectively defeat the rebels. Had Lee turned his coat out of fear for his neck? Was his scheme a ploy to trick the British into a doomed strategy? The questions remain unanswered to this day.
What’s certain is that Lee, having been away from the American camp for more than two years, was out of tune with the sentiment of the army and the country. He scoffed at Steuben’s efforts and broadcasted his conviction that the British military was unbeatable, that the Americans’ only hope was to stay on the defensive and wait for French help. Privately, he continued to regard Washington as a hopeless provincial, “not fit to command a sergeant’s guard.”24 Yet Lee’s counsel of caution won the support of the majority of generals. Even Steuben did not feel an all-out attack was advisable.
Leading the side for a more aggressive strategy was Anthony Wayne. The logic of attack was clear, the glory of the fight beckoned. Fall on Clinton’s creeping, burdened army? Of course.
To reoccupy Philadelphia, now abandoned by the British, Washington sent a small force headed by Benedict Arnold. His Saratoga wound still kept the enterprising general from a field command. With the rest of the army, his Excellency ferried across the Delaware north of Trenton and marched on a route parallel to Clinton’s. The British and Hessians, who were dragging a twelve-mile-long, thousand-wagon baggage train, made an inviting target.
At a final council of war a week later, Lee and some other officers advised Washington to take the army to safety in the Hudson Highlands and wait. Washington instead decided to send out 1,500 men to shadow the British rear and look for a chance to mount an attack. The generals judged this a measured response, all except Wayne, who refused to sign the compromise plan. When Washington asked his opinion, Wayne said, “Fight, sir.”25
The next day, Generals Greene and Lafayette reconsidered and joined Wayne in begging Washington to deploy a larger force. “People expect something from us,” Greene insisted. Persuaded, Washington ordered out more than four thousand men to attack the British rear. He would follow with the rest of the army, ready to join in a full-scale battle if the opportunity arose.
Charles Lee, by rank still second in command of the army, had refused to lead the detachment when the force was small. Washington handed the duty to Lafayette, an indication of his confidence in the boy general. But now the thought of the twenty-year-old Frenchman gaining glory in a major battle galled Lee, who demanded to take over the expanded division. Washington compromised, leaving Lafayette in charge of the initial march, with Lee to assume command when contact with the enemy became imminent. Was it wise to assign a plan to a man who disagreed with it? Time would tell.
An early summer heat wave, with temperatures in the high nineties, made the chill of Valley Forge seem a distant memory to the Americans. The suffocating humidity and frequent rain storms turned marching into a nightmare for Clinton’s men, who were dressed in wool coats and carrying eighty-pound packs. Hordes of biting insects and sporadic firing by hidden militiamen tormented them. Even at a pace of seven miles a day, the journey was wearing them out. They spent June 27 resting near Monmouth Courthouse, thirty miles from Sandy Hook, where British ships would ferry them up the bay to New York.
That same Saturday, Washington gave Charles Lee a specific order to attack the British rear guard on the morrow. Although Steuben had been out scouting the British position, Lee remained unfamiliar with the terrain. He decided that the situation was too fluid to make detailed plans.
Hessian general Knyphausen led the British baggage train and part of the army out of camp at four o’clock on the morning of June 28, 1779. Clinton planned to take the main body of the army a little way down the road until he determined the rebels’ intentions. Lord Cornwallis would stay at Monmouth with the two-thousand-man rear guard.
Lee assigned Wayne’s brigade, two Pennsylvania regiments, to lead the attack. Wayne’s men marched out and crashed into the British near the courthouse. The Americans deployed into a line of battle and began shooting. Lee sent brigades to the right and left, forming a pincer to envelope Cornwallis’s men with two times their number. “The rear guard of the enemy is ours,” Lee boasted in a message to Washington. Hot firing pounded a staccato along Wayne’s front and he found himself pressured by charging British cavalry. He called for reinforcements.
In the growing heat, confusion hampered the American deployments. Some officers did not receive orders, some acted without orders. Wayne wanted to push ahead. Lafayette pulled his men back to reposition them. Other officers did the same, thinking the line was retreating. Daniel Morgan and his riflemen never reached the field, which had become a “great anthill” of moving men. “The dust and smoke . . . sometimes so shut out the view that one could form no idea of what was going on,” one officer lamented.26
The gist of what was going on soon became clear. Clinton had countermarched his main force and sent an additional five thousand men into the fray to back up Cornwallis. The all-out battle that the American officers had feared was now unavoidable.
Sensing that the attack had gone very wrong and worried about losing his whole detachment, Lee called a retreat. Wayne protested, but the danger was very real. It was no time for bravado. Pulling off an orderly retreat in the face of an enemy attack is one of the most difficult of military operations. Lee managed to disengage and maneuver his men back through terrain broken by ravines and wetlands.
Meanwhile, George Washington was moving toward the sound of the guns with the rest of the army. He heard rumors of a retreat and refused to believe them. Lee would have informed him. But as he approached the edge of a ravine, he encountered a steady stream of men moving in the opposite direction.
General Lee himself came up. His intention, probably, was to form his men near that very spot, where the oncoming British would have to attack uphill. Washington reined in his lathered horse and confronted the man who had disobeyed his orders, had defied him. In a blistering passion, he demanded “What is this? What is this unaccountable retreat?” Lafayette said Washington cursed Lee as “a damned poltroon,” others that he swore “till the leaves shook on the trees.” By one report, Lee, ordinarily so voluble, was dumbfounded at the reprimand and could only stammer, “Sir. Sir.”27
With the enemy advancing and musket fire mounting, the two red-faced generals had time for only a brief horseback confrontation. Washington’s aides credited his personal charisma with stopping the retreat and forming a line of battle. An observer attributed “the orderly manner in which the Americans retreated” to the discipline Steuben had instilled in them.28
The British came on fast. The second phase of the daylong battle was about to begin. The task of stopping the enemy until units could be sorted out and order restored went to Anthony Wayne. He took three regiments and two field guns more than a half mile east toward the enemy and arrayed them in the face of the Hessian grenadiers, British infantrymen, and mounted dragoons.
Wayne’s men let loose a volley that brought the advancing troops to their knees. The British reformed and again came on. Another volley. Wayne’s men beat back three charges before they were overwhelmed and had to give way. Wayne marched them rearward and inserted them into the solid line that Washington had formed at the top of the ravine. Nathanael Greene took command of the American right, Lord Stirling of the left. Steuben, thrilled to be breathing gun smoke in battle for the first time in twenty years, rallied men and returned them to the fight. Henry Knox directed the firing of the artillery.
This second fight would last all afternoon. As summer pressed its hot palm onto the field, the British struggled forward and were repulsed. Men on both sides fired, reloaded, fired again. The air, Private Joseph Plumb Martin noted, was like “the mouth of a heated oven,” making it “almost impossible to breathe.”29 Many grew disoriented with the heat. Men’s minds disappeared down echoing tunnels. Dozens on both sides dropped dead with heatstroke.
Knox, sweating profusely, set up a battery and directed his gunners in holding off British advances with accurate shots. The thundering guns licked out blasts of flame and smoke that turned the hot air thick and sour. For a while, the gut-punching boom of artillery dominated the action. The stunning noise was louder than ears could hear. It was “the severest cannonade,” a newspaper correspondent observed, “that it is thought ever happened in America.”30
Around six in the evening, Clinton saw that he could neither break through nor outmaneuver his enemy. He decided to end the engagement. Wayne urged a counterattack, but Washington realized that his men were “beat out with heat and fatigue.” The troops slumped to the ground in their sweat-salted clothes, still in line of battle and muskets at the ready. Dead bodies lay where they had fallen.
Washington himself stretched out under a large oak tree just behind the lines. Lafayette shared his cloak. When the sky brightened, there was no one to attack. Clinton had kept his campfires burning as he slipped quietly toward safety in New York.
After Monmouth, Anthony Wayne found himself famous. Washington reported to Congress that all his officers had performed superbly, but singled out Wayne, “whose good conduct and bravery thro’ the whole action, deserves particular commendation.”31 Having dreamed of military glory since his days on the schoolyard, Anthony Wayne had finally achieved it.
Lee had led his men poorly, but having saved his command from destruction, he felt that he hardly deserved an ignominious dressing down from the commander in chief. He waited for Washington’s apology. When it did not come, he wrote a series of ill-considered, vituperative letters to his superior, labeling his Excellency’s most trusted advisers “dirty earwigs” and referring to Washington’s “tinsel dignity.” He demanded a court-martial to clear his name. Washington gave it to him. Lee’s fellow officers convicted him of disobeying orders, instigating a disorderly retreat, and disrespecting the commander. His punishment was a one-year suspension from the service. He would continue to hector Congress until the members dismissed him from the army altogether.
The Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, militarily a draw, had demonstrated the pride and discipline that Steuben’s drills had instilled into the American soldiers. They had stood in the open field against Britain’s best and acquitted themselves favorably. The winter’s ordeal had prompted Washington to trust, even to love, the ordinary soldiers who served under him. They had shown “incomparable patience and fidelity,” he wrote.32 His generals had also proven their growing capability. Washington had gathered around him a cadre of loyal and effective senior officers: Greene, Knox, Stirling, Steuben, Lafayette.
Now, after two long years of fighting, both armies had returned to almost the identical positions they had held in the autumn of 1776: the British fortified in New York City, the Americans hovering around them in the Hudson Highlands and New Jersey. Although none knew it at the time, Monmouth, the longest battle of the entire war, was to be the last major clash in the north. As Washington waited in a “disagreeable state of suspence,” the strategic axis of the conflict was about to shift.