Volume 4, Chapter 41, Winter at Valley Forge
Washington now sensibly prepared to take his battered and half-fed men into winter quarters rather than endure the rigors of another winter campaign as they had done the previous year.
He favored quarters at Wilmington, where supplies would be plentiful and the weather mild.
Furthermore, Delaware and Maryland could be guarded, and American boats could harass British
shipping on the Delaware.
The officers favored this plan, but in deference to Pennsylvania's howls against letting the
British Army ravage the countryside, and at the suggestion of Wayne, Washington weekly
and unfortunately decided to winter on the icy slopes of Valley Forge to the west of
Philadelphia.
Few worse locations for obtaining supplies could have been selected than this ravaged
area.
Generals James Varnum and Baron DeKalb were particularly vehement at wintering in this
desert.
On December 19, Washington's army, short of food and water, poorly sheltered and terribly
short of shoes and other clothing, staggered into the ill-conceived camp at Valley Forge.
In these conditions, disease spread like wildfire through the camp.
To obtain food, both the American and British forces sent foraging parties to confiscate
cattle and other supplies from the hapless citizens.
By the spring of 1778, massive desertions had reduced Washington's army to five or
six thousand men.
Greene was appointed quartermaster general in the emergency, and he was able to scrape
During the campaigns of 1777, a suspicion began to well up among many Americans that
Gates was an excellent general and Washington a miserable one, and that maybe something
should be done about it.
In Congress, forced to meet in the small town of York, Pennsylvania, it was the men of the
The American Left that were restive, notably Joseph Lovell and Sam Adams of Massachusetts.
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a leading Pennsylvania liberal and chief physician in Washington's
Army, urged his replacement by a Gates, Lee or Conway, Thomas Conway being a capable Irish-born
French general recently commissioned in the Continental Army.
In November 1777, Congress advanced a step toward erecting a professional bureaucracy
by creating a five-man Board of War, not composed of members of Congress, to supervise the Army.
As Chairman of the Board, Congress appointed the hero Gates, who was then too ill for field
command.
This apparent attempt to downgrade Washington and elevate Gates never got underway, in fact
never reached the stature of an organized campaign. Indeed, no one in Congress ever
proposed the replacement of Washington or even the curtailing of his powers. Two major
factors contributed to the crushing of any murmurs of dissent against the Commander in
and Chief. One was Washington's ruthless use of an indiscretion, he discovered, a letter
critical of him sent by Gates to Conway. Washington and his influential friends immediately conjured
up a non-existent widespread plot, the mythical Conway cabal, supposedly designed to scuttle
Both Roche and Conway were soon forced out of the army by the vindictive Washington.
Conway's fall and subsequent emigration and Gates's decline were also spurred by a madcap plan Gates had for another expedition to invade Canada and possibly take Montreal.
This proposed expedition was to be independent of Washington's command and was to be headed
by the vain, young French Catholic volunteer, the Marquis de Lafayette, in a rather far-fetched
scheme to appeal to the French-Canadian masses.
But Lafayette, ever worshipful of his patron Washington, refused to be independent of his
as Commander-in-Chief and bitterly denounced the supposed conspirator Conway as responsible
for an intrigue against Washington.
When the proposed expedition fell through in March 1778, the failure hastened the demise
of all incipient opposition to Washington.
The Board of War fell into a decline and Gates in virtual disgrace and subject to Washington's
Arnold's continuing vengeance was assigned a tiny and innocuous command on the Hudson Highlands.
Thus, history had dealt in high irony with the victors at Saratoga. Gates, after the winter of 1777-78, was relegated out of the action to a minor command.
Arnold, seriously wounded and crippled at Bemis Heights, was never again to bear arms for the United States, and Schuler, who for all his faults had after all harried and delayed Burgoyne in his march from Skeensboro, was in disgrace, suspected, with some justice, of treason.
He, too, was never again to serve in the army, though eventually acquitted at court-martial for his actions at Ticonderoga. He left the army shortly after.
Of the main victors over Burgoyne, only Morgan was to continue in action, and even he was soon to be treated shabbily by George Washington.
Washington. Meanwhile, Washington, the architect of defeat, surmounted a flurry of opposition
and continued more firmly in command than ever. As if the ragged soldiers at Valley
Forge did not have enough troubles, they were to be further plagued by the arrival in February
of a mendacious Prussian braggart and soldier of fortune calling himself Baron von Stubben.
Actually, Captain Steuben was neither a baron nor, as he claimed, a Prussian general.
But he managed quickly to be elevated to the post of Inspector General of the Continental Army.
Steuben set about to Prussianize the American Army.
And so now the hapless soldieries suffered the infliction of the whole structure of petty and meaningless routine,
designed to stamp out individuality and transform the free and responsible soldier into an automaton
subject to the will of his rulers. Ever since he had embarked on the Philadelphia campaign,
Washington had grown ever further away from the guerrilla tactics that had won him victory
at Trenton and had defeated Burgoyne. Washington had no desire to become a guerrilla chieftain
To his aristocratic temper, the only path to glory was through open frontal combat as
practiced by the great states of Europe. Washington had tried this formula and lost dismally at
Brandywine and at Germantown, but this experience taught him no real lessons. He was delighted
to have Steuben continue the process he himself had begun the first year of the war of imposing
and petty enslavement upon a body of free men. Until recently, historians have rapsodized
uncritically over the benefits of Steuben's training, of the enormous difference in the
army's performance. But Washington's and his army's performance was equally undistinguished
before and after Steuben. Any differences were scarcely visible.
In the midst of this Prussianizing of the American Army, Charles Lee was released in
a prisoner exchange in early April. While Washington and Steuben were taking the Army
in an ever more European direction, Lee, in captivity, was moving the other way, pursuing
his insights into a full-fledged and elaborated proposal for guerrilla warfare. He presented
and his plan to Congress as a plan for the formation of the American Army.
Bitterly attacking Steuben's training of the Army according to the European plan, Lee charged
that fighting British regulars on their own terms was madness and court had crushing defeat.
If the Americans are servilely kept to the European plan, they will be laughed at as
As a bad army by their enemy and defeated in every encounter, the idea that a decisive
action in fair ground may be risked is talking nonsense. Instead, he declared that a plan
of defense, harassing and impeding, can alone succeed, particularly if based on the rough
terrain west of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He also urged the use of cavalry
and of Light Infantry in the manner of Dan Morgan, both forces highly mobile and eminently
suitable for the guerrilla strategy. This strategic plan was ignored both by Congress
and by Washington, all eagerly attuned to the new fashion of Prussianizing and to the
attractions of a real army. Lee made himself further disliked by expressing yearnings for
for a Negotiated Peace with Full Autonomy for America within the British Empire.
During his year in captivity, it seems he had partially reverted to the position of the English Whigs.
He did not realize that the United States was now totally committed to independence,
and that peace terms that would have been satisfactory three years earlier would no longer do.
Too much should not be made of this, however, General Sullivan in his earlier term of captivity
had also been temporarily persuaded of similar views.
On reaching camp in late May, Lee soon embittered Washington by scorning Washington's abilities
and praising Gates's in a letter to his friend Benjamin Rush.
He did succeed, however, in having Steuben's powers curtailed.
He also increased his unpopularity by objecting to, though reluctantly taking, a loyalty oath
of allegiance to the U.S. and repudiating Great Britain, an oath forced upon every officer
in the Army.
The old scourge of the Tories, the coercer of loyalty oaths, seemed to be growing soft.
During the winter of 1777-78, Howe lost his last opportunity to crush Washington's army.
Only 20 miles away, and drilling for open combat, it would have been easy prey.
But Howe and his troops remained in Philadelphia.
While the Americans froze, starved and drilled, they reveled and partied, luxuriously enjoying
the fiddles, wine and women of Philadelphia.
On May 18, Washington, chafing at the inactivity, sent out a force of 2,200 men, one-third of
his army, for a reconnaissance in force against the British. He placed in command of this
pointless foray, the Marquis de Lafayette, who was apparently being rewarded for his
assiduous flattery of the commander-in-chief. Now he could have his own command and end
and his pouting, but twenty-two hundred men seems an extravagant price for soothing Washington's
protege. Lafayette advanced to Barron Hill, only two miles north of the British lines,
and settled down to wait. He did not have to wait long. Howe, about to be replaced by
Clinton as commander-in-chief, was determined to end his term on a triumphal note by capturing
and the Young Frenchman. But Lafayette, nearly surrounded, managed to elude the enemy with
his troops and to speed back home without fighting a major battle.
Upon the collapse of Burgoyne, General Howe, joined by his brother, submitted his resignation.
After furious objections by Howe's well-placed friends and relatives, Germain replaced him
with General Clinton, who assumed command in mid-May.
With the end of Howe's term, the last chance for a quick crushing of the American forces
had gone, for France was entering the war on the American side.
For Britain, the character of the war had now unpleasantly changed.
From trying to teach a lesson to revolutionaries, Britain now faced an international, transatlantic,
even a worldwide conflict. The first thing to do was end the occupation of Philadelphia,
which at best had been a waste of time. Howe had thought of Philadelphia as equivalent
to a European capital, the hub and nerve center of administrative, commercial, political and
military life. But in a decentralized people's war, such as the Americans were waging, there
There was no fixed nerve center. Indeed, there was scarcely any central government at all.
All this gave the Americans a flexibility and an ability to absorb invading armies in a manner highly stratified Europe could not understand.