Valley Forge: George Washington and the Crucible of Victory (18 page)

Tilghman shrugged his shoulders sadly.

“The last first. Them marching on us? I doubt it. Morgan, Wayne, and their scouts, though roughed up these last few days, still have spies moving in and out of the city. There are no indications of a sally. They are too busy
gorging, wenching, and now even preparing pageants and plays to entertain themselves, laughing that all they need do now is sit back and let us starve. Their spies are, without doubt, on to us as well, and are reporting with derisive humor our dire predicament. Why bother to fight us and shed more blood, and endure the discomfort of the field, when nature itself will deal with us? A week of blizzard and freeze or, worse yet, a week of icy rain will finish us once and for all. That is how precarious our hold now is.”

“Food?” Lafayette asked.

Tilghman smiled.

“A herd of swine are being driven down from Reading—if the damn things don’t run off, they should arrive here tomorrow afternoon. A hundred head, at least, enough meat for a few more days. Cattle coming in and, I heard, a dozen wagonloads of ground corn from the Reading area as well.”

He ran the numbers in his head. A dozen wagons, a pound of corn or bread per man. No, a pound and a quarter or more, given the number that marched off this morning.

Crisis averted for a few more days at least.

How pathetic that we are down to counting days,
Lafayette mused. Back home, the king’s depots stored enough rations to keep an army of a hundred thousand in the field for at least a year, if need be, with proper roads and canals laid out to bring up more, from the border of the Netherlands clear down to the coastal plains facing Italy.

“Shall we go write our letters?” Tilghman asked, producing his pocket watch and flipping it open to observe the time. “The dispatch rider awaits, the general’s reports are already signed, and I am certain a few letters from you would be heaven-sent at this point, my friend.”

Lafayette smiled and clapped him on the shoulder.

York, Pennsylvania
January 4, 1778

Fuming, General Gates looked through the stack of correspondence. The report by Wilkinson, describing the departure of over a quarter of Washington’s army, came as no surprise. His own agents had reported that probability to him long before the men paraded on the morning of the first of this New Year. Their reasons for not reenlisting were now laid out in his own report to the Board of War. Mismanagement on the field of battle, the utter failure of
Washington to attend to the most fundamental needs of those whom he was duty-bound to provide for, the useless deaths from disease, starvation, and exposure—it was now all in his report.

And yet it was the reports in the other letters that had arrived that now caused his simmering rage.

Though the exact copy had not been revealed to him, apparently the president of Congress had received an entreaty from his own son, serving with Washington, denouncing the Board of War, blaming them for the failure of supplies, containing in that report the veiled hint that if command was changed the army would desert en masse. A report as well that the French upstart Lafayette was spreading rumors that he was considering resigning, returning to France, and there denouncing before the Court at Versailles the entire war effort if the general he was a toady for was removed.

Conway was not helping matters at all. Upon his return, he stormed around the tavern and the courthouse that now served as the hall for Congress, bitterly denouncing his treatment at the hands of Washington. He demanded a letter of authorization from Laurens, signed by all members of Congress, reaffirming his promotion to major general. Washington must respect him, and all his recommendations as to the reorganization of the army per his orders as inspector general must be adhered to as coming directly from Congress, under threat of court-martial if Washington did not instantly obey.

“So what are you going to do?”

He looked up from the stack of papers at Dr. Benjamin Rush.

“What do you mean?”

“Precisely what I asked. He is calling your bluff. This confrontation was bound to come sooner or later. He is calling for a letter of endorsement from President Laurens. He is calling for a reorganization of the system of supply. He is calling for an endorsement that if need be, he may commandeer supplies as needed, based on promissory notes issued by him but sent then directly to Congress, for which we shall be responsible. Surely that is an action which the state government of Pennsylvania will object to in the extreme.”

“That is outside his authority to do,” Gates sniffed.

“He is not taking this lying down,” Rush replied, and Gates wondered if there was almost a note of admiration in the doctor’s voice, even though the man had affirmed after yesterday’s meetings that he felt the commanding general’s time, at least for now, had passed.

“He has made no response whatsoever to the letters of remonstration from Pennsylvania regarding regaining control of the west bank of the Schuylkill
River. Nor will he send troops back into New Jersey. He declares that such matters of military necessity must rest with him and not with Congress. He has denounced your ally General Conway, openly saying that the power of promotion finally rests with him, though he will consider the advice and consent of Congress during this time of war.”

Rush gazed at Gates. “It is a direct challenge to your Board of War.”

“My Board of War?” Gates retorted. “You voted for it, so it is yours as well.”

“But you insisted upon being appointed head of that board, so the challenge is to you, sir.”

“Do you think he must be replaced?”

Rush hesitated, and then finally nodded.

“You know I supported him in his desperate move against Trenton last Christmas, and then in the march around the British flank at Princeton, and on to the winter camp established at Morristown. But a year of unrelenting defeats since then, the horrors I witnessed at Brandywine, the state of our prisoners, the manner in which the British are far better prepared to treat their sick and wounded while we lack in everything, has turned my soul, reluctant as it was, to this decision. I have placed my trust in you, sir, and you are being challenged. What shall you do?”

Gates leaned back in his chair, looking at a half-empty glass of Madeira, motioning to it. The innkeeper came over with a fresh decanter. Without any pretense of gentlemanly behavior, Gates marked off on a tally sheet the charge of four shillings sterling, a practice he openly engaged in after Congress had failed to pay him the weekly charges, offering Continentals rather than Crown or Dutch silver. He refilled his glass and drained it.

“I shall face him down. I must. Laurens knows that Congress is increasingly behind me. I won at Saratoga. I have ultimately won on every field I commanded.”

Rush said nothing for a moment. Gates had commanded on his own at Saratoga? If the other reports were to be believed, those written in the halting hand of Morgan, or the bitter denouncements of Arnold, still in convalescence from his nobly gained wounds in that fight, Gates had faced nothing short of mutiny from the other generals in the field. His fellow generals believed they had won Saratoga despite him, not because of him.

Though Rush did indeed fear the Caesarism that many whispered was the ultimate goal of Washington and those fanatical followers around him, such as Greene, Lord Stirling, and Wayne, he wondered now if he was indeed
betting on the right horse. Disgusted as he was by the horrors he had witnessed on the battlefields and in the hospitals where he worked side by side with British surgeons, the flood of correspondence that had come in from General Washington and his supporters had caught him and the other members of Congress off guard.

He had spent the last few days examining the records of Mifflin, one of Gates’s cronies, and his tenure as quartermaster. Tens of thousands of dollars had disappeared, the loss blamed on paperwork between state Commissary Departments and the Continental government. The arbitrary prices fixed by the different entities, often in conflict, were a source of endless confusion, and the losers were the armies, which were starving. That and the insistence that payment for supplies would be made in Continental scrip had played straight into British hands. What fool would accept five pounds Continental for a full-grown sow when a British purchasing agent would pay half a crown sterling—and a full crown if the animal weighed three hundred pounds or more?

Page after page of such quotas and arbitrary prices for everything, from chickens and pigs to the paper and ink on which his own documents were written, had been created by Mifflin. And around it the taint that was buried in all the mountains of paperwork. There were the inflated charges for transport, for wagons to be commissioned by Mifflin with per diem charges that smelled of kickbacks to contractors for supplies, mules, and wagons.

No wonder the entire system had collapsed and even patriot families hid their stock away at the approach of Continental purchasing agents. And in the richest farmland of all the thirteen states, the realm west of Philadelphia out to Lancaster and north to Reading, land rich enough to support a hundred thousand men in the field for an entire winter, barely a sow or head of cattle could now be found.

He had thrown in with Gates and his side. He could not shake his truly Republican fear of Washington’s proposed solution: long-term enlistments of three years or the duration of the war, along with payment to be forwarded to him in hard cash for troops and their supplies. It was anathema to any true patriot, he reasoned. The notion of men of three years’ enlistment did indeed smack of the ancient Romans or the professional armies of Europe, which they now fought against.

The dream had always been that a yeomanry of free landholders, such as in the days of Rome before the Carthaginian wars, would be the backbone of this fight. History taught him that when Rome, under the so-called Marian
reforms, had gone to a professional fighting force, Caesar and Augustus waited in the wings, to bend such forces to their personal ambitions.

And yet Washington, for so many the embodiment of all the ideals of a Cincinnatus, now argued the loudest for three years’ enlistments, for a professional, well-trained army of the Continental Line, as he called it. Washington argued that a professional army that could stand volley to volley against Howe’s professionals was their only way to victory.

Rush had thrown in with Gates because of his belief that this should never be the case. It had been the undoing of liberty in the English Civil War of the 1640s. Cromwell had insisted upon training what he called his “New Model Army,” a professional force of long enlistments, the men drilled with ruthless proficiency, able at last to stand against the Royalists, and indeed they had won their war. But less than three years later, he had unleashed them against the very Parliament they were sworn to defend, putting their loyalty, as did Caesar’s legions, to their general rather than to the cause to which they had first pledged themselves.

England then lived under a harsh dictatorship for more than a decade.

A Washington dictatorship? He knew that both Samuel and John Adams, though not vocal, had whispered concerns about such a possibility. Others had as well.

But this alternative? Gates?

He looked at the man closely. Gates would understand that the base of his power was in the support of Congress, which Washington by his own correspondence and that of his fanatical followers was all but openly willing to challenge, with blame for the debacle unfolding at Valley Forge.

Gates called for an army of militias—if need be, to disband the pathetic scarecrows encamped at Valley Forge. Send them all home to resupply, to nourish themselves in their own farms and villages. To put in their spring plantings—their families to sew new uniforms and fill their haversacks with rations—and then sally forth in the tens of thousands to drive out the invaders.

What good was enduring the nightmare of trying to keep the small band at Valley Forge alive over the next four months?

Send them home, except for a small, elite guard. Let them feed themselves off their own farms rather than the bankrupt public weal, and let them return in the spring.

And yet, as he looked at the man he had allied with, he wondered yet again if he had chosen the right path. His heart, so torn by the nightmares he had
witnessed in the fall, said that he had made the right choice. His soul told him something different: that this war entered into a realm few had dreamed of in their worst nightmares of but a year and a half past.

How could he ever imagine that his own father-in-law, a signer of the Declaration, would be turncoat? That his wife, back in Philadelphia, would play upon that change as a means of negotiating protection of their own home, which at this very moment was filled with British officers. Fellow surgeons, to be sure—and, as such, they would extend to him a professional courtesy of protecting his property—but still he felt a deep twinge of self-loathing for having entered into such arrangements to protect his own.

He looked down at the stack of paperwork spread out on the table between him and Gates.

“It is obvious,” Gates announced, his voice pitched loud enough so that others in the tavern could hear, “that our beloved General Washington has dismissed Major General Conway without the respect due to a man appointed by this Congress and approved by the Board of War, and I ask you, sir, what your intentions are in regard to this.”

Rush leaned forward, feeling an inner rage building.

“Do not pressure me,” he whispered softly. “You know you have my support; let us not make a public show of denouncing a man who served as he was asked to by the Continental Congress.”

Gates swallowed hard and held his hands up in entreaty.

“I meant no such disrespect for General Washington,” he offered smoothly.

“Then let us keep it that way, sir.”

Others in the tavern had fallen silent, watching the two.

“Still, what we have learned of his secret correspondence with Laurens, the correspondence of that French upstart and his implied threats, and even the letters of Laurens’s son, is that they are an attack on my character, sir.”