His Excellency: George Washington (17 page)

One of the quaint customs of eighteenth-century warfare was the belief that armies should not fight during the winter. Having botched his chance to trap Washington’s decimated force on Manhattan, Howe now proceeded to miss another opportunity—it would turn out to be his last—to hunt down the crippled residue of the Continental army as it limped across New Jersey in November 1776. He chose instead to place his troops in winter quarters around Trenton while he himself returned to New York and the arms of his mistress. Washington, on the other hand, who by all rights should have welcomed the opportunity to hibernate and lick his wounds, was still thinking offensively. “As nothing but necessity obliged me to retire before the Enemy,” he wrote to Hancock, “I conceive it my duty, and it corresponds with my Inclination, to make head against them so long as there shall be the least probability of doing it with propriety.” Apart from his own inclinations, which probably referred to his personal urge to redeem his somewhat tattered reputation after the New York debacle, Washington recognized that the entire movement for American independence was on the verge of extinction and might very well expire on its own over the winter. He needed to “strike some Stroke.”
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The result took the form of a surprise attack, on Christmas night, across the ice-choked Delaware River, subsequently immortalized in Emanuel Leutze’s famous painting. Recent scholarship has corrected certain long-standing misconceptions about this pivotal battle, which is generally regarded as Washington’s most tactically brilliant operation of the war and the moment when the Continental army went on the offensive for the first time.

First, art historians have argued that Washington could not possibly have been standing in the prow of the boat, as the Leutze painting claims, for he would have been hurled headlong into the ice. But the boats used for the crossing were not as Leutze described. They were high-walled barges akin to the landing craft used for amphibious assaults in World War II, and everyone stood up in them. The Leutze painting is at least symbolically correct in the sense that Washington personally led the assault across the river in a driving sleet storm and was in the vanguard of the attack on the garrison of Hessian mercenaries at Trenton.

Second, the legend that the Hessian soldiers were drunk, sleeping off their Christmas cheer, is a myth. The Hessians were exhausted because they had been on round-the-clock alert for over a week expecting an attack. When Washington’s 2,400 troops descended upon them, they fought bravely, but were outgunned by the eighteen artillery pieces Henry Knox had somehow managed to transport across the river. They suffered about a hundred casualties, and nine hundred were captured. American casualties were minimal, though among the handful of wounded was a future president, Lieutenant James Monroe.

Third, Washington’s plan for the attack on Trenton, like most of his tactical schemes, was excessively intricate, calling for a carefully timed four-pronged assault. Three of the four American units never made it across the river, confronting Washington with the decision to proceed with questionable resources or abandon the attack. He chose to run the risk, figuring that the American cause was so desperate that boldness ran fewer risks than caution. It was an all-or-nothing wager, and he won it.
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A week later he did it again at Princeton. Embarrassed at the unexpected defeat at Trenton, the British sent General Charles Cornwallis with a superior force to attack Washington’s army encamped at Trenton. But Washington learned of the planned attack and quietly slipped away in the night, marching his six thousand troops toward Princeton, where Cornwallis’s rear guard was stationed. Again the British were surprised, this time in a more conventional battle with several artillery exchanges and bayonet charges.

Sighting: January 3, 1777

The Pennsylvania militia have just broken in the face of heavy musket fire and grape shot. Suddenly, Washington appears among them, urging them to rally and form a line behind him. A detachment of New England Continentals joins the line, which first holds and then begins to move forward with Washington front-and-center astride his white English charger. The British troops are placed behind a fence at the crest of a hill. Within fifty yards bullets begin to whistle and men in the front of the American line begin to drop. At thirty yards Washington orders a halt and both sides exchange volleys simultaneously. An aide, Colonel Edward Fitzgerald, covers his face with his hat, certain that his commander, so conspicuous a target, was cut down. But while men on both sides of him have fallen, Washington remains atop his horse, untouched. He turns toward Fitzgerald, takes his hand, and says: “Away my dear Colonel, and bring up the troops. The day is ours.” And it was.
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The Trenton-Princeton combination did not inflict serious military damage on the British, but it did force Howe to rethink his troop deployments in New Jersey, and, most importantly, it had a massive psychological effect on American public opinion. What had appeared to be a lost cause now enjoyed a new lease on life. The two actions also served as defiant gestures by Washington himself that fight was still in him. Having made that point, though his aggressive instincts would remain a dangerous liability, he never again felt it necessary to risk his entire army in one battle. It was as if he had successfully answered the challenge to duel, and now could afford to adopt a more defensive strategy without worrying about his personal honor and reputation. He also began to realize that the way to win the war was not to lose it.

THE FABIAN CHOICE

E
VEN BEFORE HE
entered his winter quarters at Morristown, Washington apprised Hancock that his only non-negotiable request, verging on a demand, was for “a permanent standing army” which he would have total power to shape into the kind of hard and sharp instrument necessary to persevere in a long war. “It may be said, that this is an application for powers, that are too dangerous to be intrusted,” he acknowledged. “I can only add, that desperate diseases require desperate remedies, and with truth declare, that I have no lust for power but wish with as much fervency as any man upon this wide extended Continent for an Opportunity of turning the Sword into a ploughshare.” The Continental Congress granted his request for a temporary delegation of dictatorial power—the situation truly was desperate, and they had no alternative—but its own limited power over the states to fill the manpower quotas meant that Hancock’s strong expressions of support, plus the bounties offered for volunteers who served three-year enlistments, remained hopeful wishes that never quite came true. “It is certainly astonishing and will hardly be credited hereafter,” wrote one of Washington’s in-laws, “that the most deserving, the most favorite General of the 13 united American States, should be left by them, with only about 2500 men, to support the most important Cause that mankind ever engaged in agst the whole Power of British Tyranny.” Actually, as enlistments expired in January 1777, Washington’s army probably numbered about three thousand, though he felt obliged to conceal the real number, lest the British realize that a winter campaign would surely end the war, almost by default. Washington spent much of the winter waiting to see if enough new recruits would show up to form an army capable of a spring campaign.
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He made two important decisions at Morristown. First, he recognized that the smallpox problem required a more comprehensive solution. “If the Hospitals are in no better condition,” he told Hancock, “our Regiments will be reduced to Companies by the end of the Campaign, and those poor Wretches who escape with life, will either be scattered up and down the Country and not to be found, or if found, totally enervated and unfit for further duty.” Given his manpower difficulty, he could ill afford to see a quarter of his troops incapacitated, as had occurred in New York; or else, he warned, “we must look for Reinforcements to some other places than our own States,” presumably referring to the Kingdom of Heaven. In March 1777 he made inoculation mandatory and set up special hospitals in Philadelphia to implement the new policy.
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Second, less out of conviction than a realistic recognition of his limited resources, Washington came to accept the fact that he must adopt a more defensive strategy and fight a “War of Posts.” Also called a “Fabian strategy” after the Roman general Fabius Cunctator, who defeated the Carthaginians by withdrawing whenever his army’s fate was at risk, it was a shift in thinking that did not come naturally to Washington. A Fabian strategy, like guerrilla and terrorist strategies of the twentieth century, was the preferred approach of the weak. Washington did not believe that he was weak, and he thought of the Continental army as a projection of himself. He regarded battle as a summons to display one’s strength and courage; avoiding battle was akin to dishonorable behavior, like refusing to move forward in the face of musket and cannon fire. Nevertheless, he was now forced to face what he called “the melancholy Truths.” New York had demonstrated that the Continental army could not compete on equal terms with British regulars on the conventional battlefield; and given the reduced size of his current force, “it is impossible, at least very unlikely, that any effectual opposition can be given to the British Army with the Troops we have.” The most bitter and melancholy truth of all was that popular support for the war, the essential engine for producing new recruits, continued to sputter despite the Trenton and Princeton victories. (One French partisan of the cause claimed that “there is a hundred times more enthusiasm for the Revolution in any Paris café than in all the colonies together.”) In effect, he had no choice but to become an American Fabius, or else simply surrender.
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In late March 1777 he dispatched Nathanael Greene to brief the Continental Congress on his revised strategy. “I explained to the House your Excellency’s Ideas of the next Campaign,” Greene reported; “it appeared to be new to them.” The Congress was apparently taken aback, because a Fabian strategy meant that Washington did not intend to defend Philadelphia at all costs if Howe chose to make it his target. His highest priority was not to occupy or protect ground, but rather to harass Howe while preserving his army. Adams, writing from Philadelphia, assured Abigail that he was safe: “We are under no more apprehensions here than if the British Army was in the Crimea. Our Fabius will be slow, but sure.” Richard Henry Lee, another delegate in the Congress, informed Washington not to worry about defending Philadelphia: “Your Army Sir, feeble as it is, and the North river, are more tempting objects.”
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What Lee called the North River was another name for the Hudson. Lee’s assessment, in retrospect, was strategically correct: Howe should either have attempted to destroy Washington’s army, or he should have occupied the Hudson corridor, probably by joining up with General John Burgoyne’s army coming down from Lake Champlain. Each of these goals had decisive strategic implications. Instead, Howe decided to capture Philadelphia, which had symbolic but no strategic value, and he chose to launch his campaign in the most roundabout manner imaginable. Rather than march overland across New Jersey, he loaded his army onto ships at Staten Island, sailed out into the Atlantic, and eventually circled back toward Philadelphia through the Chesapeake Bay. Befuddled by Howe’s summer cruise, Adams joked that he “might as well imagine them gone round Cape horn into the South Seas to land at California.” If nothing else, Howe’s odd tactics thoroughly confused Washington, who needed to keep his troops ready to move quickly either toward the Hudson or toward Philadelphia, contingent on where the winds carried Howe. By August 1777, once it was clear that Howe’s army was coming up from the south toward Philadelphia, Washington entered his Fabian phase.
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The orders issued from headquarters continued to reflect the old patriotic rhetoric and the old Washington preference for decisive and aggressive action: “Now is the time for our most strenuous exertions—One bold stroke will free the land from rapine devastations and burnings, and female innocence from brutal lust and violence. . . . The eyes of all America, and of Europe are turned upon us, as on those on whom the event of the war is to be determined.” His personal correspondence also exhibited his reflexive urge to throw caution to the winds and engage Howe without fear and without constraints: “I shall take every measure in my power to defend it [Philadelphia],” he wrote to one worried city official, “and hope you will agree with me that the only effectual Method will be to oppose Gen. Howe with our whole united Force.” But in all the councils of war his generals, especially Greene and Knox, kept reminding him—and one senses that they
had
to keep reminding him—that preserving the Continental army was a higher priority than protecting Philadelphia. The lion had to become the fox.
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The first battle occurred at Brandywine Creek on September 11, 1777. Washington was outmaneuvered by Howe’s quite simple flanking tactic, which split the American defenders and created a complete rout. Howe subsequently claimed that the entire Continental army could have been destroyed but for the cover of darkness at the end, but that extravagant assessment failed to recognize that Washington had left himself an escape route once the battle went badly. (It also failed to recognize the upside of the American troops’ failure to stand and fight; namely, they ran away very well.) British casualties totaled about six hundred, American nearly double that number. In the aftermath of what was clearly another British victory, Washington attributed the defeat to bad luck and claimed, in an eighteenth-century version of spin control, that American casualties were fewer than the enemy’s, a falsehood that he probably justified as a public service to the wavering cause. Brandywine reinforced two unattractive facts: first, that the superior discipline of British regulars made them masters of the battlefield unless vastly outnumbered; and second, that Washington’s inexperience at managing his force on a large battlefield beyond his visual control virtually guaranteed that he would be outgeneralled by Howe.
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