Washington's General (23 page)

The march toward Valley Forge, twenty-five miles northwest of Philadelphia, signaled a temporary halt in the war, but a battle within the Continental army itself raged all the same. Exhausted American soldiers trooped into camp on December 19 and began building log huts to shield themselves from the cold, yet nothing could protect them from political maneuvering and a scandalous lack of supplies. Intrigue would not keep them clothed, they could not live on whispered plots, and the heat of dissension in Congress did nothing to keep them warm in Valley Forge.

Nathanael Greene's most formidible opponents in the winter of 1777-78 were not snow and ice, not Howe and Cornwallis, but some of his putative colleagues and fellow patriots. The defeats at Brandywine and Germantown, the fall of Philadelphia, and the loss of the Delaware River forts inspired a movement against not only the commander in chief but one of the men accused of manipulating him into bad decisions: Nathanael Greene.

His sternest and most powerful critic was, ironically enough, the army's only other Quaker general, Thomas Mifflin, Washington's onetime aide-de-camp and a respected warrior, businessman, and former member of the Continental Congress. The defeats of autumn 1777 left Mifflin distinctly unimpressed with Washington's military skills and with his choice of intimate advisers. He was not alone in this judgment, but he was uncommonly open about his opinions. Mifflin especially loathed Greene, believing he was both incompetent and too cautious. The fall of Philadelphia, where Mifflin had been based as the army's quartermaster general, only increased his complaints and criticisms. Philadelphia might have been saved, Mifflin said, but for Washington's indecisiveness and Greene's timidity. Greene, ever watchful for criticism–whether intended or not–was well aware of what Mifflin was saying behind his back. “General Mifflin and his creatures,” he wrote, “have been endeavouring to wound my reputation. It is said that I govern the General and do every thing to damp the spirit of enterprize.”

That was precisely the criticism of the moment: Washington was weak and indecisive–a pale imitation of a commander when compared with the great Horatio Gates of Saratoga fame–and he was unduly influenced by Greene's cautious strategies. Mifflin had complained that the “ear of the Commander in Chief” was “exclusively possessed by Greene,” a development he deplored. Greene, Mifflin said, was “neither the most wise, the most brave nor the most patriotic of counselors.”

Mifflin's dyspeptic view of Washington and Greene had little trouble finding a friendly hearing within both the army and Congress. Benjamin Rush concluded that either Horatio Gates or the Irish immigrant Thomas Conway, a very junior brigadier general who had been at Brandywine and Germantown, ought to replace Washington. And the Adams cousins, John and Samuel, resented Washington's fame, which John Adams regarded as a danger “to our liberties.” But no member of Congress was as openly hostile to Washington, and to Greene, as another delegate from Massachusetts, James Lovell. He referred to Greene and Henry Knox as Washington's “privy counsellors” and said he spoke for many “disgusted patriots” who had come to despise “the reigning
Cabal” around Washington. It was just a matter of time, he said, before the army “will be divided into Greenites and Mifflinians.”

Even before the march to Valley Forge, tensions between Washington's supporters and his opponents worsened when Congress reorganized its moribund Board of War to reassert its authority over the army, which it had surrendered in late 1776 at Greene's urging. Thomas Mifflin won appointment to the three-member board, and he immediately resigned his position as quartermaster general. It was a scandalously selfish decision, for it left Washington without an officer in charge of supplies on the eve of winter. Mifflin soon persuaded Congress to expand the board to five members and just as quickly sponsored the nomination of Horatio Gates as the board's president. Gates now was well positioned to undermine Washington and establish himself as the heir apparent. Congress, in mid-December, further drove home a message to Washington and Greene by naming General Conway as the army's inspector general and promoting him from brigadier to major general. As inspector general, Conway was given power to periodically visit camp or the front lines and report his findings directly to Gates, Mifflin, and the other members of the Board of War. Greene regarded Conway as nothing less than a spy working on behalf of Mifflin and other anti-Washington forces, a sentiment the commander in chief seemed to share. When Conway complained to Congress that he had been “cooly received” when he showed up at Valley Forge, Washington replied in even chillier language. “My feelings,” he wrote, “will not permit me to make professions of friendship to a man I deem my enemy.”

And that enemy, Conway, and his sponsor, Mifflin, were now in a position to do more than merely criticize Washington and Greene. Mifflin, a talented and serious foe, had maneuvered brilliantly to find a prominent position for the very man he believed better suited to the job of commander in chief, Horatio Gates. Conway was in place as an independent auditor of Washington's army, answerable only to the board itself. And Gates, though not inclined to plot or conspire, seemed willing to entertain the idea of stepping into Washington's shoes.

Greene never doubted that there was a full-fledged conspiracy to
overthrow Washington and replace him with Gates. A certain faction, he wrote, “is said to be forming under the auspices of General Gates and General Mifflin, to supplant His Excellency from the command of the Army and get General Gates at the head of it. How success swells the vanity of the human heart.” Greene knew that if his commander in chief fell, he, too, would fall and be replaced by the likes of Conway or Mifflin. Historians have since suggested that the anti-Washington officers, members of what was called the Conway Cabal, never actually went beyond their pointed criticisms. Greene didn't believe it.

He treated Gates, Mifflin, and Conway not as colleagues but as enemies who must be crushed before they crushed him. He told other officers that Conway was a “very dangerous man,” a general with “small talents” and “great ambition.” Greene, of course, was not without ambition himself; ambition, in fact, had put him on this road to Valley Forge at the side of his commander in chief.

Through the early weeks of 1778, Greene unleashed a cannonade of letters designed to shred the reputations of his new foes, condemning Conway as “the greatest novice at war” and insisting, again, that Gates had been merely lucky at Saratoga. He wrote to the new president of Congress, Henry Laurens, to complain about Conway's promotion to major general, promising that in the future, “men of honor will decline the service,” while “low intrigue will be the characteristic and genius of the Army.”

Through his small number of friends and sympathizers in Congress, Greene monitored political gossip and debates about Washington's fate. A former aide named John Clark Jr. told him that Philadelphia was buzzing with rumors that Washington had written a letter requesting that Congress appoint Greene as commander in chief “if he fell.” This would have been seen as an invasion of congressional prerogative, another weapon to use against both Washington and Greene. No such letter has ever been found, but the rumor made the rounds and still was circulating in 1780, at another low point in the war. If nothing else, the very fact that some people believed it to be true must have given Greene a measure of satisfaction.

But there was very little else to comfort him in this increasingly bitter battle. Clark told Greene that various “reports have been circulated . . . to prejudice the People against His Excellency and you.” The strain of army politics, combined with the privations of winter camp, took a physical and emotional toll on Greene. An unexplained eye ailment prevented him from meeting with Washington in early January, and even Caty's arrival in camp did little to raise his spirits. In fact, Caty's presence may have exacerbated, rather than eased, the roiling tensions at headquarters. Lucy Knox, a frequent if often reluctant companion of Caty Greene's, observed that “all was not well with Greene [and] his lady” at Valley Forge. Some scholars have suggested that Caty Greene, fully recovered now and delighted to be free of the Lotts' smothering embrace in New Jersey, reveled just a bit too much in the attention paid her by French officers in camp, particularly the marquis de Lafayette. She also was plainly, perhaps far too plainly, attracted to General Anthony Wayne and the army's commissary general, Jeremiah Wadsworth. Wayne was a blunt, plain-speaking frontiersman trapped in an unhappy marriage. Wadsworth was a handsome and prosperous merchant from Philadelphia. Both men delighted in Caty's company, and years later, after Nathanael's death, they would become Caty's lovers.

Evidence of a strain between the Greenes crept into Nathanael's letters from Valley Forge. Their two children, George and Martha, were living in Rhode Island with Nathanael's brother Jacob and his wife. During the winter, however, Jacob fell ill, and Nathanael's children were taken to the home of another brother, Elihue. Martha soon was diagnosed with a case of rickets. The shuttling of his children from house to house and the news about Martha upset Greene, and in a letter to still another brother, Christopher, he lamented the fate of his “poor almost fatherless and motherless children.” Caty had left the children more than six months earlier, when George was about a year and a halfold, and Martha three months. But if Greene suddenly was upset that his children were “almost. . . motherless,” he had only himself to blame. He had, after all, begged her to join him, and when begging didn't work, he taunted her with fantasies of infidelity.

In joining their husbands at Valley Forge, Caty Greene, Lucy Knox, Martha Washington, and the wives of other generals bore witness to the terrible suffering that winter. While they were better off than the starving, half-naked soldiers huddled twelve to a hut, they breathed in the same acrid smoke, smelled the same foul camp odors, and shivered through the same long nights. Their very presence, however, and their willingness to endure a measure of discomfort offered the troops inspiration and at least a bit of distraction. A young soldier in camp later recalled how the generals' wives brightened their spirits: “In the middle of our distress, there were some bright sides to the picture which Valley Forge exhibited. . . . The lady of General Greene is a handsome, elegant, and accomplished woman [who] spoke the French language and was well-versed in French literature.”

The new year of 1778 was only three days old when Nathanael Greene sent a foreboding letter to his brother Jacob. The army had been in Valley Forge fewer than three weeks, but already there were signs that this would be an awful winter. Eleven thousand men were gathered in camp, and it was up to Congress and the army's supply officers–the quartermaster general, the commissary general, and the clothier general–to see to it that this small city was fed, clothed, and otherwise equipped for the next several months. But supplies were low, and, not coincidentally, so was morale.

Greene told Washington on New Year's Day that the officers were complaining that they were “exposed to the severity of the weather, subject to hard duty and nothing but bread and beef to eat morning, noon and night, without vegetables or anything to drink but cold water.” Several days earlier, fifty officers in Greene's division resigned because of low pay.

The troops, Greene wrote, were “almost worn out with fatigue and greatly distressed for want of clothing, particularly the articles of shoes and stockings.” They still were in tents on New Year's Day, for they had not completed construction of the windowless log huts in which they
would spent the rest of the winter. Although these early weeks of the new year were not especially cold or snowy, the troops suffered all the same. The work of building nearly a thousand huts was intense, their flimsy tents could hardly qualify as shelter, and food and other supplies grew scarcer with each day. Greene wrote to General McDougall, who had been with him at Germantown, of the dreadful breakdown in supplies.

The Quarter Master General, Commissary General and Clothier Generals departments are in such a wretched condition that unless there are some very great alterations in those departments, it will be impossible to prosecute another Campaign. Our Troops are naked . . . and the men getting sickly in their Hutts for want of acids and Soap to clean themselves.

Of course, the former quartermaster general, Mifflin, had quit his job when he chose to devote himself to Board of War politics. The commissary office also lacked experienced leadership. Both departments quickly disintegrated thanks in part to congressional bungling, and it was the consequent breakdown in the supply system–more than the weather–that led to misery, illness, and death at Valley Forge. By mid-January, when the camp's huts finally were completed, some four thousand soldiers were so poorly clothed that they dared not venture outside. Some used pieces of their tents for shirts, coats, or footwear. All the while, fifty loads of clothing were in a warehouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, awaiting supply wagons that never arrived.

The army's staple food, morning, noon, and night, was a concoction called fire cake–bread, not of the best quality, baked on a stone over a fire. From the damp, grim huts came a muffled complaint: “No meat! No meat!”

Conditions worsened in early February, when the relatively mild winter turned bitter and a snowstorm further reduced the already limited flow of supplies into camp. Men and horses alike starved to death in
the snow. The countryside already had been stripped clean of supplies for soldiers and forage for animals, so there was no relief in sight. Colonel James Varnum, Greene's friend from their younger days in Rhode Island, was despondent, and he warned Greene that the army seemed on the verge of collapse. He wrote that “the situation of the Camp is such that in all human probability the Army must soon dissolve.” Varnum was a respected officer, not one given to complaints or panic. Greene brought the letter to Washington's headquarters on February 12. That very day, Washington issued an order authorizing the troops to move farther into the countryside and simply take what they needed from local citizens. Washington loathed this practice, believing it smacked of British and Hessian thuggery, but he had little choice. He told his officers to impress all “Cattle and Sheep fit for Slaughter” within fifteen to twenty miles of the Schuylkill River. The owners were to be given certificates that, Washington promised, would ensure them of payment for their lost livestock.