Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (28 page)

Even this delay might not have proved detrimental to the attack had Wayne, leading Sullivan’s left, not been fired upon by Stephen, coming in on Greene’s right. Greene had attacked about forty-five minutes after the designated hour, because he had to move two miles farther than Sullivan in order to reach his position of assault. This delay has often been blamed for the confusion at the center and ultimately for the loss of the battle. Of itself, Greene’s delay was probably not important and may indeed, had fog not covered the ground, have been desirable. For when Sullivan struck, the British sent their troops forward to meet him. Greene might have been able to cut behind them had he been able to see. In the fog, however, Sullivan’s left remained uncovered for an
hour, and Wayne moved to secure this flank. Stephen, uncertain where he was to link his flank with Wayne’s, drove behind him and then, his vision obscured by the fog, opened fire. Wayne returned fire, and before the two groups discovered their mistakes, casualties mounted and the left-center was thrown into disorder. Whether through good luck or shrewd timing, Howe then delivered a counterattack with three regiments. A major part of this attack hit Sullivan’s left and poured through almost unopposed. This drive blunted the American effort, and within minutes the impetus in the battle had swung to Howe. The Americans retreated, despite Washington’s efforts to reform the troops. Thomas Paine, who had accompanied Washington, later called this retreat “extraordinary, nobody hurried themselves.”
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They were much too tired to hurry and resembled nothing so much as a slow herd in motion. Greene too pulled back, for Sullivan’s collapse had left him terribly exposed. One of his regiments, the 9th Virginian, which had taken around a hundred prisoners, was now trapped itself and surrendered, four hundred strong. On the American right, Armstrong survived intact—he had not sent his force into battle. And on the far left, Smallwood arrived much too late to exert pressure on the rear of the British, and retired almost as soon as he’d arrived. By late evening Washington’s bedraggled army had pulled back some twenty miles to the west, to Pennybacker’s Mill.

The failures of the day undoubtedly arose in part from a plan that was much too complicated to fulfill. The plan called for coordinated attacks by four widely separated forces. Their failures of coordination are often cited as the reason for the defeat. Washington blamed the fog for a lack of coordination, but the mounted messengers and the flankers each column was supposed to send out might have kept the brigades in touch with one another even through the fog. There is a possibility, too, that the fog enabled the attack to get off to a good beginning, as the British could not determine just who or what they faced. Moreover, American troops usually fought at their best from cover, and the fog afforded cover of sorts. What might have occurred in bright sunshine, with clear visibility, is anyone’s guess. The British explained their recovery and victory on rather different grounds: Discipline and the counterattack won the battle, as far as they were concerned. Still, they and foreign observers conceded that the battle that had been won was almost lost. The Americans again had taken serious
losses, but they had fought gallantly, as Washington remarked. And, as always, the British had fought bravely. Perhaps Washington’s army derived most from the battle: the knowledge that they could carry the attack to a fine professional army and carry it well. They lost the battle, to be sure, and for reasons that we will never completely understand, given the possibilities in this engagement. But even in defeat, they had absorbed another valuable lesson.

7

Valley Forge

The George Washington who rode from the Germantown battlefield was a defeated commander but an undefeated man. He seems never to have admitted—or believed—that his plan for the battle had been too complicated for his army to carry out. Nor did he believe that he made a mistake by allowing his troops to be distracted at the Chew House and thereby to squander energy and time better spent pressing ahead in the assault on the main lines of the enemy. A few weeks after the battle, he was blaming the fog for the defeat. In a sense, he never banished the fog in his thinking, and indeed may not ever have looked deeply within himself for the responsibility for this failure.

The facts of the war in October gave him little opportunity for self-analysis—or analysis of any part of the recent past. He had much to do, and his inherent preference was for action, to begin to face the new problems left to him by Germantown. There was, after all, still a chance to force Howe out of Philadelphia; the city had to find food and supplies of every kind, and the British, with thousands of troops crowded into its houses, still relied on the Delaware River to feed themselves and the several thousand civilians still remaining there.

Besides the ever-present problem of holding his army together, keeping the British army in Philadelphia cut off from food and forage occupied his time more than any other problem in the six weeks following Germantown. He held two strongpoints just below Philadelphia: Fort Mercer, at Red Bank, on the New Jersey side, and Fort Mifflin, on Mud Island, in Pennsylvania. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Smith, an experienced officer in a Maryland regiment, commanded the garrison in Fort Mifflin after Washington decided that a challenge by an officer leading a Virginia regiment to Smith’s rank and right to command was not justified. David Forman, a regimental commander
in the Continental Army and also a brigadier general in the New Jersey militia, headed the force at Fort Mercer. He too faced a challenge to his authority, from a general in the militia, a challenge that he met after weeks of frustration by resigning his New Jersey commission. Washington was caught in the middle of these disputes, an annoying circumstance that repeated itself on several occasions in the war. Both Smith and Forman were men of ability and courage, and in these weeks of fighting along the Delaware, Washington had attempted to provide them with all the support available.

He could not, however, throw his entire army into the effort to deny Howe supplies sent up the river. He had an army numbering a little over eight thousand Continentals, not large enough, or skilled enough, to drive the British from the river. The militias of both Pennsylvania and New Jersey composed an uncertain force—uncertain in quality and, as the weeks passed, uncertain even in being.

At first, shortly after the British took Philadelphia, the struggle for the river seemed to go Washington’s way. Howe spent most of his early weeks in the city settling his troops and building redoubts facing to the north, from which, he assumed, attack might come. On the twenty-second of October, Howe sent Colonel Donop and twelve hundred Hessians against Fort Mercer. The battle—or heavy skirmish—that followed was not one of the major engagements of the Revolution, but it was significant. Before he attacked, Donop, in old-world form, summoned the Americans to surrender—the reply came back with the officer who had carried the initial message: “Colonel Greene, who commands the fort, sends his compliments and he shall await Colonel Donop.”
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In the fighting that ensued, Donop had his right leg shot apart, and almost four hundred Hessian officers and men were either killed or wounded. Donop, captured by Americans, died a week later.

This defeat did not end matters on the Delaware. The British had hoped to take Fort Mercer and then Fort Mifflin shortly after, but Fort Mercer held out, and the British warships that had hoped to provide the support of heavy guns found themselves the target the day following. They had maneuvered up the river to the chevaux-de-frise that the Americans had installed close by Hog Island. Fort Mifflin sat just to the north on Mud Island. The ships—the
Merlin
, with eighteen guns, and the
Augusta
, with sixty-four—went aground while the battle was being fought and the next morning, while seeking to escape, caught
fire and blew up, whether by shells fired by American galleys or by other means. Before the day was out, they were hulks, and the British were clearly stymied.
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There was little likelihood that the British would ever give up their attempts to establish river communication to Philadelphia. If they were to remain there, they had to clear Americans from the forts; no other way to supply the army in the city existed and, having just captured it at the cost of considerable blood and misery, they did not intend to be starved out. Their efforts over the next three weeks eventually paid off as they gradually pounded the fortifications of the Americans to pieces. Washington watched with anxiety and hope, and with reinforcements led by General James Varnum. A pattern of struggle soon established itself. The British brought up heavy guns—howitzers and mortars—and proceeded to fire shell after shell. Most of the shelling took place during the day, with the American forces firing back as long as their ammunition lasted. The nights were given to repairing the forts as much as might be done, and all the while the British brought up more cannon and fresh shells and powder. By mid-November both forts had given in, their garrisons exhausted and their walls battered down, apparently beyond repair. Most of the men who could escape did so, knowing that nothing more could be asked of them.
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Washington praised the survivors and the dead. But he had other things on his mind—principally how to get at the British army in Philadelphia. So had his commanders, and when he asked them whether the army should attack Philadelphia to drive the British out, or even destroy them, almost all of the American officers—brigadier and major generals—had an answer ready. It was not unanimous, but most agreed that the Continental Army did not have the strength to defeat Howe in Philadelphia. Nathanael Greene proved especially flexible—not in his judgment of the prospect of a success in attack, for he doubted that Howe could be defeated by such an action, but in his willingness to back anything Washington wanted to do. He was clear, however, in his judgment of an attack, saying that “I think it a hassardous attempt and will terminate to the injury of the Continent and disgrace of the Army.” No doubt his memory of his advice to Washington to defend Fort Washington, on the North River, the year before remained vivid and bitter. Anthony Wayne gave a qualified yes to the idea of attack, and, as was his wont, gave Washington a little lecture on the subject
informing him that the “eyes of all America are fixed on you,” mentioning also that the “Country & Congress” expected an effort similar to the one responsible for Burgoyne’s surrender in October. Whether the country expected Washington to destroy or capture Howe’s army is not clear, but Wayne was probably right about Congress’s expectations.
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All members of Congress, of course, wished for Howe’s destruction, and some, perhaps many, wanted another attack by Washington’s army. The wish was natural and so was the hope that Washington could bring success just as General Horatio Gates had in New York. Quite naturally, they griped that Washington was doing little and that he should act. Realistic members recognized that Washington’s circumstances differed greatly from Gates’s and, given the losses at Brandywine and Germantown, believed that he could not defeat Howe’s army.

Washington’s motives in asking advice from the generals leading his army were not as clear as they seem. He had no intention of seeking another major engagement with the British hard on the heels of Germantown. His army did not possess the strength for such an effort: It had suffered much since early September, and it was now losing men at a depressing rate—militia and regulars continued to go home, including nine Virginia regiments, and those who remained included an inordinate number without shoes and clothing. Just about everything was in short supply, as he feared it would be after he learned of Congress’s reorganization of the commissary and quartermaster departments. Reorganization had not included increased compensation for the officials of those services; indeed it had produced resignations, not eager efforts to clothe and otherwise equip Washington’s troops. Among those who took themselves out of the army was Thomas Mifflin, a brigadier general, who resigned in November. He had not shown much energy even before Congress tried to make supplying the army an effective operation, and his anger at Washington’s lack of success in defending Philadelphia further diminished his energies for finding food for men expected to fight.
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The resignation of Joseph Trumbull, commissary general, proved more serious. Trumbull, who resigned in August, had performed as well as circumstances permitted. Circumstances included a group of deputy commissaries discontented almost from the beginning of their service at Congress’s refusal to allow them compensation on the basis
of their purchases. Most of these men argued for a small percentage that would have yielded a large sum for their pockets. Their resignations followed Trumbull’s, and Congress responded slowly with new deputies. The real sufferers in this contest of policy and will were the soldiers. Washington pointed out to Congress that his troops were again without steady supplies of food, clothing, and other equipment but found that, as was Congress’s practice, little of substance would be done as 1777 neared its end. Had Congress produced commissaries who bought the necessary supplies, it would have faced still another problem: finding the means of getting them to the army. For many teamsters had almost simultaneously refused the use of drivers and teams of horses until their pay was increased; and Washington’s army had too few wagons and horses of its own.
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Logistics in late 1777 were—to put the matter plainly—in crisis as Washington strove to maintain the army as a military force and to find a place for it to spend the winter. His appeals to Congress for support of all sorts did not uncover a receptive audience in that body. For in early December, Congress responded to his requests for support with resolutions that revealed either ignorance of the army’s condition or a determination to paint a picture of the war that defied Washington’s accounts of it. Earlier, on September 16, Congress, on the eve of fleeing a Philadelphia about to be captured by Howe’s army, had approved resolutions authorizing Washington to seize private property that might serve the army’s interests. There were restrictions on the use of this power, but the grant by Congress did strengthen Washington’s hand, should he need to use it. In mid-November, Congress confirmed authorization and reported that it had requested that neighboring states provide allotments of clothing for his troops.
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