Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (36 page)

Neither Washington nor Clinton knew it at the time, but the blows against these two fortifications on the river would end operations for the year. Clinton decided on a campaign in the Carolinas, solace for injured feelings over his inability to destroy Washington’s army. The reinforcement from Britain, having finally arrived, was added to the garrison now withdrawn from Newport, plus the force in and around New York City, giving him about 29,000 soldiers. A significant number
would have to be kept in the city in case Washington attempted its capture.

Washington’s army, as had become customary, began falling away, thinned by the expiration of enlistments and the failure of recruiters in the pay of the states and Congress. By the end of the year it numbered less than half of Clinton’s.

There were irritations of lesser magnitude that troubled him as 1779 ended. One, especially annoying, concerned Charles Lee, who had been convicted for offenses committed in the Battle of Monmouth. Court-martial and virtual banishment did not remove Lee from Washington’s consciousness. Lee never really recovered from what he considered the injustice of it all, and in July he sought revenge in the
Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser
. There, in a letter, he sneered at Washington as a “military genius,” a characterization Washington would never have claimed for himself. Washington resented such scorn—his skin never toughened when his reputation was the subject—but he did not answer.
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General John Sullivan’s complaints to Congress were another matter, because they seemed to question Washington’s competence, though Sullivan did not directly indict his commander. In March, Washington, after failing to persuade Horatio Gates to lead an expedition against the Iroquois along the New York and Pennsylvania frontier, had appointed Sullivan to the command. Gates had pleaded ill health and a want of energy in turning down the command. Sullivan did not want to lead the troops to the West, and when he could not escape the task he proposed an attack of two prongs: one up the Mohawk River and the other along the Susquehanna. Washington pointed out the disadvantages of the Mohawk and noted that logistical weakness made two parallel efforts impossible. There was another reason for Washington to deny Sullivan’s wishes: The plan Sullivan offered included a request for more soldiers than could be spared by the main army. As it was, Sullivan had received almost a third of that army and, with these troops, more supplies than anyone had counted on.
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Hardheaded, querulous, and probably insecure, Sullivan erupted with complaints well before he really launched his campaign. Once under way, he discovered that the Indians were hard to find, as they faded deeper into the wilderness with every advance of their enemy.
They could not take their villages and gardens with them; Sullivan destroyed habitations and fields everywhere and claimed that he had also destroyed many bushels of corn.

This grisly campaign had hardly begun when Sullivan insisted that the plan of operations was not his and was presumably inadequate. He also insisted to Congress that his expedition was too small, with only 2,312 rank-and-file at his disposal. From this total, the actual fighting force numbered 998, he reported. The absurdity of this conclusion was in the count—somehow Sullivan’s arithmetic had him arguing that the 1,300 men unaccounted for were drivers of cattle, drummers, fifers, and undesignated support troops. Washington did the arithmetic almost without comment but pointed out how lopsided these apportionments were.
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Congress found the accounting and the complaints to be without merit, and seemed satisfied that the Indians had received a severe blow. Washington answered Sullivan’s whining with fact, but the annoyance lingered.

As the year ended, the war remained, in effect, in a long pause. Since the spring of 1778, when the French entered the war, the operations of armies and navies had failed to produce decisive swings of power on either side. This was true even though the French had sent d’Estaing with a small fleet to America, for he was unable to win even a small-scale victory. To be sure, the British army replaced its commander in America, William Howe, with Henry Clinton and began to transfer troops from North America to the West Indies. They had also sent a commission headed by Lord Carlisle, ostensibly to secure peace. Each side had raided the other, to little perceptible effect.

Washington’s operations against the British in New York also took on a pallid cast, and though he watched the British carefully, he knew that he could do little more until reinforcements arrived, including the French. By the autumn, he again had another version of old problems to confront: where to spend the winter and how to feed, clothe, and house the troops who had remained with him.

9

Weary but Resolute

The raids on Stony Point and Paulus Hook invigorated Washington’s soldiers, pleased Congress, and raised his spirits, but he recognized that the change in mood at the time was temporary and that the limits on the army’s power were still set by the enemy—what the British could do in operations, especially those of its navy—not by himself or his generals. The army’s ability to defeat the British remained what it had been for months, and not even the accession of the French had changed that. In the last two months of summer 1779, he had in mind the idea of joint operations: The Continental Army and d’Estaing’s naval fleet might together win an overwhelming victory against the British in New York. It was an idea that invigorated his thought whenever the French sailed into the waters off the American coast. But by November he had given up hope that d’Estaing would return for joint operations, and news that the French navy had taken a beating in its attempt to take Savannah, Georgia, did not evoke much comment from him, though, of course, he was disappointed.
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But d’Estaing’s failure did not send Washington into a depression. As was often the case, he sustained his spirits by acting. What he had to do was not dramatic, not filled with the smell of gunpowder, hardly even warlike. What he had to do was remove his troops into winter quarters—to find a place to live that would not take his army far from profitable action. He had done this before, and his orders to his commanders to take up a familiar position showed the value of experience.

The main body of the army would lodge itself in Morristown, New Jersey, or close to it in Jockey Hollow, about three miles southwest of the town. Most of his infantry took up quarters there; his artillery, under Henry Knox, camped closer to Morristown—a mile to its west—and other units set up in nearby spaces. Morristown’s location
served the need to keep within striking distance of the enemy should they decide to drive on Philadelphia or sail up the Hudson. In a rough sense, Morristown sat on the British flank; closer in, where the British could be watched more easily, was a series of outposts occupied by smaller detachments living on the lines at Springfield, Rahway, New Brunswick, and Amboy, among others; altogether these watching points required about two thousand men. Ten thousand men found shelter at Morristown, building huts for themselves that were small—fourteen feet on all sides—cramped, and without windows. A fireplace at one end gave some heat, but the men had to find their own firewood. Though better than nothing, the huts must have been depressing.
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British enlisted men in New York City did not reside in luxury, but at least most of them lived in places that had been constructed for civilian use: houses, warehouses, and public buildings. They too found their quarters were tight, with many men in spaces designed for fewer men. They faced an added irritation: The civilians they displaced did not take to the limited space remaining for their use. There is no record of the grumbling evoked by the rubbing of elbows and other body parts in such quarters, and any fistfights were not noticed in official army reports.

Washington moved himself and Martha to Morristown on December 1, 1779. According to his aides and to others who saw him up close, his temper flared from time to time. He and Martha moved into the house of a widow, Theodosia Ford, who was not intimidated by having a great general under her roof and continued to live in two of the four downstairs rooms. This might not have mattered had the house been large and comfortable. It was neither, and to add to the Washingtons’ distress, several of the upstairs rooms had not been furnished. Washington arrived with eighteen servants, an excessive number for a man who had pledged to make the army’s standard of living his own. No one, of course, expected him to construct a hut or to live in one, and no evidence exists that there was unhappiness at the number of servants in his household. The servants themselves, however, were unhappy in their housing—many, perhaps most at first, worked in the kitchen with those of Mrs. Ford. Washington complained bitterly in late January 1780 to his quartermaster general, Nathanael Greene, saying that although he had been in the camp almost two months, he still did not have a kitchen “to cook a dinner in,” a circumstance
he found unaccountable because he knew that other officers had such kitchens. None had been built for him, for lack of boards. Greene, he knew, had his own kitchen, an arrangement Washington forgave him for because, as he said, Mrs. Greene was pregnant.
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Greene escaped Washington’s wrath because he was a man Washington liked and admired. Others were not so favored. Major Caleb Gibbs, his captain of the guard, does not seem to have been directly rebuked for the lack of a suitable kitchen, but he felt his general’s displeasure and passed it along to his subordinates. Several weeks after Washington’s complaint to Greene, his anger cooled, but life in Mrs. Ford’s house never became pleasant.
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Writing Nathanael Greene of his annoyance at the arrangements surrounding his living in Mrs. Ford’s house probably reduced the heat of Washington’s anger. To complain of such circumstance was a rare act for him at any time. He had more to think about, and even as he complained, he continued the unceasing assignment of finding provisions for his army.

The army went into winter quarters without much in the way of food or clothing, a lack that continued well into 1780. It also made the move without any certainty that it would be able to replace the men whose enlistments were expiring. And then there were the deserters who simply took off for home, time remaining on their tours of duty be damned. Fortunately, this last group was not numerous, and those who scorned desertion were often tough-minded veterans.
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But, as ever, men had to be recruited and food procured. Washington discovered while moving his troops into position that though the British would not try to stop them, the weather might. The winter of 1779–80 proved to be one of the worst that longtime residents in New York and New Jersey remembered. Washington talked with these people himself; looking at the ice on the ground, the frozen streams—rivers and creeks alike—and watching the snow pile up in drifts five feet in height, he could not have been surprised. His soldiers, meanwhile, felt the sting of the wind—sometimes, as Washington reported to Congress, without shirts on their backs.

It was a familiar story he told in letters and dispatches from December 1779 well into the spring of the next year. Along with his appeals for provisions and clothing came attempts to find wagons to carry flour and other foodstuffs to the camps scattered around New York
City and up the North River and the Highlands. His appeals for wagons failed more often than they succeeded. At times he knew that what he asked for would not be given. Late in the year and again in early 1781, the river offered a means of getting supplies north, after the British sailed most of their warships down to the main harbor, in part as a counter to anything the French might attempt. Boat owners along the river sometimes seemed willing to help the Continental Army without compensation, but such generosity proved to be rare. When conditions on the river were dangerous—the threat of the British navy or floating chunks of ice—the owners either refused or demanded guarantees that the army give full reimbursement for any boats lost.

By necessity, most of the provisions the army needed originated in inland farms, and Washington looked almost weekly to the countryside for aid. Few weeks passed in which he did not explain the army’s needs in near-desperate tones. The army, he reported in a typical appeal, had gone six days without meat, and for three of those days without flour as well. During the winter months, when streams froze over, gristmills could not turn, and grain, if it was available, could not be ground. As hunger mounted, he ordered that soldiers take wheat from mills, beat and husk it, boil it, and “make a tolerable substitute for Bread.”
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Such means were a desperate resort in the middle of winter and available only if wheat could be found. Hungry, the army turned to means Washington did not approve. As early as January, soldiers plundered nearby farms for meat and flour—and firewood as well. Washington refrained from condemning such means—“men were half starved,” he wrote, “imperfectly clothed, riotous, and robbing the Country people of their subsistence from sheer necessity”
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—but he required his officers in the field seeking provisions to consult local magistrates in their private capacity to set quotas of supplies that might be seized from farmers. The farmers were to be given certificates of payment, at prices presumably approved by local authorities. Later in the month of January 1780, something must have worked, for Washington described the army’s “situation” at present as “comfortable and easy on the score of provisions.” The comfort soon vanished and he resumed the process he despised—begging for support of all kinds.
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