Instead of supporting Burgoyne’s campaign, General Howe went
west to attack Philadelphia, the largest city on the seaboard and the capital
for Congress. Although his troops greatly outnumbered Washington’s, Howe
rejected taking the direct route overland across New Jersey. Instead, he
squandered nearly two precious months by embarking 13,000 men in 260 ships for
a circuitous voyage via Chesapeake Bay to the mouth of the Susquehanna in
northern Maryland. He left Clinton and 9,000 troops behind to defend New York
City. The long voyage removed the main British army from combat during the peak
of the summer campaign, to the dismay of Howe’s officers. His folly enabled
Washington to send reinforcements north to help Gates destroy Burgoyne’s army.
Not until August 25 did Howe’s army land in northern Maryland, fifty-seven
miles from Philadelphia, to resume the fight against Washington. He had taken
forty-seven days to shorten his approach to Philadelphia by a mere forty-three
miles. Although a superb battlefield commander, Howe was a paltry strategist,
obtuse to the bigger picture both military and political.
Brandywine Creek
Heading south from New Jersey to confront Howe, Washington
paraded his troops through Philadelphia in a bid to sway “the minds of the
disaffected.” At Brandywine Creek on September 11, Washington arrayed 11,000
men to block Howe’s advance. As in the battle of Long Island, Howe menaced the
front of Washington’s line but sent a strike force on a wide sweep around the
Continentals to surprise their vulnerable flank. After suffering heavy
casualties, Washington withdrew his battered army to safety.
With the help of the newly arrived Marquis de Lafayette,
Washington and the Continental Army ventured open battle to prevent Gen William
Howe’s thrust up from the Chesapeake to seize the American capital of
Philadelphia. British forces numbered 13,000 men against Washington’s 15,000,
making this action the largest battle on the North American continent before
the American Civil War.
American light infantry shadowed the British Army’s approach
to Washington’s line across Chad’s Ford through the namesake creek. Finding the
Americans prepared to receive him, Howe dispatched light units and received
intelligence from the local loyalists about the American positions. Howe
decided upon a holding attack, with 5000 men under Gen Wilhelm von Knyphausen
attacking at Chad’s Ford, while Gen Charles Cornwallis took 8000 troops around
Washington’s right flank. The British forced the crossing, while Washington
received a growing trickle of reports about a second British force to the
north.
Washington sent troops to reinforce his right and ordered a
defensive line prepared on Birmingham Meeting House, a half-mile to his rear.
With both American flanks slowly yielding to his attacks, Howe launched a
bayonet charge into the American centre that collapsed Washington’s line as
other British units attacked frontally. Isolated American units slowed the British
as the day drew on, while Gen Nathaniel Greene’s command’s determined
resistance retreating from Birmingham Meeting House to Battle Hill frustrated
British attempts to turn the defeat into a rout. Howe had cleared the way to
Philadelphia, but his primary objective of Washington’s army survived with 300
killed, 600 wounded and 400 captured against the British losses of 100 dead and
some 400 wounded. The grimness of American resistance signalled a fundamental
shift in the war.
Philadelphia Abandoned
Abandoning Philadelphia, Congress fled to Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania militia followed their lead at the first sight
of British regulars. A disgusted Elias Boudinot lamented that “as soon as a Gun
was fired within ¼ of a Mile of them [they] would throw down their arms &
run away worse than a Company of [New] Jersey Women.” On September 26, Howe’s
advance force entered Philadelphia unopposed. Three-quarters of the inhabitants
stayed put and loudly celebrated the British as liberators, “tho’ by all
accounts,” a Briton remarked, “many of them were publickly on the other side
before our arrival.” Adams denounced Philadelphia as “that Mass of Cowardice
and Toryism.” The former chaplain to Congress, Reverend Jacob Duche, urged
Washington to disavow independence and negotiate reconciliation with British
rule.
But Washington remained resolute. On October 4, his troops
staggered the British with a counterattack on their outer lines at Germantown,
a western suburb of Philadelphia. In the morning fog and heavy smoke of
gunfire, however, the Continentals became confused and began firing on one
another. It did not help that one of their generals, Adam Stephen, drank
himself into a stupor during the battle. Howe brought up reinforcements and
counterattacked, driving back the Continentals, but the fierce battle deflated
British hopes that Washington’s army was spent, that losing Philadelphia had
sapped the Patriot will to fight.
Despite capturing the rebel capital, the British were no
closer to winning the war. Beyond the city, Howe found many farmers eager to
sell produce but few willing to enlist as Loyalist soldiers. While Howe won the
showy battles, Washington was winning a war of attrition as the British lost
men whom they could ill afford to replace. His friend General Nathanael Greene,
noted: “We cannot conquer the British force at once, but they cannot conquer us
at all. The limits of the British government in America are their
out-sentinels,” for they lacked enough committed Loyalists to hold the ground
that Howe passed over. And Washington’s dogged ability to preserve his army
impressed French leaders almost as much as Gate’s victory at Saratoga.
But some congressmen and a few officers nurtured the fantasy
that Washington should have crushed Howe at Brandywine or Germantown. Impatient
with a slow, inglorious war of attrition, Washington’s critics longed for a
decisive military genius, who could quickly end the war by smashing the
British. In mid-October, news of Gates’s great victory at Saratoga emboldened
the critics, including John Adams, who had soured on Washington just two years
after pushing for his elevation to command.
This malicious chatter irritated Washington and angered his
inner circle of generals and staff officers, who admired his dignified
character and relied on his patronage. Led by Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, and
Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s “military family” interpreted the criticism as
an insidious conspiracy or “cabal” to sack Washington in favor of Gates. They
especially blamed General Thomas Conway, an Irish-born officer formerly in the
French service. Although able, Conway was also acerbic, angering American-born
officers who felt slighted when he won promotions at their expense. They felt
furious upon discovering that Conway had denigrated Washington in an indiscrete
letter written to flatter Gates.
The winter of criticism ultimately strengthened Washington’s
hold over the army. By responding forcefully, Washington’s partisans put his
critics on the defensive. Within the army, Conway and other critics became
shunned and marginalized, their prospects ruined. After resigning his
commission, Conway sailed back to France, nursing a wound suffered in a duel
with a Washington supporter. Most congressmen recognized that only Washington
could hold the army together and command popular support. Knox assured
Washington: “The people of America look up to you as their Father.” Adams
sarcastically recalled, “Northern, Middle and Southern Statesmen, and northern,
Middle and Southern Officers of The Army, expressly agreed to blow the Trumpets
of Panegyrick in concert” to render Washington “popular and fashionable, with
all Parties in all places and with all Persons, as a Centre of Union, as the
Central Stone in the Geometrical Arch. There you have the Revelation of the
whole Mystery.” An adept political infighter, Washington built a powerful
“interest” among officers and in Congress. Underestimating Washington was a
fool’s errand.
In late December, Washington had his ragged, shivering men
build log huts for the winter. Up to a dozen men crowded into a hut, each a
mere fourteen by sixteen feet and without windows or wooden floor. He located
the main camp at Valley Forge, in the Pennsylvania hills eighteen miles
northwest of Philadelphia: close enough to watch the British but sufficiently
far for some security from attack. But the nearby farms could not support
11,000 hungry soldiers, and many farmers preferred to sell food for British
coin rather than the depreciating paper money issued by Congress. Soldiers also
suffered because of corruption and inefficiency in the army’s commissary
department. In February 1778, Washington described his troops as “starving.” An
army surgeon reported:
Poor food—hard
lodging—Cold Weather—fatigue—Nasty Cloathes—nasty Cookery—Vomit half my time. .
. . There comes a soldier, his bare feet are seen thro’ his worn-out Shoes, his
legs nearly naked from the tatter’d remains of an only pair of stockings, his
Breeches not sufficient to cover his nakedness, his Shirt hanging in Strings,
his hair dishevel’d, his face meager, his whole appearance pictures a person
forsaken & discouraged.
Two thousand men, nearly a fifth of the army, perished that
winter from a debilitating combination of filth, exposure, malnutrition, and
disease.
While Washington grew closer to his suffering soldiers, he
felt more distant from the civilians whom they defended. He rebuked Pennsylvania’s
legislators for criticizing, rather than supplying, his army: “I can assure
those gentlemen that it is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw
remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fireside than to occupy a cold
bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blanket.” He
blamed the army’s plight on prosperous and selfish citizens who pursued profits
instead of sacrificing for the cause: “Is the paltry consideration of a little
dirty pelf to individuals to be placed in competition with the essential rights
and liberties of the present generation, and of Millions yet unborn? . . . And
shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain?” As a
planter and land speculator, Washington had chased profits, but at Valley
Forge, he saw more clearly the human costs of profiteering.
Washington had his troops whip and even shoot civilians
caught conveying provisions to Philadelphia. He left their bodies beside the
road as a warning to others. His troops also destroyed the flour mills within
twenty miles of the city and seized all the grain and livestock in that
no-man’s-land for the Continental Army. General Greene reported, “The
Inhabitants cry out and beset me from all quarters—but like Pharo[a]h, I harden
my heart” and “forage the Country very bare.” Greene’s troops converted once
prosperous farms into a barren landscape of “poverty and distress.”
In late winter, as their food supply improved, the soldiers
also got their first systematic training in battlefield maneuvers and the
manual of arms. In previous battles, their movements and firing had been ragged
and uncoordinated: a poor match for disciplined British regulars. A Patriot
officer declared that the typical Continental Army soldier had never learned
how to wield the bayonet “but to roast his beefsteak”—and beefsteaks were rare
in a starving army. To supervise the new drill instruction, Washington relied
on a mercenary officer who called himself Baron von Steuben and claimed to have
served as a general in the fabled Prussian army of Frederick the Great. Like
most of the mercenaries who offered their services to Congress, Steuben greatly
inflated his qualifications. Neither a general nor a baron, he had served as a
mere captain in Prussia, but Steuben had real talents and adapted resourcefully
to new circumstances. Admiring Washington’s persistent soldiers, Steuben
marveled that no European army would have held together under such suffering.
Steuben’s powerful build, profane passion, and blundering
English amused and intimidated his soldiers, who learned to fire more rapidly
in synchronized volleys and to wield bayonets. Their morale improved as they
took pride in their conspicuous progress in performing Steuben’s drills.
Thrilled by the results, Washington longed to have another go at the British in
a European-style battle in an open field. That opportunity would come in the
summer thanks to an alliance with France.
