Valley Forge Read online

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  On September 18, two days after the aborted Battle of the Clouds, Gen. Howe paused to camp his force near the dozen or so fieldstone farmsteads and adjacent ironworks that constituted the hamlet of Valley Forge. Just over 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia in Tredyffrin Township, the small community occupied a strategic location at the confluence of Valley Creek and the Schuylkill River. The Americans used Valley Forge as a supply distribution center, and its warehouses were currently holding both foodstuffs and military arms—including some 3,000 bushels of wheat and 20,000 tomahawks. The British seized these stores after chasing off a small contingent of Continental dragoons led by Alexander Hamilton that had attempted to retrieve them. Then they fell on the civilian farms. It was the height of the harvest season, and scavenging parties systematically ravaged the area, confiscating crops and flour sacks by the wagonload and relieving the locals of almost all of their cows, pigs, and sheep—“flesh” or “hooves” in the contemporary vernacular. Howe had ordered his foragers to spare the stock and larders of any families known to be Loyalists. But in the swarm of war, hungry soldiers were not likely to be too thorough in their discrimination.

  Before departing Valley Forge, the British burned its sawmill, blacksmith shop, waterwheels, cooperage, and workers’ housing. Most strategically, they also destroyed the complete ironworks—finery, chafery, bloomery, and slitting mill—that lent the valley its name. This was more than the usual callous depravity of combat. There was a method to Howe’s severity. He knew he was in patriot country. The historian Alan Taylor estimates that about 20 percent of all American colonists—500,000 people—remained loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution, while some 40 percent favored rebellion. The remaining 40 percent constituted a fluctuating middle who based their allegiance on their own safety and, in Taylor’s study, their “relationships with neighbors and kin.” In and around Valley Forge, however, revolutionary sentiments ran stronger, with about three quarters of the population in sympathy with separation from England. General Howe also understood that Pennsylvania was the leading iron manufacturer for the Continental Army.

  Though there were forges scattered up and down the east coast of North America, most were located near mines that yielded an inferior form of the metal called bog iron. The iron deposits up the Schuylkill Valley and into the larger Lehigh Valley, however, were of a purer grade, with the added advantage that they were also nearer to the surface. The rolling hills surrounding Valley Forge were thick with hardwood—great groves of oak, maple, ash, walnut, and sycamore, and particularly dense stands of chestnut. Burning these trees provided ample fuel for the forges. This, combined with the waterwheels powered by the Schuylkill, allowed the local ironmongers to fire-forge a superior brand of pig iron. From the works at Valley Forge the giant blocks of “pig” were shipped inland to smiths who, employing 80-pound trip-hammers, would fire them again while great bellows injected oxygen into the metal to produce wrought iron, a low-grade steel. From this process emerged all manner of end products beneficial to Washington’s army, from wagon wheel hubs and nails to musket and cannon barrels. General Howe did not hesitate to disrupt this rebel manufacturing pipeline.

  At the time the British were putting the torch to Valley Forge’s ironworks, farther west at York the relocated Continental Congress was attempting to fulfill Washington’s petition for more men and supplies. Washington was informed that in addition to the Marylanders, 2,000 Virginia militiamen had been rallied at Williamsburg awaiting his orders to march. He immediately sent for them. And after consulting with his fellow delegates, John Hancock went so far as to send the commander in chief copies of congressional resolutions granting him the authority to seize provisions from local populaces in exchange for promissory notes issued to farmers and merchants guaranteeing future repayment.

  Although well meant, this proclamation was the seed of the civilian animus toward the Continental Army that would bloom into a withering rage over the coming winter at Valley Forge. The weather had yet to turn, and his army was already in dire need of supplies ranging from food to weapons to shoes to blankets. Still, Washington sensed “the melancholy truth” that Hancock’s resolution could well “involve the ruin of the army, and perhaps the ruin of America” by turning the locals against him and his troops. In an eleventh-hour effort to forestall that outcome, Washington instead dispatched Alexander Hamilton to Philadelphia to procure what provisions he could, including blankets and, with over 1,000 of his men marching barefoot, at least 3,000 pairs of shoes he understood to be warehoused in the city. What Hamilton could not carry out he was to burn.

  Yet even this option disturbed Washington. “I feel, and I lament,” he wrote to Hamilton, “the absolute necessity of requiring the inhabitants to contribute to those wants which we have no other means of satisfying.” In follow-up instructions to Hamilton the next day he was even more morose at the notion of Americans looting their countrymen. “The business you are upon I know is disagreable,” he wrote, “& perhaps in the execution, you may meet with more obstacles than were at first apprehended & also with opposition; call in such a number of Militia as you may think necessary, observing however over the conduct of the whole, a strict discipline, to prevent evry species of rapine & disorder.”

  For now, however, as fresh soldiers and a bare minimum of provisions leached toward him from several directions—including enough ammunition procured from Philadelphia to issue 40 rounds to each soldier—a harrowed Washington faced other questions: What exactly would be Howe’s next move? With Philadelphia abandoned by Congress as well as by most of its Whigs, would the enemy still find symbolic glory in capturing the rebel capital? Or, given the British army’s own fractured supply lines, would Howe instead veer west in an attempt to seize the Continental Army’s inland storehouses, particularly its vast holdings at Reading and Carlisle? Washington had received somewhat vague congressional orders to protect Philadelphia. But was there really anything left to protect, particularly at the expense of his vital winter provisions? And where was the British fleet? If Gen. Howe could consolidate his army with his brother’s warships and supply ships somewhere on the Delaware, Philadelphia would be lost in any case. Perhaps best to strike now, before that stood a chance of happening.

  As Washington pondered these hypothetical questions, Anthony Wayne’s rear guard was about to receive a rather more empirical answer.

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  I. The Moravians were as rigidly antiviolence as the Quakers and detested the war despite the fact that they cared for colonials wounded in it.

  FIVE

  FIX BAYONETS

  By September 20, British troops were still camped near Valley Forge as Gen. Howe, again mirroring Washington’s instincts, contemplated a thrust west to meet the Continental Army. In the meantime, Gen. Wayne’s Pennsylvania division had crept to within three miles of the enemy lines, perilously close to within long cannon shot and near enough to hear the British drummers beat reveille. Wayne had bivouacked his 2,000 or so regulars on the edge of a copse along a plateaued rise near a tavern perhaps regrettably named for the Corsican revolutionary Gen. Pasquale Paoli. Paoli, once popular in America for his attempts to drive the French colonizers from his island, was at present the latest celebrity-in-exile gracing London’s salons. No one thought to change the name of the tavern. Wayne was still waiting for Gen. Smallwood’s Maryland reinforcements and what he hoped would be orders from Washington to attack. He assumed, wrongly, that the presence of his own troops had been undetected by the British.

  Journals and diaries kept by soldiers from both sides describe an ominous cloud cover rolling over the area late that Saturday afternoon, and by nightfall completely obscuring the full moon and stars. Wayne was aware of his precarious position; his original plan was to move out under cover of darkness. But with Gen. Smallwood and his militiamen inexplicably delayed and the scent of another heavy rain in the air, he instead instructed his men to fashion a series of what the Continenta
ls called “weather booths”—primitive lean-tos constructed of tree branches, thick cornstalks, and trimmed saplings that would keep dry both the soldiers and the little powder they were carrying. As his troops went to work on their improvised huts Wayne and a small group of aides rode off to reconnoiter their perimeter.

  This was familiar and, for the most part, friendly territory for the young general. Wayne—the grandson of Anglo-Irish immigrants who had been the recipients of an extensive royal land grant in what was to become Chester County—had been born only a few miles away. Prior to the revolution he had established himself as a successful farmer, state politician, and surveyor—he’d once laid out plans for a settlement on land in Nova Scotia owned by Benjamin Franklin and a consortium of merchants—and when war broke out he’d raised a regiment of Pennsylvania militiamen. Although he had no formal military training, what one historian calls his “zeal and spunk” soon led to his appointment as a colonel in the Continental Army.

  Wayne and his Pennsylvanians had subsequently distinguished themselves during the failed invasion of Canada, where Wayne was wounded during the Battle of Three Rivers. Wayne’s natural athleticism belied his vicar’s visage, and his boundless energy and fighting skills—what harder-eyed observers might describe as his reckless abandon—had caught Washington’s eye. Upon his recovery he was promoted to brigadier general in early 1777. Wayne’s mettle and knowledge of the territory had rewarded Washington’s judgment at Brandywine Creek, and if the American commander in chief trusted anyone to cover the local terrain while playing cat and mouse with a British force that outnumbered him seven to one, it was the lord of Waynesboro Manor.

  Yet neither American took into account the possibility that the same Tories who had guided Howe across the upper branches of the Brandywine would inform the British of Wayne’s location. While Wayne was off on his scouting mission, Gen. Howe was quietly assembling some 2,000 elite British and Scottish raiders to fall on the Pennsylvanians. This light infantry, under the command of Gen. Charles Grey, was well versed in the swift, stealthy movements of ranger tactics. Before departing camp, Grey ordered most of his soldiers to remove the flints from their .75-caliber “kings arms”—the ubiquitous musket soon to be known around the world as the deadly “Brown Bess.” It was fitting that Grey, a small, thin officer with a face as pinched as a hatchet, so resembled a metal instrument of destruction; the night attack he had been chosen to lead was to be purely a bayonet assault.

  The British bayonets were triangular in shape, ensuring that even if the 18-inch blade did not puncture a vital organ, at least one facet of the weapon would always be slicing near a heart, a kidney, a liver. Moreover, the tips of the bayonets were not sharpened but blunt, cast to tear at an opponent’s flesh like a shark’s tooth instead of inflicting a surgical cut that could be easily sutured. It was a perfectly deadly tactic for a dark, rainy night. As Grey’s second in command, Capt. John André, confided to his journal: “It was represented to the men that firing discovered us to the Enemy, hid them from us, killed our friends and produced a confusion favorable to the escape of the Rebels and perhaps productive of disgrace to ourselves. On the other hand, by not firing we knew the foe to be wherever fire appeared and a [bayonet] charge ensured his destruction; that amongst the enemy those in the rear would direct their fire against whoever fired in front, and they would destroy each other.”

  Although Wayne had dashed off a communiqué to Washington the previous morning assuring his commander that Howe “knows nothing of my Situation—as I have taken every precaution to Prevent any intelligence getting to him,” there are indications that he had been warned by at least one local patriot that the enemy was aware of his camp. When he returned to his headquarters tent around 10 that night he took the precaution of increasing his picket posts from four to six, with each squad consisting of roughly 20 sentries. These included a mounted picket called a vidette.

  With Smallwood yet to appear, Wayne was loath to break camp and complicate their rendezvous. Washington had indicated to Wayne that once his and Smallwood’s troops were combined, they would make up one half of the pincer movement buffeting Howe’s rear. The commander in chief’s much larger force, already on the move from Yellow Springs, would form the other half. So certain was Wayne of Smallwood’s imminent arrival that he instructed his company commanders to be prepared to move at the first sight of the Marylander’s forward scouts. As the Pennsylvanians waited, the British force under Grey was already on the march beneath the starless sky.

  Guided through the murk by an American deserter and a local blacksmith coerced into cooperation, Grey took no chance of tipping his prey and flanked out skirmishers to sweep up and detain every man, woman, and child in his path. Sometime before midnight a company of these advance guards was spotted by two of the American videttes, who fired on it before galloping back to camp with the alert. Wayne immediately ordered his entire division turned out to arms. He was too late. Moments later the Americans heard a volley of flintlock fire perhaps three quarters of a mile to the north. Then silence. They had no idea that one of their picket posts had been overrun by a bayonet charge. Wayne next issued orders to evacuate the camp, beginning with the two dozen wagons hauling his four field pieces, spare ammunition, and commissary and quartermaster supplies.

  As the division filed into columns, the Continentals heard more gunfire to their northeast. It was a second, closer American picket getting off final musket shots before being cut to pieces. Moments later, on the cry of “Dash, Light Infantry!” the first battalion of 500 enemy troops poured into Wayne’s right flank. The Americans were overwhelmed. The campfires still burning beside the weather booths served as homing beacons for the wave of Redcoats who cut and slashed their way into the middle of the American camp, their blades flashing in the firelight. At such close range, musketeers had little chance against bayonets, particularly at night. Those who did manage to use their weapons in the mounting chaos proved Capt. André prescient. Panicked Americans pulled their triggers at any firelock flash they saw. The British had still not fired a shot.

  Meanwhile, Wayne’s retreat across a fenced-in meadow stalled when one of the forward wagons hauling a field piece broke down and blocked the adjacent road. This was a perfect example of what the preeminent Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz referred to as “friction”—the unexpected and seemingly innocuous battlefield occurrence that sets off a string of unintended effects resulting in disaster. With the remainder of the wagon train now stalled, the rush of American foot soldiers attempting to shove past the obstruction between fences created a bottleneck for slaughter. A second wave of 350 British infantrymen, accompanied by a dozen or so of the Queen’s Own Light Dragoons atop snorting warhorses, saw to it. To shouts of “No Quarter” the enemy surrounded the jumbled body of Continentals and ran at them in flights of bayonet rushes. Any American who managed to escape the mayhem was run down by the mounted dragoons, who wielded their three-foot broadswords like scythes. Wayne and his company commanders were attempting to wheel the writhing mass of bleeding humanity into a semblance of a defensive line when another 300 British soldiers emerged from the woods behind them and charged.

  The early evening’s light rain had grown thicker, and the battlefield, if it can be called such, was by now a soupy brew of mud, blood, and gore. The broken wagon was pushed off the road, and the Americans who made it out of camp now streamed west with the rush of a river current. The wounded were carried by comrades as best they could be, while the able-bodied left behind were beyond putting up any organized resistance. Hand-to-hand fighting was their only recourse. Eyewitnesses later testified that Continentals attempting to surrender were surrounded by as many as a dozen British infantrymen who took turns running them through with steel blades. A subsequent compilation of wounds to the dead would confirm this. For Gen. Grey, all that was left was to administer the coup de grâce. This was accomplished by what one chronicler of the fight called “the largest and most terrifying m
enace of the night.”

  Grey had held in reserve two companies of the Royal Highlands Regiment, the ferocious Black Watch, for just this occasion. Now, at his signal, the nearly 600 Scotsmen in their short red jackets and tassled blue bonnets were released in a double-ranked battle line. They had adopted canvas “trews,” or trousers, in place of their traditional kilts. Savage Gaelic battle cries filled the air as the Scots swept across the killing field in a solid front without breaking ranks. They put to the bayonet any wounded or stragglers they encountered and began systematically burning the weather booths, often with frightened Americans still hiding inside. As Capt. André laconically observed, “We stabbed great numbers.”

  While Gen. Wayne attempted to form yet another rear guard not far from where the artillery wagon had broken down, Gen. Smallwood and his 2,000 or so Maryland troops were finally approaching Paoli along the muddy, rutted roads leading east. Smallwood digested the reports of the fighting from the first retreating Pennsylvanians he met and decided to fall back about a mile to higher ground and form a defensive line behind which Wayne’s forces could regroup. He had done much the same 13 months earlier during the Battle of Long Island. Despite that engagement’s disastrous outcome, his rearguard action at Brooklyn Heights was credited with saving hundreds of American lives. Smallwood had barely issued the order to form up when his left flank was raked by a volley from a company of British light infantry chasing Wayne’s stragglers. Earlier, back at Howe’s camp, this particular group of infantrymen had been exempted from the order to remove their flints after their commander promised to hold himself personally responsible for any of his men who fired their weapons. Now they had expressly disobeyed the order not to fire.