Patriots (68 page)

“
To give it a little revenge,” Franklin said. “I wore this coat on the day Wedderburn abused me at Whitehall.”

—

Word of America’s treaty with France reached George Washington in April 1778, and he wrote to the Congress, “
I believe no
event was ever received with more heartfelt joy.” The hard winter had tested Washington’s spirit more than the months of scheming by his detractors. In the weeks after the fighting at Germantown, his army had been shifting position in the countryside around Philadelphia. Washington would not let his men go home for the winter. John Cadwalader, commanding the Pennsylvania militia, was even more adamant they should not. The people of his state had expected Washington to stop General Howe from taking Philadelphia.
“They were disappointed!” Cadwalader wrote. Removing the American army from Pennsylvania would be taken as a proof of fatal weakness. When Washington met with his council late in November, Lord Stirling had recommended that the army move its base to the area around a village called Valley Forge. The community lay at the junction of the Schuylkill River and Valley Creek and consisted of a few houses and a forge the British had destroyed two months earlier.

A week before Christmas, 1777, Washington had notified his men that he expected them to hew a camp out of the wilderness. His order had assured them that he himself would “
share in the hardship and partake of every inconvenience.”

The two-mile site Washington chose was a sloping hill thick with the wood his troops could use to build their huts. It was protected by Valley Creek and by a peak called Mount Joy. The men chopped and sawed, their eyes smarting from the acrid fires, and when time came for supper, the hills echoed with voices shouting, “No meat! No meat!” They survived instead on damp masses of flour called “fire cake” because it could be baked on stones rather than in ovens. A young surgeon named Albigence Waldo got the same answer whenever he toured the camp.
“What have you for your dinner, boys?” “Fire cake and water, sir.”

When the Congress declared a day of thanksgiving, each soldier was given a treat—four ounces of rice and a tablespoon of vinegar. But amid the deprivation, farmers around Valley Forge were prospering by sending their meat and grain to Philadelphia, where they were purchased by the British, who paid in English pounds. Whenever Washington caught a man herding cattle to town for General Howe, he made use of the powers Congress had voted him, seized the herd and sent the farmer to jail. But Washington couldn’t compete with the lure of hard money. He had only the paper scrip issued by the Congress, which was worthless
in value and as an example of the printer’s art. Counterfeit bills were always easily detected because they were better engraved than Congressional money, which was printed on cheaper paper and misspelled “Philadelpkia.”

On Christmas Day the men were still in drafty tents. The number of sick increased, and they were treated more often with grog than with medicine. Some of the men did not have a single shirt or pair of breeches, and they went through camp wrapped in blankets and walked barefoot through the snow to haul water from the creek. For sentry duty they would stand with their naked feet inside their hats. Feet and legs froze, turned black and were amputated.

George Washington pleaded with the Congress for clothing and food. Even though his men were naked and starving, he said, they weren’t deserting now and they didn’t mutiny. When they could, they joked instead; one unit announced a dinner party limited to men without a whole pair of trousers. As the winter deepened and the cold increased, men were setting their tots of liquor on fire and swilling them down with the flame. A French volunteer was struck by the contrast between the men’s attitude and their condition. So ragged, he said. And so merry.

An increasing number of volunteers began to arrive from European armies. Besides Thomas Conway, Silas Deane had recruited Colonel Johann Kalb, who called himself a baron with even less justification than William Alexander’s in making himself Lord Stirling. Soon after his own interview, Kalb returned to Deane with a more legitimate nobleman. He was a short, slim, pale nineteen-year-old with reddish hair, a pointed nose and a shyly amiable expression. Kalb introduced him as Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette.

The boy had been two when his father was killed by a British bullet at the battle of Minden, and Gilbert had inherited a fortune along with his title. He grew up precocious—married at sixteen and a reserve captain in the French dragoons soon after. Now he made an irresistible proposition to Silas Deane. In exchange for the rank of major general in the American Army, Lafayette would serve for no pay, only expenses. He clinched the bargain by buying his own ship and slipping away from Le Havre before the official French embargo was lifted.

General Washington had a low opinion of many of the foreign
adventurers Silas Deane was unloading on his army. And Lafayette also had reason to regret the bargain he had made. He had arrived in the American camp before General Howe took Philadelphia, and he was discouraged by the shacks and tents crowded with soldiers who were half naked or wearing faded hunting shirts. But Lafayette was tactful when the American commander in chief apologized to him. “
We must be embarrassed,” Washington said, “to show ourselves to an officer who has just left the French Army.”

The marquis answered, “I am here to learn, not to teach.”

George Washington had found a son. He invited Lafayette to join his military family and move into his headquarters, where the Frenchman quickly found that Washington embodied the ideals of nobility and majesty. At Brandywine, Lafayette fought courageously and took a bullet, and when Philadelphia fell to Howe he wrote to instruct his young wife, Adrienne, how to respond when French enemies of the American cause taunted her: “
You will reply politely, ‘You are all absolute idiots. Philadelphia is an uninteresting little town, open on all sides; its port was already blockaded; it was made famous, God knows why, because Congress resided there; that’s what this famous city really is; and, by the way, we’ll undoubtedly take it back sooner or later.’ ”

When the Congress granted Lafayette a command, he flattered Washington by requesting a division from Virginia. He proved his loyalty again during the Conway affair by turning down the leadership of a proposed expedition against Montreal that could have made him famous at twenty, because Thomas Conway would have been second in command. Writing home, Lafayette predicted of Washington, “
His name will be revered throughout the centuries by all who love liberty and humanity.”

The day the alliance between France and America was announced gave Lafayette a rare excuse to demonstrate his esteem. He ran to George Washington and kissed him on both cheeks. It was the day for such liberties. Washington’s men said they had never seen such delight on his face as when he heard that France had become his ally.

Another foreigner who came to Valley Forge was less exuberant but equally welcome. Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben came recommended by both Silas Deane and Benjamin Franklin. The baron was about Washington’s age, short and powerfully
built, and spoke of his experience as a lieutenant general in the Prussian Army of Frederick the Great. Rather than cause resentment among the American officers by insisting on a generalship, he was offering himself as a volunteer without rank or pay. Steuben didn’t want to command the troops, only to drill them. With Washington’s blessing—and a sinking heart when he saw the condition of his students—Steuben conducted a training course for which he got up every morning at three. His goal was to turn half-clad men with rusty muskets into professional soldiers in time for the campaign of 1778. Steuben, who spoke no English, had to adapt his Old World methods to the character of these free men. Writing to a friend in Europe, he noted that with Prussians, Austrians or Frenchmen “
you say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he does it, but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason you ought to do that.’ And then he does it.”

Because the Continentals lacked a set of written regulations, Steuben compiled the American Army’s first manual. He wrote in French, an aide did the translation, and Alexander Hamilton smoothed out the English. Few of the men had even the most rudimentary knowledge of basic training, which meant that he had to define everything for them, including the position of a soldier at attention: “
He is to stand straight and firm upon his legs, with his head turned to the right so far as to bring the left eye over the waistcoat buttons; the heels two inches apart; the toes turned out; the belly drawn in a little, but without constraint; the breast a little projected; the shoulders square to the front and kept back; the hands hanging down at the sides with the palms close to the thighs.”

Steuben’s manual broke down the procedure for firing a musket into eight counts and fifteen motions—from “Fire!” to “Return rammer!” His precision might have seemed pedantic, but he was simplifying European regulations and speeding up the firing. Steuben stressed that the war must be won with stand-up volleys from the American line, not by the wide-ranging but erratic riflemen. Bayonet fighting was barely treated.

Looking over his troops, the baron found companies with rolls of three hundred men that consisted of only thirty. One company was comprised of a single soldier. As a result, Steuben made the American companies more flexible than the British and formed them into two ranks rather than three—tallest men at the
rear, shorter men toward the center. Officers tended the flanks and kept the line straight, and noncommissioned officers followed at the rear to prevent straggling.

Steuben became the army’s first authority on hygiene. He stopped the men from stripping animals and leaving their carcasses to rot above ground. He explained why kitchens and latrines should be placed at opposite sides of the camp. He called on the soldiers to stop relieving themselves wherever they stood. Officers inspected the tents and huts daily to make sure that every utensil was clean and that on clear days the straw and the bedding were aired. Steuben required the men to wash their hands and faces once a day, more often when necessary, and to bathe whenever the creek was high.

Setting down his thoughts on leadership, Baron von Steuben listed as his first principle that an officer must try to gain the love of his men by treating them with every kindness and being alert to their complaints. But he appreciated the value of an occasional oath and was frustrated that the Americans only laughed when he exclaimed,
“Sacre Goddam!” Once, he called to a translator, “These fellows won’t do what I tell them! Come swear for me!”

By the time George Washington learned that his latest baron was another European fraud—a parson’s son who had held no rank in Prussia higher than major—Steuben had made himself invaluable. Washington saw to it that the Congress rewarded his contribution with the rank of major general and the post of inspector general vacated by Thomas Conway.

Together with his foreign volunteers, Washington welcomed to Valley Forge in the spring of 1778 two of his former allies, one returning from the hospital, the other from captivity. Six weeks after he had fallen at Saratoga, the Congress had finally restored Benedict Arnold’s rank and seniority, but he had spent that time, his wounded leg strapped to a board, brooding over the injustices he had suffered. One of his legs was now two inches shorter than the other, and when his coach drew up in front of Washington’s headquarters it took four men to lift Arnold out. He dismissed them, took his crutches and prepared to hobble toward his commander. Instead Washington ran down the steps and embraced him.

Washington’s greeting was equally warm for Charles Lee, who had been held prisoner in New York for fifteen months. The commander in chief personally led the welcome party out of
camp to greet Lee. Martha Washington prepared as elegant a dinner as the camp could offer, and Lee stayed in a room next to her parlor. Even with those marks of favor, freedom was something of a comedown for Lee. The British had supplied a three-room suite in the New York City Hall, with rich food, fine wine and an Italian valet named Minghini. In return, Lee had told William Howe how the British might end the war.

General Lee was late to breakfast his first morning at Valley Forge. He had brought along a British sergeant’s wife and had let her into his room by a back door. One of Washington’s aides thought Lee looked dirty and disheveled at the breakfast table, as though he had spent the night rolling on the ground.

The Congress had watched Europeans flocking to Valley Forge and lately had ordered all officers to take an oath of allegiance before the next campaign. Washington called several together and directed them to place their hands on a Bible while he read out the oath. General Lee was among the group, and each time Washington began to read, Lee pulled his hand away. Washington stopped and asked why.

“
As to King George,” Lee said jauntily, “I am ready enough to absolve myself from all allegiance to him. But I have some scruples about the Prince of Wales.”

When the laughter died down, the other men agreed that he was the same Charles Lee. Then Lee went ahead and took the oath.

No amount of mockery or bad manners, though, clouded Washington’s evident relief in having Lee at his side as the year’s campaign began. And, from conversations in New York, Lee was able to confirm what Washington’s spies had only suspected: Lord North was dissatisfied with William Howe’s inaction and had recalled him to England. North was turning over the command of Britain’s army in America to Sir Henry Clinton.