Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (24 page)

Washington now had an army that had fought well after disastrous defeats in the previous six months. More of his officers and soldiers now believed in themselves. As important as this belief was the renewed faith of the nation in the army and its general. All agreed that Washington’s victory at Trenton had transformed the Revolution, which once again was a cause that could be won.

6

The Philadelphia Campaign

Washington’s strike at Trenton and Princeton revealed a side of his character not often seen: a willingness to take chances. He had allowed a part of his fierce energy to come out, and the consequences were especially pleasing to him, not simply because his daring paid off, but also because he had thrust himself into the heart of the fighting. Much of what he had done as a commander up to this moment fell into the category of administration. He had to pull together an army when he arrived in Cambridge in 1775, and that assignment compelled him to act as a manager virtually every day. The big battles of the beginning of the war had been fought at Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill; he was not present at either. Nor did the end of the Siege of Boston or the beginning of the New York campaign bring him under gunfire. He planned the move onto Dorchester Heights, but the need for overall coordination had moored him to his headquarters. In the New York campaign he had watched, but could not prevent, the collapse in Brooklyn. To be sure, he led the escape of his army in the fog and rain from Long Island to New York Island. His fierceness finally found full expression amid the shelling and musket fire the British poured into his troops at Kips Bay, but whatever satisfaction that engagement brought to his combative spirit vanished as his troops, sharing nothing of his eagerness to get at the enemy, fled for safety.

After the weary run across New Jersey, the Battles of Trenton and Princeton, at the end of December 1776, transformed his spirit. He had smelled gunpowder again, his soldiers fought well, and this time he and they emerged from battle convinced that they could defeat their enemy wherever they found him. For troops who had been in retreat for months, the victories of Trenton and Princeton assumed enormous
significance. The mode of these attacks, with their swiftness, deception, and force, confirmed for many soldiers their own skill. In effect, American soldiers defeated their enemy in the way the enemy had grown accustomed to defeating them.

Washington did not exult in his victory, but others did. Members of Congress wrote of their pleasure at the news, though several remained dissatisfied at the strategy Washington had followed since taking his command. John Adams was among them, and he, as Nathanael Greene remarked, did not have “the most exalted opinion” of any American general.
¹
Washington’s unguarded deprecation, two years earlier, of the slovenliness of New England troops probably still rankled Adams, but on the other hand it may not have had anything to do with his later unhappiness with the conduct of the war. Adams did not like many people and had even less regard for the way things were done anywhere. Adams aside, most Americans in and out of Congress whose opinions survive declared their satisfaction in the outcome of the Trenton and Princeton attacks.

As for Washington’s reputation, it seems clearly to have been solidly favorable before these battles, and this includes regard for his military skill. Nicholas Cresswell, a Virginia planter, recorded in his journal the change of heart of a friend in Leesburg, Virginia, who had been a critic: “Six weeks ago this gentleman was lamenting the unhappy situation of the Americans and pitying the wretched condition of their much-beloved General, supposing his want of skill and experience in military matters had brought them all to the brink of destruction. In short all was gone, all was lost. But now the scale is turned and Washington’s name is extolled to the clouds.”
²

Washington did not read Cresswell’s journal. But he did read, in a letter from Bartholomew Dandridge, his brother-in-law, “that it is plain Providence designed you as the favorite Instrument in working the Salvation of America.” Dandridge offered this estimate “without flattery,” and coupled it with a warning “against exposing your Person too much,” advice that might have produced a smile in Washington, who seems not to have ever felt physical danger.
³

In fact, he acted as if he had no time for congratulations or for taking care of himself. His descriptions of Trenton and Princeton played down American prowess and his own, but he did acknowledge that “these
succeses” [
sic
] had improved the morale of the people of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Whatever pride he might have felt was carefully disguised in his dismissal of his army’s quality. To Jonathan Trumbull Sr. he began his account of what had happened in this way: “Our success at Trenton has been followed by another lucky blow at Princeton on the 3d instant,” phrasing repeated almost exactly in a letter to Philip Schuyler: “The Enemy by two lucky Strokes at Trenton and Princeton, have been obliged to abandon Every Part of Jersey except Brunswick & Amboy.” Elsewhere he deflected responsibility for fashioning victories in the battles, simply saying that “Providence has heretofore saved us in a remarkable manner, and on this we must principally rely.” He was under no illusions about the strength of his army; nor did he believe that it had become the reliable professional fighting force he had long craved.
⁴

Yet he had been affected by the success at Trenton and Princeton. He was now a more confident commander, one who recognized that his own abilities were equal to his assignment. Such conviction had lived uneasily within him since he took command of the army. The uneasiness led him to pay attention to the recommendations of his council of generals, which always counseled caution and restrained action, usually warning that the enemy was too powerful to fight head-on. Washington talked with these commanders in December before deciding on his bold strokes and found agreement that an attack across the Delaware should be made. There was no doubt that the officers’ agreement pleased him, though in actuality he had made up his mind before such consultations were made, and before any advice was given.
⁵

In deciding to strike, he yielded to the frustration that had built up as defeat and one retreat after another occurred. But his motives were not based on unthinking anger or a sense of desperation that implied that rolling the dice was the only action left. He did feel a desperation, but it was softened by a mature sense of how the war should be fought and a recognition that the political being of the new nation was in peril, linked as it was to military operations. He was no longer shocked at the conduct of the militia; nor was he surprised at the unevenness of the operations of the Congress. These were problems he could do little about. His immediate dread in the weeks leading to Trenton and Princeton was that Howe would take Philadelphia. With New Jersey
in British hands and its people apparently lacking the will to help in taking it back, could the Revolution survive the loss of Philadelphia and, perhaps, all of Pennsylvania? These fears provided the context for the decision—so redolent of frustration and fury—to strike across the Delaware.
⁶

The success of the attack gratified him and released some of the anguish of earlier defeats, but he felt that the British would respond with their own attacks as quickly as possible. This belief was mistaken. Howe may have wished for one more chance to crush the rebellion before winter closed down operations, but he soon fell back into conventional actions and sent most of his army into winter quarters at New Brunswick and Amboy (later Perth Amboy). His proclamation at the end of November 1776 had brought a number of loyalists out in the open—these people wanted to escape violence, not commit it—but by early January of the new year they had had enough of the peace the British and Hessians brought them. For these troops plundered friend and foe alike, without regard to the oaths New Jersey loyalists had taken to support the British king.
⁷
British commanders, confined with their forces in New Brunswick and Amboy, found that they had to resort to local supplies of food and forage if they were to sustain their troops. They soon discovered that enemy militia, who had shown themselves incapable in previous months of fighting in conventional ways, were quite adept at taking on foraging parties, which were necessarily clumsy and difficult to maneuver, encumbered as they were with the horses and wagons necessary for transporting grains and hay back to their camps. Foraging parties also attempted to collect local cattle and horses. Bloated with their plunder, they proved to be easy targets for the angry militia. When the enemies collided, the British seemed usually to get the worst of the damage, and in flight back to friendly lines they sometimes left behind not only what they had collected but also prisoners, dead, and wounded. They soon attempted to even the odds by sending heavily armed forces along with the foraging parties, and sometimes added fieldpieces to these forces. Not even such strenuous efforts stopped militia attacks, and in these months of winter and early spring, British soldiers in Amboy and New Brunswick lived on salted beef and bread, with very little else.

Washington had ordered several of these attacks and approved of
them all. He knew they would keep the British on the defensive and would also raise the morale of the people of New Jersey, a consequence that boded well for sustaining the Revolution.

The need to deny food and forage to British troops, important as it was, had to give way to one even more urgent: recruiting and maintaining an army. As usual, short enlistments were the key to this problem, presenting Washington with a mixture of soldiers, some serving for only six weeks, others on three-month tours, still others in the service for a year, with a few signed up for three years or for the duration of the war. He needed men, and he made his preferences known throughout the months that followed Trenton. Although he had no high opinion of the fighting ability of ordinary people, he thought that with training and discipline, the common run of society in America could be made to yield the soldiers he required. But how to go about finding them remained an intractable problem.
⁸

Congress had heard him on the subject more times than most delegates probably desired. Late in 1776, Congress had responded by authorizing him to raise sixteen more regiments, in addition to the eighty-eight it had agreed to about a year earlier. A good step, Washington believed, but an authorization brought no one into camp. Congress did call upon the states to raise these regiments, just as it had in approving the original eighty-eight. Washington added his voice, but he knew that he faced reluctance among most men to venture themselves by joining Continental regiments. Most preferred service in state militias if they had to serve at all.

There was no recruiting service available, but Congress had eased his task somewhat by allowing him to name the colonels who would command the sixteen fresh regiments—and the other, lower officers as well: the lieutenant colonels, the majors, captains, right down to the lowest lieutenant, if he chose to exercise his right to choose. Washington, as recruiting proceeded in the winter, soon came to permit a colonel who had agreed to head a regiment to name all the officers in his command. This right was an important inducement, and a necessary one on several scores, for no regimental commander wanted officers in his command whom he did not know, and in many cases regimental officers turned out to be men who knew one another. Washington did
make clear that should a colonel’s choices of subordinates dissatisfy him, he retained the right to reject them.
⁹

Filling the ranks was even more difficult than finding officers. In this assignment he received limited help from Congress, which proved unwilling to require long-term enlistments and could not bring itself to pay, feed, and equip ordinary soldiers in any but the most miserly style. Washington recognized that the paltry rewards offered to recruits stopped many from coming in, and he told Congress that such parsimony could gut the army and forestall attempts to replace those who departed. What he proposed by way of rewards was hardly magnificent: In January he suggested paying every man who volunteered a twenty-dollar bounty, and added that a suit of clothes would be necessary. Congress agreed and added a promise of one hundred acres, presumably to be carved out of the West, and half pay for the disabled for life.
¹⁰

Armed with such lures, newly commissioned colonels set out to fill the ranks. They could not accept anyone simply because he volunteered, for Washington had clear ideas about who should find acceptance and who should not. The rules he laid out provided that no one under seventeen or more than fifty years of age should be accepted, and only those “free from Lameness or other bodily Infirmity” that might make them incapable of standing up to the rigors of camp life should be enlisted. To make certain that no weakling might slip through for the bounty, Washington also instructed his new colonels to take only men of sufficient stature to carry out the duties of a private in the army. He was emphatic in demanding that no deserter from the British army be enrolled; nor should anyone of suspicious principles, a warning to steer clear of Tories or the lukewarm. He also demonstrated knowledge of an underhanded practice sometimes used by recruiters by requiring that no one already in the army in another regiment be accepted. All of these requirements imposed standards that would not likely slow recruitment, but the term of service he insisted upon surely did. A recruit who signed up must agree to a minimum enlistment of three years—and preferably for the duration of the war. This requirement probably discouraged more men than any other.