Washington: A Life (64 page)

That the Continental Army did not disintegrate or revolt en masse at Valley Forge is simply astonishing. When Dr. Benjamin Rush toured the camp, General Sullivan lectured him, “Sir, this is not an army—it is a mob.”
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It shows the confidence that Washington produced in his men that they stuck by him in this forlorn place. Nor did he achieve popularity by coddling anyone, for he inflicted severe floggings on men caught stealing food. “The culprit being securely lashed to a tree or post receives on his naked back the number of lashes assigned to him by a whip formed of several small knotted cords, which sometimes cut through his skin at every stroke,” wrote Dr. James Thacher, who described how men survived this ordeal by biting on lead bullets—the origin of the term “biting the bullet.”
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Governed by a powerful moral code and determined to maintain some semblance of military discipline amid woeful conditions, Washington perpetuated his ban on cards, dice, and other forms of gambling.

Perhaps most frightful at Valley Forge were the rampant diseases that leveled 30 percent of the men at any given time. Many underwent amputations as their legs and feet turned black from frostbite. Owing to pervasive malnutrition, filthy conditions, and exposure to cold, scourges such as typhus, typhoid fever, pneumonia, dysentery, and scurvy grew commonplace. Dr. Benjamin Rush deplored the army hospitals, located outside the camp, as gruesome sties, overcrowded with inmates “shivering with cold upon the floors without a blanket to cover them, calling for fire, for water, for suitable food, and for medicines—and calling in vain.”
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By winter’s end, two thousand men had perished at Valley Forge, mostly from disease and many of them in the warm spring months. “Happily, the real condition of Washington was not well understood by Sir William Howe,” wrote John Marshall, “and the characteristic attention of that officer [i.e., Washington] to the lives and comfort of his troops saved the American army.”
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On December 23, with the situation deteriorating daily, Washington rushed an urgent message to Henry Laurens, warning that the Continental Army would “starve, dissolve, or disperse” without more food. To illustrate, he related a frightening anecdote of an incident the day before when he had ordered his soldiers to pounce on British soldiers scouring the countryside for forage. The operation was scuttled because his men were too enervated from lack of food to carry out the mission. Washington testified that there was “not a single hoof of any kind to slaughter and not more than 25 bar[re]ls of flour!” He made the astonishing prediction that “three or four days [of] bad weather would prove our destruction.”
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In heartbreaking fashion, he evoked an army devoid of soap; men with one shirt, half a shirt, or no shirt at all; nearly three thousand unfit for duty for lack of shoes; and men who passed sleepless nights, crouched by the fire, for want of blankets.

Ever since the war started, Washington had saved his laments for Congress, even though much of the real power resided with the states. But he was reluctant to appeal to the states, lest he seem to circumvent Congress or violate military subordination to civilian control. Now, in desperation, he began to issue circulars to the states, which gave him license to rail against the rickety political structure that hampered his army. That November Congress had completed drafting the Articles of Confederation, creating a loose confederacy of states with a notably weak central government. Dreading the hobgoblin of concentrated power, states shrank from levying taxes and introducing other measures to aid the federal war effort. Washington was dismayed that the states now shipped off their mediocrities to Congress while more able men stayed home “framing constitutions, providing laws, and filling [state] offices.”
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A leitmotif of his wartime letters was that the shortsighted states would come to ruin without an effective central government. Increasingly Washington took a scathing view of lax congressional leadership.

The Christmas dinner at Valley Forge was an austere one for Washington and his military family, who shared a frugal collation of mutton, potatoes, cabbage, and crusts of bread, accompanied by water. The liquor shortage produced the worst grumbling among the officers. Sometime around the Battle of Brandywine, Washington had lost his baggage, with its complement of plates, dishes, and kitchen utensils, and he now made do with a single spoon. He experienced no self-pity, however, so woebegone was the comparative plight of his men. On the last day of the year, he compressed the suffering of Valley Forge into a single piercing cry: “Our sick naked, our well naked, our unfortunate men in captivity naked!”
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What made Valley Forge so bitterly disenchanting for Washington was that selfishness among the citizenry seemed to outweigh patriotic fervor. In choosing winter quarters at Valley Forge, he had surmised, correctly, that the surrounding countryside possessed ample food supplies. What he hadn’t reckoned on was that local farmers would sell their produce to British troops in Philadelphia rather than to shivering patriots. Some of this behavior could be attributed to blatant greed and profiteering. But prices also soared as the Continental currency depreciated and an inflationary psychology took hold. Holding a debased currency, the patriots simply couldn’t compete with the British, who paid in solid pounds sterling. “We must take the passions of men as nature has given them,” Washington wrote resignedly. “… I do not mean to exclude altogether the idea of patriotism … But I will venture to assert that a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone.”
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Washington presented a rare case of a revolutionary leader who, instead of being blinded by political fervor, recognized that fallible human beings couldn’t always live up to the high standards he set for them. Though often embittered by the mercenary behavior of his countrymen, he tried to accept human nature as it was. He believed that many Americans had expected a speedy end to the conflict and, when the first flush of patriotism faded, were governed by self-interest. In 1778 there were far more political fence-sitters than in the giddy days after Lexington and Concord.

By late January Washington was so enraged about farmers engaging in contraband trade with the enemy that he issued orders “to make an example of some guilty one, that the rest may be sensible of a like fate, should they persist.”
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Many farmers tried to bypass restrictions by having women and children drive food-laden wagons to Philadelphia, hoping American sentries wouldn’t stop them. Nothing short of the death penalty, Washington insisted, would terminate this reprehensible practice. Finally, he saw no choice but to sabotage American mills turning out supplies for the enemy and sent teams of soldiers to break off the spindles and spikes of their water wheels. With a beef shortage looming, he had Nathanael Greene and almost a thousand men fan out across the countryside and confiscate all cattle and sheep fit for slaughter. As word of the operation spread, farmers hid their livestock in woods and swamps. Despite such draconian measures, Washington warned that his army still stared at starvation: “For some days past, there has been little less than a famine in camp. A part of the army has been a week without any kind of flesh and the rest three or four days.”
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At Valley Forge, Washington composed numerous screeds against American greed that make uncomfortable reading for those who regard that winter as a purely heroic time. Seeing the decay of public virtue everywhere, he berated speculators, monopolists, and war profiteers. “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?” he asked James Warren. “ … And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it heaven!”
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Washington himself could be a hard-driving businessmen, yet he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason, he thought it the intent of “the speculators—various tribes of money makers—and stock jobbers of all denominations to continue the war for their own private emolument, without considering that their avarice and thirst for gain must plunge everything … in one common ruin.”
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Besieged by critics, heartsick at the shabby state of his troops, and angry at congressional neglect and the supine behavior of the states, Washington refused to abandon his army and again deferred a visit to Mount Vernon. Martha did not arrive at Valley Forge until early February. Right before Christmas she had suffered the grievous loss of her younger sister and best friend, Anna Maria Bassett. Death had been omnipresent for Martha, who had now lost a husband, a father, five siblings, and three of her four children. Whether her second husband would survive this interminable war remained an open question. A touching condolence note to her brother-in-law, Burwell Bassett, shows that her mind was darkly tinged with thoughts of mortality. Anna “has, I hope, made a happy exchange and only gone a little before us,” she said of her sister. “The time draws near when I hope we shall meet, never more to part … I must [own] to you that she was the greatest favorite I had in the world.”
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She pleaded with Burwell to send his ten-year-old daughter Fanny to Mount Vernon. “If you will let her come to live with me, I will, with the greatest pleasure, take her and be a parent and mother to her as long as I live.”
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Bassett complied, and Fanny came to occupy a special place in Martha’s affections.

While wishing to join her husband at Valley Forge, Martha was temporarily detained at Mount Vernon by the birth of her second grandchild to Jacky’s wife on New Year’s Eve 1777. Though Washington understood the reason for her delay, he pined for her presence. The long winter journey on bumpy, frozen roads must have taxed Martha to the utmost. When she arrived at Valley Forge, the soldiers cheered her, but she was taken aback by her husband’s humble quarters, somber mood, and frayed nerves. “The General is well but much worn with fatigue and anxiety,” she confided to a friend. “I never knew him to be so anxious as now.”
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That Martha Washington was made of stern stuff soon grew evident as she pitched in with good-natured energy. One observer left this touching vignette of her at work:

Her selfless, devoted style reminded one admiring Frenchman “of the Roman matrons of whom I had read so much and I thought that she well deserved to be the companion and friend of the greatest man of the age.”
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By and large Martha Washington wasn’t overtly political, yet she shared her husband’s firm commitment to the cause, writing to Mercy Warren, “I hope and trust that all the states will make a vigorous push early this spring … and thereby putting a stop to British cruelties.”
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The wives of several generals stayed at Valley Forge that winter—including the flirtatious Caty Greene, the amusing but increasingly obese Lucy Knox, and the elegant Lady Stirling, accompanied by her fashionable daughter, Lady Kitty—and tried to lighten the dismal mood. Washington was especially beguiled by Lady Kitty, who requested a lock of his hair. These women dispensed with dancing and card playing as inappropriate to such mournful times and settled for quiet musical evenings where people took turns singing; tea and coffee replaced more potent beverages. That February, on Washington’s forty-sixth birthday, a little levity was allowed as he was entertained by a fife and drum corps.

To relieve residual gloom several months later, Washington allowed junior officers to stage his favorite play,
Cato,
before a “very numerous and splendid audience.”
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Written by Joseph Addison, this classic tale told of a Roman statesman, Cato the Younger, who had defied the imperial sway of Julius Caesar and committed suicide rather than submit to tyranny. No longer able to ransack British history for heroes, many patriots turned to classical history for inspiration. Ancient Rome in its republican phase provided uplifting examples, while its decline and fall into despotism offset them with cautionary tales. Washington identified with the stern code of honor and duty in ancient Rome, taking Cato as a personal model. He had seen the play performed several times in Williamsburg and he frequently quoted it. One of his stock phrases—“Thy steady temper … can look on guilt, rebellion, [and] fraud … in the calm lights of mild philosophy”—was plucked from the play.
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Other treasured epigrams included “ ’Tis not in mortals to command success / But we’ll do more … we’ll deserve it,” a commentary on the fickle power of fate and how we must acquit ourselves nobly despite it, and “When vice prevails and impious men bear sway, / The post of honour is a private station.”
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The rhetoric of
Cato
saturated the American Revolution. Two of its most famous lines, one from Nathan Hale, the other from Patrick Henry, derived from the play: “What pity is it / That we can die but once to serve our country” and “It is not now a time to talk of aught / But chains or conquest, liberty or death.”
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During this Valley Forge winter Washington conquered his initial misgivings about Lafayette and embraced him as his most intimate protégé. In late November, in Gloucester, New Jersey, Lafayette spearheaded a party of four hundred men in a surprise raid on a Hessian detachment, leading to twenty enemy deaths versus only one American casualty. Washington admired the Frenchman’s swashbuckling courage. No longer just another foreign nobleman to be tolerated, Lafayette was rewarded with command of a division. He knew he had attained a unique place in Washington’s heart. “I see him more intimately than any other man,” he boasted to his father-in-law. “… His warm friendship for me … put[s] me in a position to share everything he has to do, all the problems he has to solve, and all the obstacles he has to overcome.”
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