As he rushed to defend Philadelphia, Washington decided to march his men through the city before their looming encounter with British forces. A showman by nature, he wanted to advertise the size and élan of the Continental Army, and he choreographed their movements down to the last details. For this grand spectacle, each soldier was to wear a green sprig, a symbol of victory, affixed to his hat or hair. This stage-managed political march was designed, according to Washington, to “have some influence on the minds of the disaffected” in Philadelphia and on “those who are dupes” to the “artifices and opinions” of the British—in other words, Tories.8

On August 24, 1777, George Washington marched his army, twelve thousand strong, through Philadelphia, first down Front Street, then up Chestnut Street. Mounted on a white horse, he presented a shining figure at the head of the procession, with Lafayette riding at his side and Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens close behind. The tide of soldiers poured on for two hours, the men trooping twelve deep “with a lively smart step,” said one observer, to the nimble beat of a fife and drum corps in each brigade.9 A stickler for rhythm, Washington warned his soldiers to mind the beat, “without dancing along or totally disregarding the music, as too often has been the case.”10 Anyone who abandoned the parade route faced a stiff penalty of thirty-nine lashes. With every window and rooftop crammed with gaping spectators, the soldiers received a rousing reception from the exultant crowds. Although Washington tried to offer a sanitized version of his drab army, the half-clad soldiers fell short of the spic-and-span panache that John Adams wanted. “Our soldiers have not yet quite the air of soldiers,” he protested. “They don’t step exactly in time. They don’t hold up their heads quite erect, nor turn out their toes exactly as they ought.”11 The rest of the crowd, however, seemed thrilled by the survival of this scrappy army against the world’s foremost military machine.

As Howe moved toward Philadelphia, Washington decided to cut off his approach at a place called Brandywine Creek, a difficult stream to negotiate. He informed his men that the upcoming battle might be decisive. Should the British be defeated, he proclaimed, “they are utterly undone—the war is at an end. Now then is the time for our most strenuous exertions.”12 Not trusting to patriotism alone, he reminded his men that fleeing soldiers would “be instantly shot down as a just punishment to themselves and for examples to others.”13 Rediscovering the virtue of alcohol in battle, Washington issued an extra gill of rum (five fluid ounces) to each man on September 9 to fortify wavering courage.

A landscape of plunging ravines and forested hills, Brandywine Creek presented a natural line of defense southwest of Philadelphia. Washington concentrated the bulk of his forces on wooded high ground behind Chadds Ford, on the east side of the creek, where the major road crossed. Relying on flawed intelligence, he posted detachments the length of the creek, stretching up to what he thought was the northernmost crossing.

On the night of September 10, a spy informed Howe of the existence of two fords still farther north—a flagrant breach in American defenses that had gone unnoticed, in a manner reminiscent of the Battle of Brooklyn. Howe decided that he and Cornwallis, with 8,200 men, would secretly execute a bold sweeping movement to the north. They would then turn east, cross these newly discovered fords, circle back to the south, and sneak up behind the right flank of Washington’s army. All the while, an advance column of 5,000 troops under Baron Wilhelm von Knyphausen would smash straight east into Washington’s army at Chadds Ford, distracting the Americans and duping them into thinking this was the main enemy offensive. While Washington’s military instincts told him that Howe might steal up behind his right flank, he didn’t assign a high enough priority to investigating this possibility and delegated a crucial scouting mission to General John Sullivan and Colonel Theodorick Bland. Unaccountably, the Americans proved ignorant of their own home turf, while Howe operated with faultless information.

In the predawn light of September 11, 1777, General Howe launched his maneuver. In the early morning, Knyphausen’s units clashed, as planned, with the main American force at Chadds Ford. Washington presided over the troops there and, as usual, showed no qualms about exposing himself to enemy fire, even when it beheaded an artilleryman nearby. The story is told that the chivalrous Major Patrick Ferguson actually had Washington in his sights and could easily have killed him—he didn’t know who it was—but refused to fire on a man with his back turned. Washington was pleased when Brigadier General William Maxwell rode up and boasted that his marksmen had killed or wounded three hundred British soldiers.14 With Lafayette at his side, Washington rode the length of the line to the sound of cheering men, but he was blind to the true shape of the emerging battlefield.

Aware that he saw only a fraction of the British Army, Washington was tormented by a nagging question: What had happened to the bulk of the enemy’s forces? Around noon Lieutenant Colonel James Ross of Pennsylvania informed him that, on a reconnaissance expedition, he had clashed with five thousand British troops on the west side of Brandywine Creek, along the Great Valley Road; he thought these troops had been led by General Howe himself. Washington didn’t fathom the full meaning of this news, though he did, as a precaution, shift troops under Adam Stephen and Lord Stirling to bolster General Sullivan’s men at Birmingham Hill, a position to his right that was well placed to resist any sudden flanking move from the upper forks.

On the spot, as his original battle plan unraveled, Washington sorted through a blizzard of contradictory information. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina remembered his patent frustration: “I heard him bitterly lament that Coll Bland had not sent him any information at all and that the accounts he had received from others were of a very contradictory nature.”15 Amid sharp clashes at Chadds Ford, General Sullivan relayed a report from Major Joseph Spear saying that he, too, had been at the Great Valley Road but found not a trace of Howe’s army. Tricked by Howe many times, Washington feared that his nemesis was about to deceive him again. Indeed, he drew the wrong conclusion from Spear’s report: he imagined that Howe had turned south and was doubling back to Chadds Ford. But in fact Howe was heading north in a long, looping movement; around noon his soldiers and horses, veiled by thick fog, waded across the northern crossing at Jeffries Ford, of whose existence Washington was unaware. As they splashed through waist-high water, the British and Hessians were flabbergasted to encounter no American resistance. By one-fifteen P.M. Washington had received reports of two British brigades moving upon Birmingham Hill from the north and abruptly realized that Howe had outwitted him. He spurred his horse toward the hill as fast as it would fly, but he still didn’t comprehend that the two brigades were merely the advance guard of Howe’s vast army.

Around four P.M., to the resounding beat of drums, British and German troops barreled forward in three sharply drawn columns, undeterred by a torrent of American canister and grapeshot. Piercing a wide hole in American lines, they engineered a deadly attack, firing muskets and charging in bayonet attacks. Tree branches snapped, leaves fluttered down, and gun smoke enveloped the battlefield. Soon the ground was thickly littered with dead bodies, mostly American, and some patriot divisions turned tail and ran. To complete a pincer movement against the Americans, Knyphausen and his men blasted their way across Brandywine Creek, diving at the Americans in a fierce bayonet attack that left the water dyed red with blood. The American private Elisha Stevens recorded the horror of “cannons roaring, muskets cracking, drums beating, bombs flying all round,” not to mention the groans of dying men.16 At five P.M. Washington dictated a message to Congress: “At half after four o’clock, the enemy attacked General Sullivan at the ford next above this and the action has been very violent ever since. It still continues. A very severe cannonade has begun here, too, and I suppose we shall have a very hot evening.”17 Washington had been completely deceived by Howe. “A contrariety of intelligence, in a critical and important point, contributed greatly, if it did not entirely bring on the misfortunes of that day,” he later wrote.18