Belatedly, Washington heeded his dissenting officers and told his army to move on, leaving a small detachment behind. Cool as ever, shielded only by a pack of aides, Washington again exposed himself to danger on his conspicuous white horse. “With great concern I saw our brave commander-in-chief exposing himself to the hottest fire of the enemy,” recalled Sullivan, and “regard to my country obliged me to ride to him and beg him to retire.”45 Washington briefly withdrew to the rear, only to ride forward again. At first he imagined he was hearing the sound of British soldiers retreating, with the enemy falling back “in the utmost confusion.”46 He was so sanguine of victory that he nearly ordered his men to march to Philadelphia. Washington remained unalterably convinced that, until bad weather reversed the situation, the British had been on the brink of withdrawing from the battlefield.

Unfortunately, the strange conditions had played havoc with his overly intricate plan. Enveloped in fog and drifting smoke, the four columns found it hard to coordinate their actions. As so often with Washington’s strategies, the many interlocking parts were hard to harmonize. American soldiers began firing at one another in the fog, precipitating a headlong retreat. False reports flew about of an enemy force in the rear, causing patriots to flee a phantom enemy. Washington ordered Major Benjamin Tallmadge to block these stampeding foot soldiers by lining up a row of horses across the road, only to have the infantry run around or crawl desperately beneath them. Washington shouted at his men, even struck at them with his sword, as he had done at Kip’s Bay—to no effect. At the same time Greene’s men to the north were falling back in disorderly fashion. The whole battle lasted less than three hours.

By nine P.M. the American troops had regathered at Pennypacker’s Mill, twenty miles away. By all accounts, they weren’t bowed or crestfallen. “They appeared to me to be only sensible of a disappointment, not a defeat, and to be more displeased at their retreating from Germantown than anxious to get to their rendezvous,” said

Thomas Paine.47 But the final tally of battle—150 Americans killed, 520 wounded, and 400 captured versus 70 British killed, 450 wounded, and 15 captured—decidedly favored the British. “In a word,” Washington told his brother Jack, “it was a bloody day. Would to heaven I could add that it had been a more fortunate one for us.”48

In a letter Howe complained of the torching of flour mills and the suffering of law-abiding citizens; on October 6 Washington replied in a sternly worded reproach. He noted the “wanton and unnecessary depredations” committed by Howe’s own army and the annihilation of Charlestown.49 On that same day, in a magnificently gallant gesture, he sent Howe a two-line letter about a dog found roaming the Germantown battlefield. It said in full: “General Washington’s compliments to General Howe. He does himself the pleasure to return [to] him a dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on the collar appears to belong to General Howe.”50 How could the British portray such a man as a wild-eyed revolutionary?

Although Germantown ended in defeat, Washington had shown extraordinary audacity. With grudging admiration, Howe conceded that he didn’t think “the enemy would have dared to approach after so recent a defeat as that at Brandywine.”51 The French foreign minister, the Count de Vergennes, who was pondering an alliance with America, claimed that “nothing struck him so much” as the Battle of Germantown. 52 He was impressed that Washington, stuck with raw recruits, had fought two consecutive battles against highly seasoned troops. In writing about the battle, Washington stressed how bravely his men had fought and how narrowly victory had eluded them. “Unfortunately, the day was overcast by a dark and heavy fog,” he told one correspondent, “which prevented our columns from discovering each other’s movement . . . Had it not been for this circumstance, I am fully persuaded the enemy would have sustained a total defeat.”53 In narrating events to Hancock, he disguised the fact that twice as many Americans as British had been killed. “Upon the whole,” he wrote, “it may be said the day was rather unfortunate than injurious. We sustained no material loss of men . . . and our troops, who are not in the least dispirited by it, have gained what all young troops gain by being in actions.”54 Of these assertions, the last came closest to the mark: the battle was the sort of defeat that supplies a fillip to the confidence of the losing side. Now, Washington averred, his men knew they could “confuse and rout even the flower of the British army with the greatest ease.”55 Congress seemed to agree with this generous assessment and not only commended Washington for bravery but forged a medal in his honor. After the humiliating flight of Congress from Philadelphia, the Battle of Germantown had proved that the patriotic cause, if ailing, was far from moribund.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Rapping a Demigod over the Knuckles

TWO WEEKS AFTER the Battle of Germantown, George Washington digested the bittersweet news that General Horatio Gates had trounced General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, capturing his army of five thousand men. Just when Washington ached for a victory, his rival achieved a stunning conquest. A victory so incontestable made Gates the natural darling of Washington’s critics. Washington knew that appearances would count heavily against him and that in the afterglow of Saratoga Gates’s reputation would be gilded and his own recent defeats darkened. An anonymous pamphlet called The Thoughts of a Freeman made the rounds of Congress, indicting Washington’s leadership with the damning remark that “the people of America have been guilty of idolatry in making a man their God.”1

For all the adulation of Washington, a vocal, persistent minority of naysayers took issue with his leadership. As assorted voices of discontent echoed in Congress, these discussions were cloaked in secrecy. Writing to John Adams, Dr. Benjamin Rush voiced what others privately thought. Gates, he said, had planned his campaign with “wisdom and executed [it] with vigor and bravery,” making a telling contrast with the hapless Washington, who had been “outgeneralled and twice beaten.”2 He extolled Gates’s army as “a well-regulated family” while deriding Washington’s as “an unformed mob.”3 The disgruntled Adams was relieved to see Gates victorious. “If it had been [Washington],” he said, “idolatry and adulation would have been unbounded, so excessive as to endanger our liberties.”4

With excellent antennae for rivals, Washington knew that Gates represented a competitive threat to his leadership. In August Congress had arbitrated a feud between Philip Schuyler and Gates for control of the army’s northern department.

Washington always felt warm friendship toward Schuyler, the undisputed favorite of the New Yorkers. But the bearish Gates, who often dispensed with etiquette, appealed to the rough, egalitarian instincts of the New Englanders, and his ambition only grew with success. In tactless letters, he accused Washington of everything from trying to monopolize “every tent upon the continent” to waylaying uniforms meant for his own regiments.5

In midsummer Schuyler had been blamed for the Ticonderoga debacle. In early August Congress had asked Washington to choose the next head of the army’s northern department, and with commendable restraint, he declined. He didn’t care to stir up a hornet’s nest by meddling in the decision and sought to emphasize civilian control of the military. After all, it was Washington’s reflexive restraint in seeking power that had enabled him to exercise so much of it. In this case, however, his neutrality paved the way for Congress to elect Gates. By ceding this power to Congress, Washington allowed his scheming rival to nourish the fantasy that he held an equal and independent command and was beholden only to Congress.