It was Washington’s nature to ponder the darker side of things, and that night he sent out special patrols to guard the camp, lest the enemy try to exploit the festivities, as Washington had done with the Hessians on Christmas Night in 1776. The sudden turn of events both emboldened him and made him cautious. Although he thought the French alliance would tip the scales and that things were now “verging fast to a favorable issue,” he fretted that this bonanza might breed overconfidence.62 In the short run, although it yielded no immediate benefits, the French alliance was an immense tonic to American spirits. Not until midsummer would France be officially at war with England, and in the meantime the Continental Army fended as best it could against a newly alarmed British Empire.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The Long Retreat

THE FIRST CASUALTY the French alliance claimed was General William Howe, who informed his troops that spring of his imminent departure for England after a winter of fun and revelry in Philadelphia. He was replaced by General Henry Clinton, who at first glance scarcely projected a heroic image. A lonely widower, Clinton was a short man with a low, balding brow and dark eyebrows; in one image, his hooked nose and large jaw looked much too massive for his tiny face. The entire effect might have been unappealing, were it not for the kindly, intelligent expression in his eyes. If he could be rash, quarrelsome, and hypersensitive, Clinton also had a long and distinguished military record, including early service in a New York militia and a stint in the Coldstream Guards. For his valorous leadership at New York in 1776, he was decorated as a Knight of the Bath. Six months earlier George Washington had expressed contempt for Clinton when he referred to his “diabolical designs” in a letter to a Virginia friend.1

France’s entry into the war would precipitate a radical shift in British strategy. Both empires controlled lucrative islands in the West Indies, whose vast sugar and cotton slave plantations had yielded considerable profits. When Clinton was ordered that spring to divert eight thousand men, or a third of his army, to reinforce the West Indies and Florida, he concluded that staying in Philadelphia was untenable and decided to evacuate his troops across New Jersey to New York City. The British still dreamed of a mass Loyalist uprising that would turn the war decisively in their favor, but many Americans who fraternized with the enemy merely sought lucrative business. Those Loyalists in Philadelphia who had curried favor with the British were thrown into a panic by their decision to quit the city and made bootless attempts to travel north with the army. By failing to safeguard these turncoats, the British committed a major propaganda blunder. “No man,” said one royal official, “can be expected to declare for us when he cannot be assured a fortnight’s protection.”2 With excellent political judgment, Washington opposed a plan to levy punitive taxes on rich Tory sympathizers when the patriots regained the town. “A measure of this sort . . . would not only be inconsistent with sound policy,” he reflected, “but would be looked upon as an arbitrary stretch of military power.”3 He named Benedict Arnold commandant of the reclaimed city.

Often mystified by British intentions, Washington had accurate intelligence in mid-May that the British would leave Philadelphia and repair to their more secure base in New York. He did not know whether Clinton would return by land across New Jersey or by sea. With three thousand men still sick, and short of supplies, Washington doubted he could capitalize on a land retreat. Ironically in view of what was to happen, he envisioned a lightning march of quick-stepping British soldiers across New Jersey, led by “the flower of their army, unencumbered with baggage,” and did not think he could harass such fleet-footed units.4

In April Washington had been rejoined by General Charles Lee, who was released in a prisoner exchange after sixteen months of captivity in New York. As queer a fish as ever, the imprisoned Lee had written to Washington that he should forward his beloved dogs, “as I never stood in greater need of their company than at present.”5 His opinion of Washington’s military talents had hardly improved with incarceration. When Elias Boudinot, commissary general of prisoners, visited Lee that January, the latter launched into a diatribe about “the impossibility of our troops, under such an ignorant Commander in Chief, ever withstanding British grenadiers and light infantry,” as Boudinot recorded in his journal.6 Attempting to woo the capricious Lee to their side, the British had pampered him with choice food and wine and a warm bed “into which he tumbled jovially mellow every night.”7 The strategy produced the desired effect. It was later learned that Lee may have sketched out for General Howe a comprehensive plan on how to crush patriotic resistance and end the war.

Washington knew none of this that April, when he amicably greeted Lee on horseback, with all the honors due to his second in command, on a road outside Valley Forge. The two rode companionably into camp together, flanked by troops exhibiting the precision marching drilled into them by Steuben. Lee immediately exhibited bizarre behavior. When he awoke the next morning, “he looked as dirty as if he had been in the street all night,” said Boudinot, staggered that Lee had brought along “a miserable dirty hussy with him from Philadelphia and had actually taken her into his room by a back door and she had slept with him that night.”8

Lee was guilty of more than bad manners. Far from giving Washington credit for saving the army at Valley Forge, he snickered in private that Washington was “not fit to command a sergeant’s guard,” that the army was “in a worse situation than he had expected,” and that Washington couldn’t do without him, since he surrounded himself with toadying officers.9 But Lee was careful to conceal this venom from Washington himself: in a sympathetic note in mid-June, he apologized obsequiously to Washington for intruding on his time as it “must necessarily be taken up by more and a greater variety of business than perhaps ever was impos[ed] on the shoulders of any one mortal.”10 With his usual certitude, Lee believed that the superior British forces would not retreat to New York but would lurch west and try to engage the Americans near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

On June 16 Washington received a clue that the British stood on the verge of leaving Philadelphia: peace commissioners sent by George III to Philadelphia had asked for the immediate return of their clothing from the laundry. Two days later ten thousand British and Hessian troops began shuffling across New Jersey toward New York, slowed by a baggage train of fifteen hundred wagons that stretched for twelve miles. Coincidentally, Washington had recently lectured his men on the hazards of getting bogged down with bulky, overloaded baggage: “An army by means of it is rendered unwieldy and incapable of acting with that ease and celerity which are essential . . . to its own security.”11

Washington summoned a war council to consider whether to pounce on the retreating army. Most of his generals, after the previous fall’s defeats and the traumatic winter, urged extreme caution. The usually daring Henry Knox warned that “it would be the most criminal madness to hazard a general action at this time,” while Charles Lee passionately opposed any action.12 Despite the overall air of skepticism, some of Washington’s generals wanted to engage the British aggressively; the impetuous Anthony Wayne declared his desire of “Burgoyning Clinton.”13 On June 18, as soon as he received definite word that the British were leaving Philadelphia, Washington sent six brigades in pursuit of them. The last remnants of the Continental Army crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey on June 22.