He looked to the west of Valley Creek, through the gray wintry clouds already buffeting the midday sky and saw one of the two peaks that bounded the area. Its name alone should have foretold what this winter would bring for Washington and his thousands of men.
It was called Mount Misery.
This encampment, Washington saw, would need everything. And it needed it fast.
He swung down from his horse. “Pitch our tents here,” he ordered. “This is where we will stay.” Then came another command. “Summon my general staff, if you would. We cannot survive long protected by mere canvas!”
Quickly a wagon rolled toward General Washington. Soldiers scrambled to pull a great white linen tent down from it, to hoist sturdy ropes skyward and to hammer iron stakes into the rocky ground. Orderlies rustled to set up Washington’s folding wooden camp table and low stools.
“Roll out that map of the area, Colonel Hamilton, if you would,” Washington said matter-of-factly. “Now, look, there,” he continued, drawing imaginary lines on the document before him. “We will erect roads, here, here—and there. Here will be a line of barracks. As well as here—and here. General Knox’s artillery brigade will be here. A guardhouse there. And the outer defenses, trenches and forts, will form lines there—and there. Our parade ground shall be in the center.” Again there was a sharp jabbing of his index finger to indicate the location of his plans. “And let us not forgot hospitals. Two hospitals for each brigade.”
Some of the junior officers marveled at how Washington had so quickly absorbed the lay of the land to reach such logical conclusions. But Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s brilliant young chief of staff, knew better. He knew that his commander had unrolled his maps before ever arriving at Valley Forge. He knew that he had consulted with his officers and sought advice from the locals as he rode to this destination. George Washington’s genius, Hamilton knew, rested not only on good judgment, but on good listening and detailed preparation.
But Hamilton also knew something else: they would all need a lot more than listening and preparation to survive a winter in Valley Forge.
• • •
A cart that seemed to be from hell itself rolled and lurched down the heavily rutted mud-and rock-strewn path that passed for a road, leading south out of the portion of Valley Forge that sheltered the Marquis de Lafayette’s encampment.
Instead of being piled high with provisions or armaments, it was stocked with corpses—rotting, vermin-infested, stinking corpses. Some with their eyes wide open, staring heavenward, others with their mouths agape, their gums blackened from sickness and malnutrition. This cart—and the one that closely followed it—reeked of death. Not of heroic battlefield death, but rather of the stench of death from gnawing, ever-present hunger and horrible sickness.
A shoeless body, dressed in blue rags, tumbled from the cart down into the mud. With this sorry remainder of what had once been a farmer, a husband, a father—a soldier—came a rat. And when both corpse and rat landed upon the winter’s ground, the rat, as ravenous as Washington’s surviving troops, flew right back toward the dead man—Private Joseph Hawthorn of the First Massachusetts Infantry—and sunk his teeth once more into what had recently been the deceased’s right hand.
December 31, 1777
Philadelphia
“Another glass of claret, my dear?” asked General William Howe, the fifth Viscount Howe.
“No, thank you, Your Excellency,” coyly replied the woman before him. Her name was Betsy Loring and she was the beautiful, blond wife of the stocky Loyalist commissary of prisoners, Joshua Loring. Even without another glass of claret, however, the twenty-five-year-old Mrs. Elizabeth Loring was really enjoying this wonderful masked ball. Gossips whispered—and they were probably for once correct—that this splendid affair had cost at least three thousand guineas.
If it did, Mrs. Loring thought, it was well worth it.
A chamber orchestra played the latest music from England—no rustic colonial tunes would annoy the patience of this crowd. Officers in silks and ladies in satins and high white wigs curtsied and danced. The finest foods and liquors were served. If this was what occupations were like, then the current occupation of Philadelphia was going very well indeed for the half-German General Howe and his three thousand redcoats.
For his part, General Howe was enjoying not only Philadelphia, but Mrs. Loring, as well. After all, Betsy had been his mistress—and rather openly so—since his occupation of Boston. The genial but corrupt Mr. Loring’s official duties kept him in New York for long stretches of time. General Howe saw to that.
“Excuse me, General, but may I have a word with you?”
The voice belonged to the local superintendent-general of police and head of Philadelphia’s civil government, Joseph Galloway. Galloway was no ordinary Loyalist. He had served with Washington in the First Continental Congress and had been Speaker of the Pennsylvania House. But Galloway had drawn back from independence and cast his lot with London.
Howe, clearly resenting this interruption of his conversation with Mrs. Loring, gruffly nodded for Galloway to begin.
“Your Excellency,” Galloway said, becoming more and more excited as he spoke, “my spies have returned from Valley Forge. They have seen everything, and they all report the same: The rebels have no supplies. They are naked, dressed in rags. They are shoeless. Their enlisted men pack up and leave as their enlistments expire.” His voice was now rising to fever pitch and speed. “Thousands—yes, thousands!—of their men lay sick at hospitals. This is an army on the verge of extinction. If we move against them now, not only will they be in no position to resist, they may very well not even possess the strength to flee. We might sweep up the whole lot of them—once and for all! Even Washington himself!”
“Even Washington?” responded Howe, his eyes widening, his eyebrows arching. Galloway had finally piqued his interest.
“Yes,” said Galloway. “Even Washington.”
The ground beneath George Washington’s high boots was white and brown and red.
It was white for the drifts of snow and ice that remained upon it.
It was brown for the sodden mud born of wildly fluctuating weather, from warm spells that had punctuated freezing cold, melting snow and ice and creating the mire that clogged the primitive roads in Valley Forge. It would have been better had the snow remained, since one might then drive sleighs upon the hard-packed snow. But the mud ensured that nothing could pass upon these wretched thoroughfares, these lattice works of impenetrable ruts that snapped axles and shattered wheels and hobbled horses. These excuses for roads brought no clothing, no food, no medicine, no muskets or ammunition—only carts of corpses; corpses that were responsible for the final color beneath Washington’s boots: blood red.
Crimson streaks marred Valley Forge’s patches of whitened ground—the red painted by bleeding, shoeless, frozen feet, frostbitten extremities soon to feel the agony of a surgeon’s sharpened blade.
Yes, white and brown and red were the colors of Valley Forge. White and brown and red were, this season, the very colors of hell.
January 5, 1778
Valley Forge
George Washington silently dismounted and walked steadily away from the crowd of ragged militiamen who eyed his arrival, past a gently sloping wooded hillside and into a small clearing, where, at this hour of day, a shaft of light might illuminate his view—and his soul. He was alone. No one accompanied him in these moments.
Washington looked skyward. Despite the winter’s cold he removed his woolen tricornered hat and held it before him as he pondered the terrible nature of the burden he had placed upon himself. In more ways than one, he held in his hands the life and fortunes of every soldier in his command. But that wasn’t his only burden, for he also knew that the fate of this great experiment in human freedom and dignity depended on their success. If it—if he— failed, it might never be repeated.
Mankind’s history had, after all, revealed its
remarkable tolerance for tyranny. But maybe, he thought, these men here today might prove different. Perhaps this place, this Valley Forge, might now forge not iron but a world made anew. But if a new order of the cosmos were to be forged, George Washington knew he could not do it alone.
And so, in the solitude of a snow-covered Pennsylvania clearing, George Washington knelt—and he prayed.
In nearby Reading, General James Wilkinson was downright drunk.
Good and drunk.
Wilkinson did his drinking at the headquarters of the wounded general Lord Stirling. Stirling had originally been a New Yorker with the far more modest name of William Alexander but had gotten it into his head that he was Scottish nobility and so, not long before the revolution erupted, he’d assumed the vacant title of “Lord Stirling.” Whether Stirling was nobility or not wasn’t of much concern to the shifty and pudgy Wilkinson. He was far more concerned with pouring his guts out to his aide-de-camp, Major William McWilliams. And those guts, it seemed, contained equal quotients of admiration for his superior, General Horatio Gates, the recent the hero of Saratoga, and contempt for General George Washington.
Wilkinson was hardly alone in his opinions. In Congress, similar sniping circulated. The Continental Congress’s president, South Carolinian planter Henry Laurens, had even found an anonymous anti-Washington pamphlet, Thoughts of a Freeman, openly circulating among its members. The knives were out for George Washington. He had not won a battle since Princeton and now he was refusing calls from Congress’s armchair generals hiding in York to attack Howe in Philadelphia.
“No, by Jove!” General Wilkinson thundered to Major McWilliams, pounding his fat fist upon the heavy oak table before them for emphasis, “Washington is not the man for the job! And the officers who surround him—this Quaker general Nathanael Greene, for example, or these boys Hamilton and Lafayette—well, they make him look like a genius, a veritable Alexander the Great or Cromwell!”
Wilkinson wasn’t done. “You know General Conway, don’t you?” he shook a finger at McWilliams, referring to yet another ambitious general who fancied himself superior in experience and judgment to Washington. “Well, Conway might be an Irishman, but he was one of the best generals the French had before he came over here, and he thinks the way I do—the way we all do! Conway wrote right to Gates himself, I can quote it direct to you: ‘Heaven has determined to save your country, or otherwise a weak general and bad counselors would have ruined it.’”
Wilkinson paused from his tirade long enough to loudly demand another portion of rum from the innkeeper. The hour was late. And the more alcohol that entered General Wilkinson the more of what he considered truth burst forth.
“What do you think of that, McWilliams? I’ll tell you what I think: truer words were never spoken—and heaven will soon deal further with the master of Mount Vernon, unless, that is”—and here Wilkinson chuckled wildly—“hell takes him first!”
January 12, 1778
Valley Forge
“Fire cakes again?” stormed Corporal Amos Barnett of New York’s Westchester County militia. A deep, long scar that had turned a hideous purple in the Valley Forge cold ran down Barnett’s right cheek. It had been bestowed upon him courtesy of a dragoon’s slashing blow during the Battle of Long Island.
Barnett’s eyes fixed ominously on the concoction stewing in the fireplace before him. The men called it a “fire cake.” They took what little flour meal they had left, mixed it with water and a little salt (if they were lucky to have any), and ladled it onto a griddle—or in this case, on a flat rock—in their hut’s fireplace. And there was their “fire cake.”
“Damn it all!” the scarred New Yorker thundered even louder now. “Are we never to have meat again? Never?”
The flour-and-water mixture turned a brownish hue upon the flat, heated rock.
“Are you through, Corporal?” answered the recruit cooking the fire cakes, a slight lad—growing slighter every day—who was barely into his teens.
“No, I am not!” Barnett sputtered. “What manner of army is this? What kind of war when men die more in camp than in battle? Who bears responsibility for this?”
“I do,” came a voice from the doorway.
A dozen pairs of eyes turned toward the powerful figure standing before them, his left arm tucked beneath his great red-lined cape, his hand taut upon the gold handle of his sword.
“I apologize to every man here for every hardship,” Washington said, his black manservant Billy Lee, along with Colonel Hamilton and General Lafayette, standing just behind him. “I thank you all for the service you have rendered to the causes of liberty and independence.”
But responsibility was not truly his. Congress had taken the issue of supplies out of his hands. It had placed its trust in men who were thieves, incompetent, or who simply did not care.
But George Washington took responsibility anyway.
The soldiers before him remained quiet, so Washington continued. “I have sent parties out to forage for grain and cattle and horses and clothing and boots. General Greene will assume overall command of supplies. We are even sending our men to New England to secure cattle. We will bring them back on the hoof, Providence willing.
“Meat, gentlemen, meat.”
His audience remained silent. Too dumbstruck to speak. A now-forgotten fire cake blackened and burned in the fireplace. It charred and smoked. No one noticed.
“Do you take me at my word, fellow patriots?” their commanding officer asked softly.
Finally, Corporal Barnett spoke: “You have not lied to me yet, General, nor to any of us here. So yes, we take you at your word.”
“Will you join us for dinner, General? We have not much, but what we have is yours.”
“Yes,” said General Washington, thinking not only of the men before him but of the West Indies–born Hamilton and the highborn French nobleman Lafayette and the slave Billy Lee behind him. “I would be honored to dine with you tonight—to dine among Americans.”
Yet another foreign-born officer now stood at attention before Washington.
Hamilton spoke excellent English, and the brave young Lafayette spoke enough so that he could be misunderstood—but this chap, this pudgy man with the great sunburst medal, the Star of Fidelity of Baden, pinned over his heart, a bulbous nose and a twinkling smile, spoke nary a word of the King’s English.
The officer standing before Washington spoke German, along with a touch of French that he had acquired along the way from one European battlefield to another. He called himself Baron Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand von Steuben and informed one and all—or at least the one and all who could understand him—that he had been a close associate of Europe’s greatest warrior, King Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Washington placed his reading spectacles upon his nose and pored over the letter of introduction from the Congress that Steuben presented to him. Benjamin Franklin, representing the rebels in Paris, and the Congress residing in York had dispatched this foreigner here to Valley Forge—but what had they dispatched him to do exactly, make schnitzel of the enemy?
Washington read the portion of Franklin’s letter concerning Frederick the Great and it impressed him. Frederick was the most noted warrior in all of Europe. Washington solemnly nodded his head in appreciation, and, as Steuben noticed Washington nodding, the German too began to nod, adopting the general’s somber manner. Steuben had no idea why Washington—or he—was nodding. But he kept nodding anyway, and as Washington kept reading and nodding, Steuben kept nodding—faster and faster and faster.
He figured it wouldn’t hurt.
Even had he noticed it, Washington would never have been able or willing to keep pace with Steuben’s nodding, but he really began to nod when he read that von Steuben proposed to serve without salary. He would take only necessary expenses, and he would only receive a salary if the rebels ultimately triumphed.
George Washington was a betting man. He would bet on fox hunts, on horse
races, on lotteries, on just about anything. If the Virginian had one vice, it was gambling. Now, in Steuben and the deal he had cut with Congress, Washington saw a kindred spirit. The baron had bet the table on American independence—and Washington, who had bet his very life on it, really liked that.
And, if that were not enough for Washington, there was even more to like about von Steuben. In a Continental Army flooded by European officers grabbing for every rank, promotion, and command that they might, this von Steuben fellow requested nothing but to serve.
Washington liked him right away. Here was a chap he might already possess plans for. Washington stopped nodding, looked the shorter man in the eye—and delivered a rare smile.
Steuben burst into a great grin. “Ja!” he exclaimed, “Ja! Vashington! Ja!”
“Ja!” said Washington. “Steuben!”
“Major General Thomas Conway to see you, General Washington.”
Conway, his epaulets of golden braid glistening in the midday sun, kicked the dust off his boots as he entered Washington’s headquarters, located at the very rear of Isaac Potts’s modest two-story, six-room gray stone farmhouse. The egotistical Conway might have tidied himself before entering his commander in chief’s private office, but that would have indicated his respect for Washington.
Conway was feeling his oats, and his smug expression only further betrayed his confidence. And why, after all, should Conway not display unbounded swagger? The noose was now tightening around Washington—not a British noose, but an American one. Congress had snubbed Washington by appointing a “Board of War” to oversee the army. Washington wasn’t on it, but Horatio Gates was—and his drunken henchman General James Wilkinson served as its secretary.
Now Conway had even more salt to rub in George Washington’s wounds.
“You know why I am here, General. Congress has promoted me to major general and made me inspector general of all continental armies.”