Washington the Soldier

by Henry B. Carrington

Meanwhile, Indian massacres in Wyoming Valley, during July, and that of Cherry Valley, on the eleventh of November, afterwards to be avenged, multiplied the embarrassments of the prosecution of the war, and kept the Commander-in-Chief constantly on the alert. The condition of Clinton, in New York, had indeed become critical. The position of the American army so restricted even his food-supplies, that he had to depend largely upon England; and on the second day of December he wrote again, and even more despondently, to the British Secretary of State: “I do not complain; but, my lord, do not let anything be expected of me, circumstanced as I am.” The British Cabinet had already indicated its purpose to abandon further extensive operations in the Northern States, and to utilize the few troops remaining in America, in regions where less organized resistance would be met, and where their fleets could control the chief points to be occupied. As early as November twenty-seventh, Commodore Hyde Parker had convoyed a fleet of transports to Savannah, with a total land force of thirty-five hundred men; and on the twenty-ninth of December, Savannah had been captured.

The year 1778 closed, with the Southern campaign opened; but the American Congress had no money; and the loose union of the States constantly evoked sectional jealousies. Any thoughtful reader of this narrative must have noticed with what discriminating judgment enlistments were accommodated to the conditions of each section, and that care was taken to dispose of troops where their local associations were most conducive to their enthusiastic effort. Washington thus forcibly exposed the condition of affairs, when he declared that “the States were too much engaged in their local concerns, when the great business of a nation, the momentous concerns of an empire, were at stake.”

Bancroft, the historian, thus fitly refers to Washington at this eventful crisis in American affairs: “He, who in the beginning of the Revolution used to call Virginia his country, from this time never ceased his efforts, by conversation and correspondence, to train the statesmen of America, especially of his beloved State, to the work of consolidation of the Union.”

At the close of 1778, General Washington visited Philadelphia; and thus solemnly and pungently addressed Colonel Harrison, Speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses. After urging Virginia to send the best and ablest of her men to Congress, he thus continues: “They must not slumber nor sleep at home, at such a time of pressing danger; content with the enjoyment of places of honor or profit in their own State, while the common interests of America are mouldering and sinking into inevitable ruin.... If I were to draw a picture of the times and men, from what I have seen, heard, and in part know, I should, in one word say: that idleness, dissipation, and extravagance, seem to have laid fast hold of many of them; that speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration and almost of every order of men; that party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day; ... while a great and accumulating debt, depreciated money, and want of credit, which in its consequences is the want of everything, are but secondary considerations, if our affairs wore the most promising aspect.... An assembly, a concert, a dinner, a supper, will not only take men away from acting in this business, but even from thinking of it; while the great part of the officers of our army, from absolute necessity, are quitting the service; and the more virtuous few, rather than do this, are sinking by sure degrees into beggary and want.”

There is a touch of the pathetic, and an almost despondent tone with which the closing paragraph of this utterance of the American Commander-in-Chief closes, when he adds: “Our affairs are in a more distressed, ruinous and deplorable condition, than they have been since the commencement of the war.”

There was no danger from any extended movement of British armies in force, and a consequent relaxation of effort pervaded the Colonies which had been most largely called upon for men to meet immediate invasion. This partial repose brought actual indolence and loss of enthusiasm in general operations beyond the districts immediately exposed to British attack. The winter garrison of Philadelphia, like that of Howe the previous year, languished in confinement, grew feeble in spirit, and weakened in discipline. Congress shared the enervating effect of the temporary suspension of active hostilities; and it was not until the ninth of March, 1779, that the definite establishment of the army, upon the fixed basis of eighty battalions, was formally authorized.

The inaction of Clinton at New York gave the American Commander-in-Chief an opportunity to turn his attention to the Indian atrocities perpetrated the previous year in central New York; and on the nineteenth of April he sent a force under Colonel Schenck, Lieutenant-Colonel Willett and Major Cochran, which destroyed the settlement of the Onondagas, on the lands still occupied by them, near the present city of Syracuse in that State. An expedition was again planned for Canada, but the wisdom of Washington induced Congress to abandon it. Confederate money dropped to the nominal value of three or four cents on the dollar; and Washington was constrained to offer his private estate for sale, to meet his personal necessities. Congress seemed incapable of realizing the impending desolation which must attend a forcible invasion of the southern States, and Washington was powerless to detach troops from the north, equal to any grave emergency in that section, so long as Clinton occupied New York in force. General Greene, comprehending the views of Washington and the immediate necessity for organizing an army for the threatened States, equal to the responsibility, asked permission to undertake that responsibility; but Congress refused to sanction such a detail, although approved by Washington. This refusal, and the consequent delay to anticipate British invasion at the South, protracted the war, and brought both disaster and loss which early action might have anticipated, or prevented. The utmost that could be secured from Congress was permission for the detail of a portion of the regular troops which had been recruited at the South, to return to that section for active service.

Lafayette, finding that active duty was not anticipated, sailed from Boston for France, January 11, 1779, upon the frigate Alliance, which the Continental Congress placed at his disposal.

General Lincoln, of the American army—who had reached Charleston on the last day of December, 1778—attempted to thwart the operations of the British General Sir Augustine Prevost; but without substantial, permanent results. The British, from Detroit, operated as far south as the valley of the Wabash River, in the Illinois country; but Thomas Jefferson, then Governor of Virginia, with troops raised in Virginia and North Carolina, strengthened the western frontier and placed it in a condition of defence, unaided by Congress.

The Middle States, however, had some experience of the desultory kind of warfare which characterized the greater part of the military operations of 1779. General Matthews sailed from New York late in April, with two thousand troops and five hundred marines, laid waste Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, destroyed over one hundred vessels, and returned to New York with seventeen prizes and three thousand hogsheads of tobacco, without serious loss to his command. As if keen to watch for the slightest opportunity of resuming active operations from New York, and constantly dreading the nearness and alertness of the American headquarters in New Jersey, Clinton, on the thirteenth of May, under convoy of the fleet of Sir George Collier, surprised the small garrisons at Verplanck’s and Stony Point, re-garrisoned them with British troops, and retired to Yonkers, leaving several small frigates and sloops-of-war to cover each post.