Germantown and the Roads to Valley Forge Read online

  The Philadelphia Campaign

  The Philadelphia Campaign

  ♦ VOLUME II ♦

  Germantown and the Roads to Valley Forge

  THOMAS J. MCGUIRE

  STACKPOLE BOOKS

  Copyright ©2007 by Thomas J. McGuire

  Published by

  STACKPOLE BOOKS

  5067 Ritter Road

  Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

  www.stackpolebooks.com

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FIRST EDITION

  Volume II

  ISBN: 0-8117-0206-5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-0206-5

  Volume I

  ISBN: 0-8117-0178-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-0178-5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McGuire, Thomas J.

  The Philadelphia Campaign / Thomas J. McGuire.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8117-0178-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-8117-0178-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Philadelphia (Pa.)–History–Revolution, 1775-1783. 2. Pennsylvania–History–Revolution, 1775-1783–Campaigns. 3. Maryland–History–Revolution, 1775-1783–Campaigns. 4. Delaware–History–Revolution, 1775-1783–Campaigns. 5. United States–History–Revolution, 1775-1783–British forces. 6. United States–History–Revolution, 1775-1783–Campaigns. I. Title.

  E233.M3 2006

  973.3'33–dc22

  2006010732

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8117-4945-9

  For Susan and our Grand Union With love

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1 “Jerusalem hath grievously sinned…therefore she came down Wonderfully.”

  PHILADELPHIA AND GERMANTOWN, LATE SEPTEMBER–EARLY OCTOBER 1777

  CHAPTER 2 “A devil of a fire upon our front & flank came ding dong about us.”

  THE BATTLE OF GERMANTOWN, OCTOBER 4, 1777

  CHAPTER 3 “Like living in the suburbs of Tophet.”

  THE BATTLE OF RED BANK, OCTOBER 1777

  CHAPTER 4 “The Colours was left flying.”

  FORT MIFFLIN, SEPTEMBER 26–NOVEMBER 16, 1777

  CHAPTER 5 “I could weep tears of blood.”

  WHITEMARSH AND THE ROADS TO VALLEY FORGE, NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1777

  Appendix

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the following institutions and individuals for their assistance in this work: in the United Kingdom, the British National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) at Kew; the Royal Artillery Library at Woolwich; the Library of Edinburgh Castle; Capt. David Horn of the Guards Museum, London; Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Russell of Ballindalloch Castle for use of the Grant Papers; Lord Howick of Howick Hall for use of Lord Cantelupe's diary; Durham University Library; the King's Map Collection at Windsor Castle, especially Martin Clayton; Sir Richard Osborn, Bt., and Sarah Saunders-Davies for their constant support, encouragement, and friendship; Col. Graeme Hazlewood of the Royal Logistics Corps; Andrew Cormack of the Journal of Army Historical Research for opening many doors, especially at “the Castle,” and networking with colleagues to find answers to challenging questions; Mr. John Houding; Robert Winup for his help with newspaper research; Dr. Anne Black and Uday Thakkar for their hospitality and tremendous support through years of research.

  Back home, thanks are due to the American Philosophical Society; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Chester County Historical Society and the Chester County Archives, especially Diane and Laurie Rofini; the Lancaster County Historical Society; the Manuscript Department and Map Department of the Library of Congress, especially Ed Redmond; Col. J. Craig Nannos (Ret., PNG/USA) and Bruce Baky, two great history colleagues; Barbara Pollarine, assistant superintendent of Valley Forge NHP, for years of friendship and help; the Clements Library, especially John Dann; the New York Public Library; the Maryland Historical Society; the Historical Society of Delaware, especially Dr. Connie Cooper for her constant help and endless good humor; Lee Boyle, former historian at the Valley Forge National Historical Park Library; Joe Seymour of the First City Troop; Don Troiani; Will Tatum; Donald Londahl-Smidt and Mark Benedict for Hessian information; Joe Rubinfine; and Sam Fore of the Harlan Crow Library for the Von Feilitzsch manuscript.

  The David Library of the American Revolution at Washington's Crossing deserves special mention, not only as an extraordinary depository of primary materials on the Revolution, but also for its excellent staff, especially Meg McSweeney, Kathy Ludwig, and Greg Johnson, as well as former directors Dave Ludwig and Dave Fowler, who made working there a joy.

  Thanks also to Susan Gray Detweiler for her help and kindness with the British documents in the Appendix; my good friend and mentor, David McCullough, for his enthusiasm, advice, and encouragement; my editor and friend, Kyle Weaver, for providing the opportunity to make this book a reality and a labor of love, and his team of professionals, particularly copy editor Barbara Rossi and production editor Amy Cooper, for their tireless work; and finally to my wife, Susan, to whom this book is dedicated, for putting up with it all.

  “Ev'n whilst we speak our Conqueror comes on,

  And gathers ground upon us ev'ry Moment.

  With what a dreadful Course he rushes on

  From War to War: In vain has Nature form'd

  Mountains and Oceans to oppose his Passage;

  He bounds o'er all, victorious in his March;

  Thro’ Winds and Waves, and Storms, he works his Way,

  Impatient for the Battle: One Day more

  Will set the Victor thund'ring at our Gates.”

  —Joseph Addison, Cato, act I, scene III

  PROLOGUE

  “Figure to yourself two large armies, the one flying from the other and both sweeping all before them,” a British officer wrote home to England, describing the path of the Philadelphia Campaign and its effect on Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and especially Pennsylvania. “Not only the present stock is destroyed, but all the young cattle, the future dependency of the province.” Appalled by the effects of the war on the region, he ruefully commented, “Desolation triumphs all around; nor will a century repair the loss America has already sustained in population and in commerce, burdened with debt beyond the ability of the most flourishing state in Europe to discharge.”

  Though he was actively engaged in crushing the American rebellion, Lt. William John Hale of the 45th Regiment of Foot could not help but marvel at the situation of the struggling American states after the fall of Philadelphia. “Washington will never attempt to cover Pennsylvania,” he confidently asserted, “indeed it is so much exhausted as to be scarcely worth the trouble.” The grenadier lieutenant had faced the Continental Army at Brandywine and witnessed the growing devastation of war firsthand through the rest of the campaign. “Their commerce is almost totally ruined, and what little specie yet remains among them must be sent to foreign Nations for the purpose of prolonging a war every day of which plunges them still further in misery and ruin,” Hale told his parents in the spring of 1778. “The leaders have gone too far to recede, and the people, having parted with the means of freeing themselves
from the tyranny of their oppressors, are obliged to submit.”

  And yet, this British officer saw something else, a growing spirit which seemed to be rising out of the smoke and ruin. “Perhaps never was a Rebellion so universal and intense as this,” Hale remarked, “a circumstance which affords in my opinion a most convincing refutation of the patriotic assertion that America was forced into independence.” In other words, this was no mere spontaneous uprising, but something that had been building for years. “No sudden commotion could have been prepared for, or supported with such obstinacy, so unlooked-for a transition.”1

  With General Howe's capture of Philadelphia on September 26, 1777, the third phase of the campaign that had begun in June was successfully completed by the Crown Forces. Washington's army, repeatedly outmaneuvered and defeated, had failed to stop the British invasion, and Congress had fled the city in a panic. To all outward appearances, the American Revolution was finished.

  “But the loss of Citys may some Times be the Salvation of States,” an American officer, Col. Thomas Hartley of Pennsylvania, told his friends. “Better days I doubt not will attend America but let former Misfortune be a lesson to our Statesmen.”2 The American nation was learning the hard way that the struggle was difficult, and the toll of the fight for independence was high in lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. “What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly,” Thomas Paine had written in his first American Crisis essay the year before. “It is dearness only that gives everything its value.”

  Some of the most difficult days in the American Revolution lay ahead in the next few months. The story of Valley Forge has achieved a place in world history as a symbol of survival against the odds and the elements, and also as a place of rebirth and renewal. But between the fall of Philadelphia and the Valley Forge encampment, some of the hardest fighting and worst devastation during the War of Independence occurred in the area surrounding the two famous places. “The City of Brotherly Love,” which William Penn envisioned as “a green Country Towne, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome,” became a war zone.

  CHAPTER 1

  “Jerusalem hath grievously sinned…therefore she came down Wonderfully.”

  PHILADELPHIA AND GERMANTOWN, LATE SEPTEMBER–EARLY OCTOBER 1777

  “Well, here are the English in earnest,” an anxious Elizabeth Drinker wrote in her diary on Friday, September 26, 1777, the day the Crown Forces took possession of Philadelphia. “About 2 or 3000, came in, through second street, without oppossition or interruption, no plundering on the one side or the other,” she was relieved to say. “What a satisfaction it would be to our dear Absent Friends,” she added—especially her husband Henry.1

  Stoked by countless rumors and garbled reports, more than three months of constant tension had worn hard on the city residents ever since Sir William Howe opened the Philadelphia Campaign back on Friday, June 13. The two weeks since Brandywine had seemed surreal, beginning with the exile of twenty-two prominent Philadelphia Quakers, among them Henry Drinker, on September 11. Arrested several days earlier without charge, they were escorted out of town under armed guard as artillery thundered in the distance.

  “We could distinctly hear the firing at this battle in Philadelphia, where prayers were offered up for both parties,” wrote Charles Biddle, a privateer captain at the time, noting that in the streets, “there was an awful silence most of the day. People were coming in every minute from the scene of action, scarce any two of whom agreed in their account of the battle.”2 Fifteen-year-old Debby Norris recalled that “towards night a horseman rode at full speed down Chesnut street, and turned round Fourth to the Indian Queen public house” on the corner of Fourth and Market, one of the leading taverns in town. “Many ran to hear what he had to tell,” she said of the rider, who had galloped past her family's mansion on Chesnut near Fifth, “and as I remember, his account was pretty near the truth. He told of La Fayette being wounded.”3

  Washington's defeat, followed by hundreds of wounded coming into town, brought some of the war's ugliest realities to the stoops of the city residents.4 In the aftermath, thousands cleared out, closing their homes and businesses as nerve-wracking reports of plundering and mayhem arrived each day. Merchants did their best to evacuate goods and vessels up the Delaware toward Burlington and Trenton.

  Biddle, a seafaring adventurer, commanded a small brig. “As the owner concluded to send the brig up the river to Trenton, I took on board every person that applied to go up until we had as many as we could stow,” he recalled. “Many of these unfortunate people who were leaving the city knew not how they were to subsist. Some of them had wives and children without a morsel of provision to give them.”

  As the Crown Forces slowly advanced from the south and west, most of the refugees fled north into Berks, Bucks, and Northampton counties, or east into New Jersey. “The day after we left town,” Captain Biddle continued, “we anchored off Bristol,” a small village about twenty miles north of the city in Bucks County, opposite Burlington, New Jersey. “I landed there, and found the place full of people flying from Philadelphia, many of whom were my acquaintances.”5

  Columns of smoke and occasional explosions in the distance continued to feed the general anxiety over the next few days. Congress's panicked flight to Bristol in the middle of the night on September 19 provided a touch of comic relief, especially for the Tories, but left the Whigs thoroughly discouraged. “Fright sometimes works Lunacy,” Congressman Henry Laurens of South Carolina had written a few hours before the hasty exodus. “This does not imply that Congress is frighted or Lunatick but there may be some Men between this & Schuylkill who may be much one & a little of the other.”6

  Capt. Charles Willson Peale, Philadelphia militia officer and artist, was madly scrambling to find quarters for his family in the countryside. He went out toward Reading, first to Trappe, where Rev. Henry Muhlenberg was harboring friends and family from the city, and then on the Swamp Road, where “after about 12 miles Ride I got a place where my family might be accommidated for a time amongst a Dutch neighbourhood.” He was somewhere in Colebrookdale Township, Berks County, near the Oley Valley, and observed that “many familys amongst them Could not speak any English.” After making arrangements, Peale returned to Philadelphia on September 19 only to find the city in a panic and his family gone to New Jersey. He eventually located them “1½ mile beyond Hadenfield on Egg harbour Road” in Gloucester County.

  A few days later, the artist “had engaged 2 Waggons to come to the City to carry my Goods & Family,” and they returned to town amidst more bustle and confusion and flying rumors. The Peales were getting out of Philadelphia for good on September 23 “when [they] heard the news confirming that the Enemy was certainly crossed” the Schuylkill. “As the Wagons were waiting I hurried what things I could hastily pick up & shoved them off,” Peale wrote, a risky move since the British set up camp in Norriton that day. Heading up the Germantown Road toward Trappe, the Peales narrowly made it past the king's forces. “It was about 9 oclock when we Reached our Journeys end,” the painter wrote after the exhausting ordeal.7

  The state authorities also fled as Howe's army approached. “Thus we have seen the men from whom we have received, and from whom we still expected protection, leave us to fall into the hands of (by their accounts) a barbarous, cruel, and unrelenting enemy,” seventeen-year-old Robert Morton, the stepson of Quaker exile James Pemberton, wrote bitterly. Washington's orders to confiscate blankets, shoes, and other specified goods for the army added to the overall sense that law and order was crumbling in the face of coercion and chaos. Fear of arson, all too real in the wake of New York City's massive conflagration the previous September (when suspicious fires destroyed nearly 500 buildings after the British seized the town), caused Morton to join a volunteer citizens’ watch to keep an eye on the streets at night. “Set up till 1 o'clock,” the young Quaker grumbled on September 23, “not to please myself, but other people.”8 The night before Howe's troops marched i
n, “many people were apprehensive of the city's being set on fire,” Sarah Logan Fisher wrote. “Near half the inhabitants, I was told, sat up to watch.”9

  The stress was fatal for John Bartram, the Botanist Royal for North America. Born in nearby Darby at the end of the previous century, the greatest of all of Chester County's “great and strange people” became a collateral casualty of war. “The old gentleman was exceedingly annoyed and agitated,” the scientist's granddaughter told his biographer, Dr. William Darlington. “She thought his days were shortened by the approach of the royal army, after the Battle of Brandywine.” The irony was tragic, for Bartram had received the appointment as His Majesty's Botanist in 1765 from King George III, whose own passion for botany earned him the nickname “Farmer George” and resulted in the expansion of Kew Gardens on the Thames above London. Bartram's Garden, situated on the west bank of the Schuylkill three miles from Philadelphia, was considered the greatest botanical garden in North America, and the king's army was now approaching. “As that army had been ravaging various portions of the revolted colonies, he was apprehensive it might also lay waste his darling GARDEN, the cherished nursling of almost half a century.”10 The seventy-eight-year-old botanist died on September 22, the same day that the British Army began crossing the river twenty miles upstream. In still greater irony, Bartram's Garden, and the extraordinary stone mansion he had built with his own hands more than four decades earlier, survived; his son William, also a world-class botanist, carried on the Bartram legacy.

  With Congress and the Supreme Executive Council gone, along with the militia and local authorities, parts of Philadelphia seemed like a ghost town. Hundreds of buildings were empty; a month later, nearly 600 houses, or more than 10 percent of the city's dwellings, were still “untenanted.”11 On most Fridays, the city bustled with market people swarming in for the Saturday markets, the roads to town congested with livestock and hundreds of wagons piled high with the wares of the Pennsylvania country folk, while on the waterfront, scores of boats hauling fish, assorted meats, produce, and firewood from New Jersey usually crowded the landings, all welcomed by the chimes of Christ Church pealing merrily away. But on Friday, September 26, the bells were gone and the docks were empty; a strange, uneasy quiet prevailed. Elizabeth Drinker commented, “Our end of the Town,” the northern district of Front Street between Race and Vine, “has appeard great part of this Day like the first day of the Week,” the Quaker name for Sunday.12 Many of those who remained gathered along Second Street early in the morning to witness the British Army's grand entrance.