02:33 PM EDT on Sunday, June 18, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

On Dec. 10, 1777, 11,000 men -- some sick, all tired and hungry and dressed in tatters -- marched out of an army camp at Whitemarsh, Pa., destination unknown. Their general, George Washington, still had no idea where he would bed them down for the winter. He also had little idea how he would feed his men and keep them clothed till spring.

"The army was now not only starved but naked," recalled one of his men, Private Joseph Plumb Martin, who'd just turned 17; "the greatest part were not only shirtless and barefoot, but destitute of all other clothing, especially blankets."

A 27-year-old surgeon, Dr. Albigence Waldo, wrote in his diary:

"I am sick, discontented, and out of humor. Poor food. Hard lodging. Cold weather. Fatigue. Nasty clothes. Nasty cookery. Vomit half my time. Smoked out of my senses. The Devils in it, I can't endure it. There comes a bowl of beef soup, full of burnt leaves and dirt, sickish. . . ."

Before marching from camp, Martin, the teenage private, scavenged a "small piece of raw cowhide and made myself a pair of moccasins, which kept my feet (while they lasted) from the frozen ground, although, as I well remember, the hard edges so galled my ancles, while on a march, that it was with much difficulty and pain that I could wear them afterwards but the only alternative I had was to go barefoot, as hundreds of my companions had to, till they might be tracked by their blood upon the rough frozen ground."

They arrived in a gloomy valley called the Gulph; Nathanael Greene had advised Washington against coming here, but he'd been outvoted.

On their first night in the Gulph it snowed, a few inches of wet slush. The army had left its tents on the eastern side of the Schuylkill, so they lay in the snow, many barefoot and without blankets. From here they pushed on through a chill rain into Valley Forge.

They arrived less than a week before Christmas, one of the shortest days of the year. By spring, 2,500 of them would be dead of exposure or disease, a death rate of more than 20 percent.

"We arrived at the Valley Falls in the evening; it was dark;" recalled Martin in his memoirs; "there was no water to be found, and I was perishing with thirst. . . . Fatigue and thirst, joined with hunger, almost made me desperate. . . .I am not writing fiction, all are sobering realities."

Dreary place

There had been something like a village in the valley -- a few fieldstone houses clustered near Isaac Potts's iron forge. The American army kept a supply depot here at Valley Forge until after the battle at Brandywine. Then victorious British troops marched out and captured the supplies -- 3,800 barrels of flour, 25 barrels of horseshoes, some kettles, even thousands of tomahawks. The British also destroyed the forge.

Even Washington, who'd led his army of 11,000 here through the dark days of December 1777, called Valley Forge "a dreary kind of place and uncomfortably provided."

Despite the dismal nature of the place, Washington's wife, Martha, traded in her palatial digs at Mount Vernon, Va., and came to the valley to join her husband.

Caty Greene also came from the estate of Abraham Lott, where she'd lived since summer; she'd left their infant son, George, and three-month-old daughter, Martha, with Greene's brother in Coventry almost fatherless and motherless, in Greene's words.

One of Greene's brothers in Potowomut offered to host Caty for the winter, but Nathanael wrote from Valley Forge: She is coming to camp to spend the winter. I expect her in today, Jan. 5, 1778.

In the same letter Greene wrote: Col. [Christopher] Greene [a distant cousin] and all his officers are coming home to recruit a negro Regiment. Will they succeed or not?

'Forage the country naked'

The camp at Valley Forge was pitched on a two-mile wide, wooded slope rising from the western banks of the Schuylkill to a peak called, ironically, Mount Joy.

The only commodity this dreary land provided was trees, and Washington put them to use. He divided his men into teams of 12 with orders for each team to build its own log hut. He specified the dimensions: 14 feet long, 16 feet wide, 6.5 feet high -- just 18 square feet per man.

The team that built its hut "in the quickest and most workmanlike manner" would win a $10 bonus.

The army's diet was mostly a paste of flour and water "fire cake" -- cooked on the hot rocks of open fires, not much food to fuel the hard work of chopping trees, sawing off branches, hauling the logs, chinking them together with clay.

A month of chopping and sawing passed before every man had moved from tent to hut. This log-hut village of less than 11,000 covered 2 miles of the valley. Smoke from nearly 1,000 fires, built of green wood, hung low over the valley, frequently thick enough to make the eyes itch.

Moving into dark huts with leaky roofs did little to alleviate the misery of life in Valley Forge.

Our Troops are naked, we have been upon the eve of starving and the army of mutinying, Greene wrote on Jan. 27, 1778. Our horses are dying by dozens every day for the want of Forage, and the men getting sickly in their Hutts for the want of acids and Soap to clean themselves.

Then came the snow: for two days in early February it fell, filling the valley so that no wagons could move, stopping what little food deliveries there'd been. Men went without meat; then they went without bread; many went day after day with no food at all.

Four days after the storm, on Feb. 13, Col. William von Cortlandt complained to Washington that 20 of his men had no pants: "they are obliged to take their blankets to cover their nakedness;" as many had "no shirt, stocking, or shoe." Even men with clothes would soon "be laid up, as the poor fellows are obliged to fetch wood and water on their backs half a mile with bare legs in snow or mud."

The smoke of nearly a thousand fires hovered over a village of squalid huts; herds of skeletal horses nuzzled the muddy snow in vain; horse carcasses rotted in the snow; men, too, died by the hundreds.

To deal with this crisis, Washington turned to Nathanael Greene. In a direct order to Greene delivered on Feb. 12, 1778, Washington wrote: it is of the utmost Consequence that the Horses Cattle Sheep and Provender within Fifteen or Twenty miles be taken from their civilian owners to supply the present Emergencies of the American Army.

Washington always took great pains to avoid impressing goods from civilians near his camp, for he knew that even those who supported American independence would turn against the cause if the army stole their food, forage and horses. Even in this order he first blamed the need for impressments on the possibility that the British were planning to raid the country, so the Americans might as well beat them to it. He also ordered Greene to make sure that locals were given IOU's for anything taken from them:

I do therefore authorize, impower, and Command you forwith to take, carry off and secure all such Horses as are suitable for Cavalry or for Draft and all Cattle and Sheep fit for Slaughter, Washington wrote to Greene.

Like Washington, Greene had been a stickler for treating civilians fairly; but he zealously carried out these orders for impressments. By the next day he'd ridden to Springfield Meeting House, where he would "collect all the cattle carriages &c &c" before moving the next day to Edwards tavern for the same purpose. From Springfield he wrote his aide-de-camp, Col. Clement Biddle, that to prevent people from complaining that their horses and cattle would starve if soldiers took all their oats and hay, they also had to take all their horses and cattle.

You must forage the Country naked, Greene wrote.

The Inhabitants cry out and beset me from all quarters, Greene wrote to Washington, but like Pharoh I harden my heart.

Conditions worsening

Five days of foraging yielded "near fifty Head" of cattle that Greene sent to the starving at Valley Forge; from New Jersey, Gen. Anthony Wayne drove "beeves" across the Delaware at Coryell's Ferry then down into the valley, enough meat on the hoof to feed the troops for several days. Col. Biddle reported he had 40 wagons loaded with forage headed for camp.

Although he'd pledged to harden his heart to pleas for leniency, Greene did cave in to a petition from one Nathan Sellers, who begged for the return of his pregnant mare for she "is all of the Horse Kind" he owned.

After foraging for nearly two weeks, a "very disagreeable" business, Greene returned to Valley Forge.

From camp, Greene wrote to Henry Knox in Boston: The troops are getting naked, and they were seven days without meat and several days without bread. The seventh day they came before their superior officers and told their sufferings in as respectful terms as if they had been humble petitioners for special favors; they added that it would be impossible to continue in Camp any longer without support. Happily relief arrivd from the little collections I had made and some others, and prevented the Army from disbanding. We are still in danger of starveing; the Commisary department is in a most wretched condition; the Quarter Masters, in a worse. Hundreds and Hundreds of our horses have actually starved to death.

Quartermaster general

In the winter of 1778, with many of its soldiers barefoot, pantsless and starving, the nascent nation needed a good quartermaster general -- the person in charge of supplying an army. The previous quartermaster general, Thomas Mifflin, had resigned to take a seat on the War Board. When Mifflin resigned the post on Nov. 7, the quartermaster general and commissary departments were in shambles.

It was odd, the change in Mifflin's character: he'd been a good soldier until the summer of 1777, when Washington refused to pull all of his troops away from New York to defend Mifflin's native Philadelphia. Greene, who had reconnoitered Philadelphia when called there to testify before Congress, had advised Washington that the city was indefensible; Mifflin was mad at Washington for ignoring Philadelphia until it was too late to save it, and he held hard feelings against Greene for the advice he'd given.

Congress would choose Mifflin's replacement, though Washington would have some say in the matter. Both Congress and Washington turned their eyes toward Nathanael Greene.

Greene had been valuable to Washington both as a field general who could marshal men quickly to the right places, and as a strategist who helped plot the big-picture strategy. But he was also very good at matters of supply: when Washington needed cartridges for his army at White Plains in the fall of '76, Greene forwarded 80,000 of them; when his troops were retreating across New Jersey after disastrous losses at New York, they lived off stores strategically placed beforehand by Greene; when his troops were starving at Valley Forge it was Greene who "forage[d] the country naked" to deliver fresh meat.

Right now, Washington needed a quartermaster general more than he needed a good field general. Both he and a committee from Congress that met at Valley Forge pressed Greene to take the job.

Greene didn't want it. To Henry Knox he wrote in late February 1778:

The Committee of Congress have been urging me for several days to accept of the Q M Generals appointment; His Excellency also presses it upon me exceedingly. I hate the place, but hardly know what to do.

Greene wrestled with the conflict of the job into March, when he wrote to Gen. William Smallwood: The Congress have appointed me QMG, the Committee and the Commander in chief urges my acceptance. I am at a stand to know what to do. If I don't accept I am afraid all of our operations the next Campaign will be retarded by the mismanagement of the department, but if I do accept I am sensible of the druggery and difficulty of the business.

Greene had good cause for "hating" the prospect of becoming quartermaster general. As the Committee of Congress pointed out "the Confusion of the Department, the depreciation of our Money, and the exhausted state of our Resources" combined to make this a nearly impossible job. The Continental Currency traded in Philadelphia that winter at one-third its face value. Only the most loyal patriot wanted to sell goods to the American Army's quartermaster when the British were paying in silver specie.

Yet Greene eventually relented, writing to friend and fellow general, Alexander McDougall:

I am appointed Q M General, and am vexed with myself for complying with the pressing importunity of the Committee and the General. They were at me Night and Day.

All of you will be immortallising your selves in the golden pages of History, while I am confind to a series of druggery to pave the way for it.

To Washington, Greene later complained: No body ever heard of a quarter Master in History.

'You must get rich'

Once he accepted the post as quartermaster general, Nathanael Greene plunged into it.

[T]here is not a moments time to be lost, he wrote on March 30; then he set out an ambitious plan for storing more than 1 million bushels of grain to feed draft horses. Give all sorts of grain the preference to wheat, he noted. Oats first, Corn next, Rye next, and so on.

The "druggery" as he called it, of overseeing the myriad wants of an army was offset to a degree by his new rate of pay. For every $100 of government money Greene spent on feeding and furnishing the army, he would get $1; this he would split three ways with his two primary assistants.

Congress was concerned that paying the Quartermaster a commission based on how much of the government's money he spent could entice him to feather his own nest by inflating the army's needs. The Committee of Congress addressed this by concluding that if the quartermaster were inherently dishonest, there would be many ways he could steal:

"The Fact is, if those at the Head of it are not vigilant and honest, the publick may, nay, must be defrauded of immense Sums by an Infinity of Ways in Spite of every Check which the Ingenuity of Man can devise."

For his part, Greene claimed not to care about the huge pay raise that was coming his way. I am not solicitous about the profits of the Office of QMG, he wrote to a colonel at Valley Forge. If the publick business is but well executed, that will be all that I shall be solicitous about. I wish Officers in every denomination and in every department was more attentive to the publick good and less so to their private gain.

Still, Greene was not entirely unconcerned with making money -- he couldn't afford to be. The company his father had left was not prosperous enough to support growing families, his own and those of his brothers; plus, with British warships blockading Narragansett Bay, there wasn't much business in the anchor trade.

Money becomes more and more the Americans' object, Greene wrote to his brother, Jacob, from Valley Forge. You must get rich, or you will be of no consequence.

Greene tried hard to get rich. Hanging on to cash when its value was plummeting was not a good idea, so he made many investments. Most of his money was sunk into "privateering" which was basically legalized piracy. Investors would fit out ships with cannon and guns, then with government authorization, cruise the high seas looking for British-flagged ships to plunder. The privateers acted as a kind of Navy fighting sea battles for profit. A lucky privateer could reap a fortune in a single seizure. But all of Greene's ships lost huge amounts of money. He also invested in a New Jersey furnace that made cannon, again with disastrous results.

gcarbone@projo.com / (401) 277-7434

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