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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