Washington [234]
Whatever Washington thought of Lee’s attempts to gratify his own self-importance, he couldn’t afford a feud with his second in command on the eve of battle, even if Lee had shown little sympathy for the planned attack. On the other hand, he didn’t wish to disappoint Lafayette. So he crafted a nice compromise, adding one thousand men to the operation and placing Lafayette under Lee’s nominal command. As James McHenry wrote, “To prevent disunion, Lee is detached with 2 brigades to join the Marquis and as senior officer to the command. His detachment consists of 5,000 men, four-fifths of whom were picked for this service.”21
On June 27, as the British reached the vicinity of Monmouth Court House, the advance American forces pulled to within six miles of the tail end of their column. Meeting with his generals, Washington ordered Lee to attack the British column the next morning, as soon as it sprang into motion. He himself would hang in the rear with six thousand men, prepared to move forward with the main body of the army.
In retrospect, Washington conceded too much latitude to Lee, and the open-ended nature of the battle plans would breed fatal confusion the following day.
Many romantic yarns have been spun about the eve of the Battle of Monmouth. One describes the Reverend David Griffith, a chaplain in the Continental Army, going to Washington and warning him that General Lee planned to make him seem inept the next day so as to nab the top army spot for himself. Another tale claims that several generals approached Washington’s friend Dr. James Craik and asked him to appeal to Washington to safeguard his own person in the coming conflict instead of exposing himself to danger. This advice, if given, ran counter to Washington’s active conception of leadership on the battlefield. It is also said that Charles Lee, overtaken by a case of nerves, paced through a sleepless night before the battle. As for Washington, he is said to have shown a touching solidarity with his men, akin to Shakespeare’s Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt, sleeping under a tree amid his army.
Around dawn Washington learned that the British Army had risen early and was already marching toward Sandy Hook. He sent orders for General Lee “to move on and attack them unless there should be very powerful reasons to the contrary,” and started toward Monmouth Court House with his men.22 Washington recommended that Lee’s men jettison their packs and blankets to accelerate their speed. Unfamiliar with the local topography, Lee found himself penetrating terra incognita, a problem that had troubled the Continental Army in previous contests. On this morning of brutal weather, the temperature would zoom close to one hundred degrees, and many men stripped off their shirts and rode bare-chested. Joseph Plumb Martin opined that “the mouth of a heated oven seemed to me to be but a trifle hotter than this ploughed field; it was almost impossible to breathe.”23 At eleven A.M. Washington, accompanied by troops under Stirling and Greene, wrote to Henry Laurens that several men had already expired from the heat.
Toward noon, as his main force advanced toward Monmouth Court House, Washington couldn’t see what was happening up ahead and assumed that all was going according to plan. In reality, Lee had made only a confused, halfhearted attack against Clinton and Cornwallis who, anticipating a possible attack, had concentrated their finest soldiers in the rear. They turned the tables,