Washington [248]
“WASHINGTON WAS NEVER VERY GOOD AT WAITING,” writes the historian Edward G. Lengel, “but that is how he spent the years between 1778 and 1781.”16 The year 1779 was perhaps the war’s most sluggish, characterized by minor skirmishes in lieu of major battles. Although Washington busied himself with espionage, the Continental Army mostly settled into an indolent mode. Aside from the Indian offensive, Congress was bent upon conserving money, forcing Washington into an unwanted defensive posture as he awaited the return of the unaccountable Count d’Estaing. He found it extremely dispiriting to be suspended again in a limbo of inaction as the war dragged on interminably.
In May the major locus of fighting switched back to the Hudson River, as Sir Henry Clinton overran two American forts at Stony Point and Verplanck’s Point. This placed the enemy twelve miles south of the American fortress at West Point and made it seem as if the British might at last attain their strategic will-o’-thewisp—cutting off New England from the rest of the country. Washington hastily relocated his base of operations to New Windsor, New York, overlooking the Hudson, where he could interdict British movements on the water. Afraid that its loss would be catastrophic, he assigned top strategic priority to West Point. For his summer headquarters, he chose the commodious West Point dwelling of a well-known New York merchant named John Moore.
Washington doubted that he could ever dislodge the British from their new entrenched positions, but he had a general who warmed to the task: Anthony Wayne, a fighter by nature as much as by training. Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, he had been educated by his uncle, Gilbert Wayne, who found the wayward boy’s mind inflamed by dreams of battle. “He has already distracted the brains of two-thirds of the boys under my charge by rehearsals of battles, sieges, etc.,” Gilbert Wayne sighed. “During noon, in place of the usual games of amusement, he has the boys employed in throwing up redoubts, skirmishing, etc.”17 A surveyor and a tanner before the war, then a member of Pennsylvania’s assembly, Wayne had gained Washington’s admiration for his bravery at Brandywine Creek, Germantown, and Monmouth Court House. He fought with often-bloodthirsty glee, shouting to his men, “I believe that [a] sanguine God is rather thirsty for human gore!”18 This rabble-rousing style earned him the nickname of “Mad Anthony” Wayne.
Bluff and familiar, Wayne was a great favorite among his men. Washington’s coolly reserved style of leadership was so antithetical to Wayne’s that he admired this impetuous officer with reservations. Washington found Wayne, for all his courage, imprudent and cursed by erratic judgment. As president, Washington would render this mixed appraisal of him: “More active and enterprising than judicious and cautious . . . Open to flattery, vain, easily imposed upon, and is liable to be drawn into scrapes. Too indulgent . . . to his officers and men. Whether sober, or a little addicted to the bottle, I know not.”19 On the other hand, Washington knew that Wayne was an effective missile if fired with accuracy. While crediting Wayne’s bravery, Thomas Jefferson contended that he was the sort of obstinate man who might “run his head against a wall where success was both impossible and useless.”20
Washington chose Wayne to lead a picked force of 1,350 infantry to mount a surprise raid against the new British outpost at Stony Point. The commander sketched out a plan to scale the 150-foot-high cliff overhanging the river, prompting Wayne, according to legend, to boast, “I’ll storm hell,