42. The Battle of Monmouth and the Ouster of Lee

With a powerful French fleet sailing westward, Britain could no longer afford the luxury of being open to entrapment between French and American forces. Clinton had to disperse a large part of his troops quickly to fight against the French in the West Indies and to Florida as a base for southerly operations. He was ordered to evacuate Philadelphia immediately and repair to the main British base in New York City.

Clinton evacuated Philadelphia from June 8 to 18; by sea, his ships transported 3,000 terrified Philadelphia Tories to New York; the army would have to march across New Jersey. His 10,000 men were soon vulnerably strung out and loaded down with baggage as they trudged slowly northeast across the New Jersey plain toward South Amboy and New York City.

Washington’s army was now in good condition, thanks to General Greene’s supply efforts, and had swelled to 11,000, supplemented by militia in New Jersey. Before leaving Valley Forge, Washington asked advice of his council of war. The reckless General Wayne urged a full-scale frontal attack on the British in New Jersey, but the other generals agreed with Lee in arguing strenuously against an open attack. Far better to enjoy the victory implicit in the British retreat, and to bid Clinton good riddance to New York.

Washington appeared to accept this sober advice, and followed Clinton’s army, harassing them along the flanks, and outracing them to Cranbury in central New Jersey. Reaching Allentown, east of Trenton, Clinton feared a possible attack crossing the Raritan River, possibly combined with a move southward by Gates; he veered east from the New Brusnwick-Amboy road to take his army to Sandy Hook on the Atlantic Ocean, there to evacuate his men to New York by ship. Washington was anxious to reverse the council’s decision for limited harrying operations, and at another council of war on June 24 he suggested a general open attack on Clinton’s army. Washington was seconded by Wayne, Lafayette, and by his aide and theoretician, Col. Alexander Hamilton. Lee, on the other hand, argued trenchantly that it would be “criminal” to risk a general engagement against Clinton’s professionally trained and equipped troops, and that it would be far better strategically to “build a bridge of gold” to speed Clinton on his way to the strategically valueless nest in New York. Other generals, however, wanted to have their cake and eat it too, calling for a partial attack that would not risk the entire American army. In a typically muddled compromise, the council decided to keep the main army in reserve, while 1,500 men attacked the British flank and rear. This partial attack would accomplish little, and, at worst, as Lee cogently warned, it would rapidly escalate into the very general frontal engagement that most of the generals were trying to avoid. Greene’s naively optimistic view that “I think we can make a partial attack without suffering them to bring us to a general action” was linked with his psychological argument for having the action at all: “People expect something from us.” On the other hand, Lafayette and Wayne wrote letters protesting what they regarded as too soft a decision; Hamilton wrote bitterly that the council’s decision did “honor to the most honorable body of mid wives and to them only.”

Lee angrily refused to lead the 1,500 attackers, and the command was given to Lafayette, itching to get into action. He was ordered eastward, to harass or strike at the enemy as he saw fit. But when Washington decided to escalate the partiality of the attack, and to commit 5,000 men —fully half of his army—to the engagement against Clinton, Lee changed his mind and insisted on assuming command of the front-line forces, the possibility of defeat now being far more grave. Lee camped at English-town, and the British lay at Monmouth Courthouse, five miles to the east.

On June 27, Washington ordered Lee to attack Clinton’s rearguard the following day to prevent Clinton from reaching Sandy Hook, even though neither Washington nor Lee had had time to reconnoiter the terrain. Before this attack, Lee was to send out a skirmish force of 600, which, joined with Morgan’s 600 men on the British right flank, were to harass and scout the British force when it began to march northeast. Morgan’s men, however, were too outnumbered to do any good. As the harassment began the following morning, Washington ordered Lee to advance to Monmouth with the rest of his men, and to attack the British rearguard “if possible” and “as soon as possible.” Washington was to remain at Englishtown in support of Lee, but because the terrain between English-town and Monmouth Courthouse could only be traversed across three morasses, or “ravines,” any support he gave Lee would not be effective. Lee halted upon receiving contradictory information about Clinton’s movements, then pressed on to Monmouth, not knowing that Clinton had anticipated the American attack and stood behind Cornwallis’ rearguard of over 1,500 men with a crack force of more than 4,000.

After some indecisive skirmishing, Lee saw that Clinton’s large force stood right behind the rearguard. He ordered Lafayette to defend the right flank against assault, but instead Lafayette retreated, without authorization, followed first by his fellow blowhard Anthony Wayne and then by Gen. Charles Scott. Lee had no choice but to retreat back toward English-town, and he managed to do so in good order, and he later admitted that Lafayette had done the proper thing by retreating. Lee’s estimate of the futility of a large-scale attack had been vindicated against Washington’s rashness and poor judgment.

When Washington, making his advance, met Lee’s force retreating, he gave him no chance to explain the retreat. He cursed Lee publicly in a vile manner, halted the retreat, and roused the soldiers to a demagogic pitch. After an attack by the British and furious fighting, the British withdrew from the attack, leaving approximately 350 casualties on either side. The Battle of Monmouth ended in a futile draw, with Clinton satisfied that he had conducted a model rearguard action; that night he slipped away, and was soon at Sandy Hook, and, on July 5, in New York.

The long march across Jersey, the pursuit of Clinton, and especially the Battle of Monmouth accomplished nothing but the loss of lives. The order for attack at Monmouth, over poor terrain, was Washington’s responsibility and his alone. Lee was correct in opposing the campaign, and especially the attack at Monmouth; his retreat was required by the circumstances. Washington’s public outburst against Lee was typical of his habit of passing the blame for his own defeats and blunders onto his hapless subordinates. Unluckily for Lee, he was not the man to stand for this sort of despicable treatment. He quickly wrote an angry letter to Washington accusing him of “an act of cruel injustice” and demanding “some reparation.” The letter led to a court-martial which, subservient to Washington, found Lee guilty of not attacking according to orders, unnecessarily retreating, and being disrespectful of his superior officer in his letters of complaint. It was characteristic that the major force in prosecuting Lee was the reactionary Hamilton, who had exploded at Lee on the field at Monmouth and had accused him of treason. The court-martial suspended Lee from command for one year.

Congress’s approval of this unjust verdict led Lee to denounce Congress itself, and he was discharged from the army altogether. Yet both votes in Congress—for approving the verdict of the court-martial and for dismissing Lee from the service—were close, surprisingly so since the campaign against Lee in Congress was largely made a test of confidence in Washington. The Left, led by Sam Adams, James Lovell and especially Richard Henry Lee, lobbied vigorously for Charles Lee; Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote angrily that the congressmen were beginning to “talk of state necessity and of making justice yield... to policy.” Lee placed equal responsibility for his fall on Washington and his aide Hamilton. Also participating in the savaging of Lee were Lafayette, Wayne, Steuben, Scott, and Washington’s aristocratic South Carolinian aide, Col. John Laurens. Defending Lee among the high officers (in addition to his legal aides) were Horatio Gates, Henry Knox, who had distinguished himself at Monmouth, Gen. Alexander McDougall, Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, who had been wounded and crippled at Saratoga, and Col. Aaron Burr, who had also fought at Monmouth. Even Nathanael Greene, staunch supporter of Washington and personally estranged from Lee, acknowledged the grave injustice of Lee’s treatment. Indeed, most officers acknowledged privately that Lee was right, but sided opportunistically with their commander-in-chief in public. Even General Clinton, certainly no friend of Lee’s, thought the treatment of him grossly unjust, and agreed that Lee’s able retreat had saved the American army from a smashing blow by his forces.

When Charles Lee heard the verdict of Congress, he turned to one of his beloved dogs and exclaimed, “Oh, that I was that animal! That I might not call man my brother.” Despite his being deeply hurt by the decision, he gamely fought on for vindication, publishing effective defenses in the press. In this, he pointed to Washington’s series of severe military defeats, and keenly raised the point of the similar treatment of General Conway by Washington. Finally, isolated and embittered, he retired to a Virginia farm; as he had wittily written to Aaron Burr, he would “learn to hoe tobacco, which I find is the best school to form a consummate general.” There he was to die impoverished before the end of the war, consoled only by a few friends such as the young Virginian James Monroe, who rallied round. Even in death, Lee shocked the respectables, as his will revealed him to be a confirmed deist. His final estimate of Washington was apt: a man whose stern and composed visage masked an impoverished intellect and a vindictive cunning that destroyed every man who aroused his envy or injured his pride. His only military victory in an innumerable stream of defeats was in “one successful surprise of a drunken Hessian.”

Monmouth was the last major battle of the war to be fought in the North. From that point on, the strategy of the war was to undergo a sharp change; it was now an international war, and the British government’s aim for a quick knockout in the North had to be abandoned. From then on, only minor skirmishes and forays were waged in the North, with the bulk of the British Army concentrated in New York City; the scene of major conflict would now shift to the hitherto unscarred South.