Three routed American divisions fell back “in the most broken and confused manner,” according to Nathanael Greene, who managed to fight a noble rearguard action with his division. During the American retreat Lafayette showed his usual valor, jumping into the fray to rally his men. Shot in the left calf, he didn’t grasp the severity of the wound until his boot was soaked with blood and he had to be lifted off the battlefield. Possibly with some exaggeration, he claimed years later that Washington told the surgeon, “Take care of him as if he were my son, for I love him the same.”¹⁹ If true, this was an extraordinary statement, given how briefly Washington had known Lafayette. It would confirm that the young French nobleman had touched him in some special way, and it again speaks to Washington’s unseen emotional depths. He was always impressed by Lafayette’s bravery, his eagerness to return to service. “When [Washington] learned I wanted to rejoin the army too soon,” Lafayette told his wife, “he wrote the warmest of letters, urging me to concentrate on getting well first.”²⁰

With the sound of muskets still reverberating in their ears, the overpowered Americans streamed east toward Chester in an unruly flight. Lafayette recalled the confused swarm of carts, cannon, and other military paraphernalia that the soldiers managed to salvage. These battlefield refugees, who straggled into the American camp throughout the night, left behind so many hundreds of bleeding compatriots at Brandywine Creek that Howe asked Washington to send doctors to care for them. All told, the Americans lost about 200 killed, 500 wounded, and 400 captured versus only 90 killed and 500 wounded for the triumphant British.

Toward midnight, in a private home in Chester, Washington informed Congress of the shattering defeat. After asking Timothy Pickering to draft a note, he found the message so dispiriting that he said some “words of encouragement” were needed .²¹ If this was self-serving, it also reflected Washington’s firm belief that he had to uphold American morale at all costs. The management of defeat had become an essential aspect of his repertoire. Rather desperately, he tried to give a positive gloss to the terrible thrashing his men had taken, grossly understating American losses. His letter to John Hancock began, “Sir: I am sorry to inform you that in this day’s engagement, we have been obliged to leave the enemy masters of the field.”²² It continued: “Our loss of men is not, I am persuaded, very considerable; I believe much less than the enemy’s . . . Notwithstanding the misfortune of the day, I am happy to find the troops in good spirits; and I hope another time, we shall compensate for the losses now sustained.”²³ This sounded, after the bloody disaster, like sheer fantasy, but the troops had fought in a spirited manner; the defeat resulted from the failed performance of the leaders, not the lethargy of the rank and file. Two weeks after the battle Washington still maintained that “the enemy’s loss was considerable and much superior to ours.”²⁴

It had been an ignoble defeat for Washington, who had failed to heed clues that might have unlocked the key to Howe’s strategy. The commander in chief had frequently seemed marginal to the battle. As Pickering said, Washington had behaved more like “a passive spectator than the commanding general.”²⁵ Fighting on home territory near Philadelphia, he should have been able to master the terrain instead of relying on crude maps and erring scouts. The carnage and chaos of Brandywine only reinforced an image of Washington as dithering and indecisive.

Thomas Jefferson traced Washington’s strengths and weaknesses as a general to a persistent mental trait. He prepared thoroughly for battles and did extremely well if everything went according to plan. “But if deranged during the course of the action,” Jefferson noted, “if any member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circumstances, he was slow in readjustment.”²⁶ With a mind neither quick nor nimble, Washington lacked the gift of spontaneity and found it difficult to improvise on the spot. Baron Johann de Kalb, who came to America with Lafayette, echoed Jefferson’s critique when he said of Washington after the Brandywine defeat, “He is the most amiable, obliging, and civil man but, as a general, he is too slow, even indolent, much too weak, and is not without his portion of vanity and presumption.”²⁷ Even Washington’s faithful ally Nathanael Greene confided to Pickering that he found Washington indecisive. “For my part,” he boasted, “I decide in a moment.”²⁸ Washington’s inestimable strength, whether as a general, a planter, or a politician, was prolonged deliberation and slow, mature decisions, but these were luxuries seldom permitted in the heat and confusion of battle.

Somewhat unfairly, congressional opinion found General Sullivan culpable for passing along bad information to Washington. The latter had the good grace to acquit Sullivan of any blame, but he didn’t admit failure readily. Dr. Benjamin Rush left an acidulous portrait of Washington’s compliant general staff after Brandywine. He saw the commander as a passive figure manipulated by Greene, Knox, and Hamilton and portrayed his generals as a rogues’ gallery of incompetent buffoons: “The first [Greene] a sycophant to the general, speculative without enterprise. The second [Sullivan] weak, vain, without dignity, fond of scribbling, in the field a mad-man. The third [Stirling] a proud, vain, lazy, ignorant drunkard. The fourth [Stephen] a sordid, boasting, cowardly sot.”²⁹ His description of the “undisciplined and ragged” American camp was scarcely more flattering, a scene of “bad bread, no order, universal disgust.”³⁰ It was true that Washington surrounded himself with loyal men, but he never walled himself off from contrary opinion or tried to force his views on his generals.

After the Brandywine disaster, Washington marched his battered army north across the Schuylkill River to Pennypacker’s Mill. No longer could he guarantee the safety of the American capital. He sent Alexander Hamilton and Henry Lee scurrying off on an urgent mission to burn flour mills on the Schuylkill before they were captured by the British. On the night of September 18, Hamilton alerted Hancock that the British might enter the city by daybreak, triggering a panicky exodus of congressmen in the night. Thomas Paine remembered Philadelphia’s moonlit streets thronged by so many people that the town resembled high noon on market day. “Congress was chased like a covey of partridges from Philadelphia to Trenton, from Trenton to Lancaster,” recalled John Adams, who was especially upset by the emergency move and disenchanted with the man he had once championed to lead the Continental Army.³¹ In his diary he scribbled, “Oh, Heaven! Grant us one great soul! . . . One active, masterly capacity would bring order out of this confusion and save this country.”³²

The British didn’t claim possession of the capital for another week, giving Washington a chance to gather vital supplies. Invoking emergency powers, he sent Hamilton into the city, assisted by one hundred men, to requisition supplies. Many soldiers had shed blankets and clothing, and one thousand were barefoot; with the weather turning colder, these items rated high on the list of goods Hamilton demanded from residents during two frantic days of activity. Always skittish about employing autocratic powers in a war fought for liberty, Washington had Hamilton issue receipts to residents, in the hope they would someday be reimbursed. This highly effective operation yielded forty rounds of ammunition per soldier.

Around this time Washington received another sickening piece of news. On the night of September 20-21 British infantry had crept through the woods near Paoli and massacred American troops led by General Anthony Wayne. To ensure surprise, the British did not load their muskets but rushed forward with fixed bayonets and pitilessly slashed their sleeping victims, killing or wounding three hundred Americans. Even the British soldiers seemed appalled by the blood-smeared corpses, one saying it was “more expressive of horror than all the thunder of the artillery . . . on the day of action.”³³ To worsen matters, hungry American soldiers went marauding through the countryside, terrorizing inhabitants. Tired of marching in drenching rains, they sought shelter wherever they could find it. When the Reverend Henry Muhlenberg had to bury a child at his church near Valley Forge, he found Washington’s men defiling it. An outraged Muhlenberg said that “several had placed the objects of their gluttony on the altar. In short, I saw, in miniature, the abomination of desolation in the temple.”³⁴ If such desecration was the antithesis of the orderly behavior Washington craved, it was hard to maintain morale with meager pay and a dearth of military victories.