Germantown: The Battle That Almost Worked

Three weeks after losing Philadelphia, Washington learned that Howe had divided his army, leaving roughly 9,000 troops at Germantown while detachments garrisoned the city and moved against Delaware River forts. Washington planned a complex night attack with four columns converging on the British camp at dawn, modeled on the same surprise principle that had worked at Trenton. The attack came within reach of a decisive victory before fog, a fortified stone house, and the inexperience of his army turned near-success into a costly retreat. Washington's actual written orders for the attack and his letters reporting the outcome both survive at Founders Online.

Washington's plan called for two columns of Continental regulars under Nathanael Greene and John Sullivan to strike the British center, while militia columns hit both flanks, all four converging on the British camp in a coordinated dawn assault after a sixteen-mile night march. To help his own men identify each other in the dark and confusion of close combat, Washington's orders included an unusual instruction.

British Major John André, whose journal documents events from the other side of the war throughout this period, recorded that the detail did not go unnoticed by his own side. He wrote in his entry for October 4 that the white paper led the British to suspect the Americans intended a surprise night attack, a suspicion that proved entirely correct.

Sullivan's column struck the British advanced pickets at Mount Airy around five-thirty in the morning, driving them back in confusion through a thickening fog. Howe himself rode forward, initially convinced his men were facing nothing more than a minor raiding party, and reportedly called out for his retreating light infantry to re-form, certain the action was a small skirmish rather than a full assault. American artillery opened with grapeshot, and Howe withdrew out of range, beginning to understand the scale of what he actually faced.

Roughly 120 British soldiers under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Musgrave, cut off from the main British force during the retreat, barricaded themselves inside Cliveden, the substantial stone country house of Pennsylvania's former chief justice Benjamin Chew. On the advice of artillery commander Henry Knox, Washington chose to assault the fortified house directly rather than simply bypassing it with a small containing force. The decision proved costly. American troops and artillery battered the thick stone walls for roughly two hours without success, diverting forces and time from the main advance while the sound of the fighting created confusion in the fog among American units further along.

Believing themselves surrounded amid the fog and the sound of heavy fighting behind them at the Chew House, some American units began to retreat without orders. Howe used the time the delay had bought him to organize a counterattack with fresh troops, recapturing his camp and driving the exhausted American army back the way it had come.

Washington's official report to Hancock on October 5 is the anchor primary source for this episode. What makes the documentary record unusually transparent is that Washington's own casualty estimate changed visibly across his correspondence in the days that followed, as a fuller accounting reached him.

Despite the defeat, the battle had a significance beyond the battlefield. Reports of the engagement reaching Europe, arriving around the same time as news of the unfolding disaster for Burgoyne at Saratoga, helped persuade French observers that the American army, even when defeated, remained a serious and resilient fighting force, a perception that contributed to France's decision to formally enter the war four months later.