The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777-1778 (review)

The British Army's 1777 campaign under William Howe to subdue Pennsylvania has received little scholarly attention. It began in dilatory fashion, proceeded fitfully, became strategically and politically fruitless even in success, and was overshadowed by General John Burgoyne's disastrous surrender to the Americans at Saratoga. The campaign provoked one of Benjamin Franklin's wittiest purported jibes—that Philadelphia had "taken" General Howe—and, of course, it led to the famous Valley Forge Winter.

Stephen R. Taaffe looks beyond these contexts to judge the campaign on its own terms. Like Howe's performance, the book is operationally successful but sometimes uneven. Taaffe shrewdly describes the irregular skirmishing in New Jersey in early 1777 that showed Howe at his worst, but he overestimates how much George Washington—frantically building his "new" army at Morristown—shaped these events. His treatment of Howe's awkward approach to Pennsylvania and reconstruction of the complex engagements at Brandywine, Germantown, and on the Delaware River below Philadelphia, are astute. Howe emerges as tactically gifted but strategically inept while Washington seems almost the opposite. Taaffe writes sure-handedly, but too many clichés—scales falling from eyes, writing appearing on walls, logistical houses being put in order—offset gems such as the observation that the British effort to clear the Delaware of submerged obstructions was like "rummaging through a bag of broken glass in the dark" (p. 110).

Taaffe's focus is on the battlefield. When he seeks broader explanations for military dynamics—that the Philadelphia area was "rife with loyalist sentiment" (p. 89), or that Howe failed to defeat "a modern society" or even "a democratized and politically conscious society" (pp. 147, 229)—he is less convincing. Howe invaded Pennsylvania in 1777, not America, and it was kaleidoscopic particularities, not big structural realities, that undid him. The book's attention to auxiliary military functions is sometimes thin. Taaffe knows that supply breakdowns in late 1777 deflected the campaign, but he does not spend much energy showing how or why. His account of the events that doomed General Burgoyne is insightful, but he does not plumb the command or cultural challenges of melding triumphant northern troops into the frustrated "Main" army in Pennsylvania after Saratoga, or ask whether this process affected the campaign's outcome.

Taaffe defines the Philadelphia "campaign" to include the Valley Forge winter. His conclusions here are shakier than his analyses of the season of active fighting. He underestimates the importance of politics in the Continental decision to winter at Valley Forge and states that "attacking [Philadelphia] was out of the question" (p. 149) although Washington planned minutely for such an attack. His narrative of the army's march to and first days at Valley Forge is a classic tableau of helplessness, where previous chapters admirably credit the army for its tenacious achievements during the fall. Taaffe reconstructs the famous "Conway Cabal" against Washington's leadership in greater detail than seems justified by his sensible conclusion that the plot was mostly one in Washington's imagination. This account, and an overdrawn depiction of the Redcoats comfortably ensconced in Philadelphia, leaves little room for attention to the struggle in the hinterland, which resembled the action in New Jersey the winter before more than the author admits. Taaffe's treatment of Friedrich Steuben's work with the American troops and its effect on the army's operational capabilities is solid. He moves too lightly over the British strategic reappraisal in London after the French alliance to appreciate its importance, but accurately describes its implications for British commanders in North America.

At the end, the book threatens to unravel like the American right wing at Brandywine. Taaffe calls Continental troops in May 1778 "little more than an unorganized mob" (p. 201), subverting his own account of their performance in 1777. He notes that "unfriendly...