A daughter of the Quincy house saw the beginning of the Revolution. Mount Vernon was the home of its chief figure. From the Jumel Mansion he retreated to Westchester when the Continental army suffered its first major reverse. In the Kendall house at Dobbs Ferry he conceived the campaign which was to end the war, and there finally he saw the British evacuate the United States. Five houses in America punctuate the Revolutionary career of Washington, and the fifth is the house where the cause of freedom entered the dark hours, the period of terrible ordeal.
Cliveden was built in 1761 on “the worst road in America,” the main street of Germantown. The village, whose houses dotted some three miles of the street, was already becoming a fashionable summer retreat for prominent Philadelphians, and William Chew, the attorney general of the province, made Cliveden large enough for a family that totalled fourteen children, with the appropriate retinue of servants and household pets. The house is three stories high, as severely rectangular as a mill, with a plain extension built to the rear, and a further detached addition connected only by an underground passage. It might easily have been commonplace, but the dapple-gray native stone of which it is built is interesting, the doorway, to which you ascend by a flight of six stone steps, is dignified and inviting, and dormer windows, fat chimneys, and stone urns strike notes of real character on an otherwise plain roof. It makes no great bid for beauty, but its aspect of substance is as honest as a Philadelphia lawyer—and that is what William Chew was.
Although he became chief justice of Pennsylvania under the crown, he was no more of a loyalist than his position required. As a model of astute straddling, where can you cite a statement which quite compares with his decision, rendered in answer to the question: What is to become of those who meet the mandates of the crown with armed resistance?
“I have stated,” he answered, “that an opposition by force of arms to the lawful authority of the King or his Ministry is high treason, but in the moment when the King or his Ministers shall exceed the authority vested in them by the Constitution submission to their mandate becomes treason.” The same tolerance he showed toward the uprising of the colonies he showed to their leaders in Philadelphia, and you may take it from John Adams’ diary that he was a rare and upright judge of food as well as of treason.
“Thursday. Dined with Mr. Chew, Chief Justice of the Province, with all the gentlemen from Virginia ... and many others. About four o’clock we were called down to dinner. The furniture was all rich. Turtle and every other thing, flummery, jellies, sweet-meats, of 20 sorts, trifles, whipped sillabubs, floating islands, fools, etc., and then a dessert of fruits, raisens, almonds, pears, peaches, wines most excellent & admirable. I drank Madeira at a great rate & found no inconvenience in it.”
However much the members of the Continental Congress enjoyed his hospitality in 1775, they could no longer endure his presence as chief justice in Philadelphia in 1777, and in August of that year he and Governor John Penn were arrested and escorted to Burlington, New Jersey. Within a month Washington had met the British in force at the Brandywine in a doubtful effort to check their march on Philadelphia, and had been defeated. For a fortnight he played hide-and-seek with Howe on the banks of the Schuylkill, and if the countryside had been as communicative to him as it was to the enemy, the enemy would not have marched, as he presently did, unmolested into Philadelphia. Howe placed his major force at Germantown, and Washington came in as near as he dared and sat down to watch and wait. Strategically, the Revolution was a distinctly suburban war. With Philadelphia, the national capital, in the hands of the British, and winter coming on, American morale was quoted at .001, with no sales.
On the night of October 2–3, the American forces marched quietly down the main road toward Germantown, with flanks thrown out, on the right to the Wissahickon ravine, on the left to the old York pike. Dawn brought Sullivan of Maine into contact with the enemy. The enemy retreated, gaining speed as he scampered down Mount Airy into Germantown, with Sullivan, Conway and Reed at his heels. Colonel Musgrave, of the Fortieth Regiment of the British, saw the retreat coming, and with one hundred and twenty men swarmed into Cliveden, closed the shutters on the lower floor, barred the doors, and prepared to stand. Washington himself was in the pursuit, and he ordered Maxwell and four cannon to the ground across the street from Cliveden, where Upsala now stands. A thick fog had gathered, making it nearly impossible to determine where the enemy was, or in what strength. The utmost confusion prevailed. One of Maxwell’s six-pounders spoke, and a ball passed in the front window of the Chew house, through four partitions and heaven knows how many British, and out a rear window. The battery hammered at the steps, the windows and the door, while snipers fired at the flash of rifles from the upper stories. Infantry charged across the lawn and were beaten back, artillery punctured, but did not dislodge. Reed was all for chasing the rest of the retreating British toward the city, but Knox said it was against the rules to leave an enemy fort in the rear. “What!” Reed exclaimed, “call this a fort and lose the happy moment?”
It was in effect a fort, but it was as truly the happy moment to leave the fort to be cleaned out later and press the British retreat. For the American wings had not driven the British back (the American left wing failed because General Stephen was drunk), and the British, unopposed, marched obliquely toward the center of the fighting at Cliveden. Thus the battle became, instead of the conflict of bow-shaped forces, the meeting of two great arrowheads, and the point where the arrows met and the sparks were flying thickest was the lawn of the Chew house. Smith of Virginia, a colonel, set out for the house with a flag of truce to demand Musgrave’s surrender, and was shot from a window. Major White, one of Sullivan’s aides, tried to set fire to the house, and a shot from a cellar window killed him. Musgrave hung on. Every minute that passed brought British troops nearer, and increased the odds against the Americans.
Our army left five hundred dead and wounded in Germantown and then retreated to Whitemarsh. The King’s forces, reduced by five hundred dead and wounded, remained in the bloody fog of the village. The townsfolk began to come out of their cellars and examine the damage. A field hospital was set up at Wyck, a fine old house down Germantown Road. At Johnson House you can see today the hole in a window-frame through which a frantic pet squirrel, forgotten in the flight to the cellar, gnawed his way to freedom. Stray bullets pierced every house within a quarter-mile, and of all the houses within that radius, Cliveden, its center, took the worst punishment.
Five carpenters worked all that fall and winter repairing the damage. Holes gaped through the inner walls, hardly a pane of glass was intact, statues were chipped, mirrors splintered, furniture reduced to expensive kindling. What was not stained with blood was streaked with smoke, and the second floor ceilings were sprayed with bullets by Continentals who dashed into the shelter of the building and fired through the upper windows.
Across the span of the years we can still hear the echo of an outraged protest—the hymn of hate of the daughters of William Chew, sung with all the cordial detestation that could be uttered by a group of sisters who came out to Germantown under British escort and found their lovely home in ruins at the hands of the army that had already made their father a prisoner. None can blame them for the gayety with which they entered into the social life of that winter in the occupied city, with never a thought for Washington’s men shivering in the snow at Valley Forge. Knyphausen, Cornwallis, and the two Howes picked out comfortable quarters in the deserted houses of the patriots who had fled, and Major André settled down with a “rapacious crew” in the home of Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin’s daughter returned after the British evacuation the next June she reported to him in Paris: “They stole and carried off with them some of your musical instruments, viz., a Welsh harp, ball harp, the set of tuned bells which were in a box, viol-de-gamba, all the spare harmonica glasses and one or two spare cases.” Tuneful was the life of the army of occupation.
André was paying diligent court to Peggy Chew. He was her champion in the fête of Mischianza, and her gallant protector when a marauding force of ragged Continentals marched down from Valley Forge and broke up the party. He wore her ribbon, with the legend “No Rival,” presented her with an aquarelle of himself in costume, wrote an account of the affair in verse, and filled in his spare hours by inditing to her rhapsodies inspired in the orchard at Cliveden, in apple-blossom time. Then came the parting; within a few short years
“The youth who bids with stifled pain
His sad farewell tonight”
was dead with a rope around his neck, and although Peggy married a soldier of the Republic, she remembered the enemy gallant. She was never so impishly amused as when she could say a kind word for André, for it guaranteed an explosive protest from her husband. “Major André,” said Peggy, demurely, with a certain dangerous sadness in her eyes, “was a most witty and cultivated gentleman,” and Colonel Howard, seizing a visitor’s arm, exclaimed “He was a damned spy, sir! Nothing but a damned spy!”
The house had been restored only two years when William Chew sold it to Blair McClenahan, but in 1787 he bought it back. In August of 1787 Washington, then president of the Constitutional Convention, rode out to see the encampment at Whitemarsh to which he had retreated ten years before, and dined with McClenahan in the Chew house. Despite his Royalist relations, the close of the Revolution restored Benjamin Chew to good standing in his community and the judicial profession, and he served as justice of the High Court of Errours and Appeals until its abolishment in 1808. During the period when the Federal Congress sat in Philadelphia it was no infrequent thing to see the Father of His Country in company with the father of Peggy and of Harriet, who was soon to marry a Carroll of Doughoregan.
It was at Germantown that Stephen’s drunkenness left his division without a commander, and opened a vacancy for Lafayette’s assumption of an active command as major-general. Naturally, therefore, when Lafayette returned to America in 1825, he could not ignore Germantown. He was received with a military escort and drawn “in an open barouche” to Cliveden. Let Miss Ann Johnson, of Upsala, across the way, carry on the story as she did in a letter to her mother:
“Last 4th. day morn I had the honour of breakfasting with Lafayette at Mr. Chew’s. I wish you had been here—the house both up and down stairs was crowded with men, women and soldiers—and around the house. Mrs. and two of the Miss Morris’s and myself were the only invited ladies that sat down to Breakfast—about 16 sat down at first, and when they had finished others took their place, and so on till I believe nearly all the soldiers had breakfast—those that did not come in had something in the kitchen. I heard that they eat everything they had till at last the cook had to lock the doors.
“I was introduced to LaFayette twice and shook hands with him three times. Ann Chew regretted M. was not there to enjoy the scene—it was quite delightful to see anything so animated in G—pp. There was so much noise that I could not hear a word the General said; every person seemed so anxious to see him eat that a centinal had to keep guard at the door with a drawn sword—it was very fine indeed. When he departed the shouts of the multitude and the roaring of the cannon was almost deafening. A. L. Logan said I could give you a very fine description of it—but I told him I would have to leave it to your imagination, it would be impossible for me to describe everything.”
Mrs. Samuel Chew is the present owner of the estate, and an appreciative custodian of its legend. Hers are the Washington letters; the portraits of illustrious Chews who have been eminent in the law, medicine, and public affairs since John Chew sailed into Jamestown in the Charitie in 1621; the shot-holes, the stains of the powder-kegs on the floor; the immaculately carved columns and stair rail of the hallway, and the hundred other fragments of the Cliveden story. Cliveden is hers—its story is the nation’s.