More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Like others, he attributed the storm of March 5 to the intervening hand of God. He did not “lament or repine at any act of Providence,” he told Joseph Reed, for “in great measure” he had become a convert to the view of the poet Alexander Pope that “whatever is, is right.”
In Greene and Knox, Washington had found the best men possible, men of ability and energy who, like Washington, would never lose sight of what the war was about, no matter what was to come. All important, too, was the devotion and loyalty these two young officers felt for Washington.
In the stilted phrasing of a young captain from Pennsylvania, Alexander Graydon, “The appearance of things was not much calculated to excite sanguine expectations in the mind of the sober observer.” To Graydon, who in what he wrote did little to conceal his feelings of superiority, the Yankees were a “miserably constituted,” “unwarlike” lot who did “not entirely come up to the ideas we had formed of the heroes of Lexington and Bunker Hill.” Most officers were still indistinguishable from their men. Deportment seemed altogether absent.
If New York was the key to the continent, then Long Island was the key to New York, and the key to the defense of Long Island was Brooklyn Heights. “For should the enemy take possession of N[ew] York when Long Island is in our hands,” Lee had written to Washington, “they will find it almost impossible to subsist.”
Further details on the makeup of the enemy armada followed quickly. The ships included the Centurion and the Chatham, of 50 guns each, the 40-gun Phoenix, and the 30-gun Greyhound with General Howe on board, in addition to the 64-gun Asia. In their combined firepower these five warships alone far exceeded all the American guns now in place on shore. Nathanael Greene reported to Washington that the total fleet of 120 ships had “10,000 troops received at Halifax, beside some of the Scotch Brigade that have joined the fleet on the passage.” And as Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Webb of Washington’s
...more
IN PHILADELPHIA, the same day as the British landing on Staten Island, July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress, in a momentous decision, voted to “dissolve the connection” with Great Britain.
In a ringing preamble, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, the document declared it “self-evident” that “all men are created equal,” and were endowed with the “unalienable” rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And to this noble end the delegates had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
It was his understanding, Washington continued, that Lord Howe had come out from London with authority only to grant pardons. If that was so, he had come to the wrong place. “Those who have committed no fault want no pardon,” Washington said plainly. “We are only defending what we deem our indisputable rights.” According to Henry Knox, the English officer appeared as “awestruck as if before something super-natural.”
The total British armada now at anchor in a “long, thick cluster” off Staten Island numbered nearly four hundred ships large and small, seventy-three warships, including eight ships of the line, each mounting 50 guns or more. As British officers happily reminded one another, it was the largest fleet ever seen in American waters. In fact, it was the largest expeditionary force of the eighteenth century, the largest, most powerful force ever sent forth from Britain or any nation.
All told, 32,000 troops had landed on Staten Island, a well-armed, well-equipped, trained force more numerous than the entire population of New York or even Philadelphia, which, with a population of about 30,000, was the largest city in America.
Some of the older soldiers and officers were veterans of the killing fields of Europe during the Seven Years’ War, or the French and Indian War in America, or had survived the retreat from Concord or the Battle of Bunker Hill.
The Battle of Brooklyn—the Battle of Long Island as it would be later known—had been a fiasco. Washington had proven indecisive and inept. In his first command on a large-scale field of battle, he and his general officers had not only failed, they had been made to look like fools.
General Lee had seen clearly that “whoever commands the sea must command the town,” and from the moment Washington chose to ignore that warning, he was in trouble.
It was as though in all his anguish over where and how he might be outflanked by water, he forgot that it could happen on land.
How a man so characteristically insistent that things be done just so, who took such care about details, could have let the Jamaica Pass stand unguarded is impossible to explain—and particularly when he had spent the full day at Brooklyn, August 26, studying the situation.
Washington’s anger may also have been partly with himself, as the attack at Kips Bay had been nearly as great a tactical surprise as the enemy’s night march through the Jamaica Pass. He had been made to look a fool by Howe still again.
It was Captain John Montresor, who, only hours afterward, under a white flag, brought word of Hale’s fate to the Americans and described what had happened to Hale to his friend Captain Hull. And it was Hull, later, who reported Montresor’s account of Hale’s last words as he was about to be executed: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” which was a variation on another then-famous line from the play Cato. (One imagines that in delivering the line to his British executioners, Hale, knowing that it was as familiar to them as to him, put the emphasis on the
...more
Hale’s place in the pantheon of American heroes, as the martyr spy of the Revolution, was not to come until years later. For now very little was known or said of his story. Washington, angry or saddened as he may have been, is not known to have mentioned the subject.
In August, Washington had had an army of 20,000. In the three months since, he had lost four battles—at Brooklyn, Kips Bay, White Plains, and Fort Washington—then gave up Fort Lee without a fight. His army now was divided as it had not been in August and, just as young Lieutenant Monroe had speculated, he had only about 3,500 troops under his personal command—that was all.
But of greatest importance, as time would tell, was the impression made on Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, who had recently volunteered to serve as a civilian aide on Greene’s staff.
He himself, however, said it was not until later, at Philadelphia, that in a “passion of patriotism,” he began what he called The Crisis, with its immortal opening lines: These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
It was such resolve and an acceptance of mankind and circumstances as they were, not as he wished them to be, that continued to carry Washington through. “I will not however despair,” he now wrote to Governor William Livingston.
The post road, or King’s Highway, from Brunswick to Trenton, the main thoroughfare between New York and Philadelphia, was as straight and flat and fine a thirty-mile stretch of road as any in the country, and the retreating army made good time. The retreat was not at a run. It was a forced march, not a rout, as sometimes portrayed. Washington and the main body of the army, marching through the night, reached Trenton on the Delaware the morning of December 2, having left Lord Stirling and two brigades as a rear guard at the little college town of Princeton.
WITH HIS BROTHER Sir William’s campaign succeeding splendidly in New Jersey, and the war rapidly losing support among the people there, Admiral Lord Howe decided to make yet another appeal for conciliation.
The proclamation, dated November 30, was an immediate success.
Hundreds, eventually thousands, in New Jersey flocked to the British camps to declare their loyalty.
“With a handful of men we sustained an orderly retreat,” wrote Thomas Paine in The Crisis, which soon appeared in Philadelphia. No sign of fear was to be seen, he insisted. “Once more we are collected and collecting. . . . By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue.”
Yet for all the troubles that beset him, all the high expectations and illusions that he had seen shattered since the triumph at Boston, Washington had more strength to draw upon than met the eye—in his own inner resources and in the abilities of those still with him and resolved to carry on.
If William Howe and others of like mind thought the war was over and the British had won, Washington did not. Washington refused to see it that way.
The crossing of Washington’s force was to be made in big flat-bottomed, high-sided Durham boats, as they were known, normally used to transport pig iron on the Delaware from the Durham Iron Works near Philadelphia. Painted black and pointed at both ends, they were forty to sixty feet long, with a beam of eight feet. The biggest of them could carry as many as forty men standing up, and fully loaded they drew only about two feet, and so could be brought close to shore. The oars—or sweeps—used to propel the boats were eighteen feet long.
that it is vain to ruminate upon, or even reflect upon the authors of our present misfortunes.
