1776

by David McCullough

Stories that he had been slow to learn, that by age eleven he still could not read, were unfounded. The strange behavior—the so-called “madness” of King George III—for which he would be long remembered, did not come until much later, more than twenty years later, and rather than mental illness, it appears to have been porphyria, a hereditary disease not diagnosed until the twentieth century.

General James Grant, a member of the House of Commons, had boasted that with 5,000 British regulars he could march from one end of the American continent to the other, a claim that was widely quoted.

War had come on April 19, with the first blood shed at Lexington and Concord near Boston, then savagely on June 17 at Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill. (The June engagement was commonly known as the Battle of Bunker Hill on both sides of the Atlantic.)

In sum, he, George III, Sovereign of the Empire, had declared America in rebellion. He had confirmed that he was committing land and sea forces—as well as unnamed foreign mercenaries—sufficient to put an end to that rebellion, and he had denounced the leaders of the uprising for having American independence as their true objective, something those leaders themselves had not as yet openly declared.

The commander in chief of the army, George Washington, was himself only forty-three. John Hancock, the President of the Continental Congress, was thirty-nine, John Adams, forty, Thomas Jefferson, thirty-two, younger even than the young Rhode Island general. In such times many were being cast in roles seemingly beyond their experience or capacities, and Washington had quickly judged Nathanael Greene to be “an object of confidence.”

While the American army controlled the land around Boston, the British, strongly fortified in the city and on Bunker Hill, had control of the sea and could thereby supply their troops and send reinforcements. (Only weeks before, in September, reinforcements of five regiments had arrived.) The task at hand, therefore, seemed clear enough: to confine the King’s men in Boston, cut them off from supplies of fresh provisions, and keep them from coming out to gain what one of their generals, Burgoyne, called “elbow room.”

It had been the Reverend Emerson who declared the morning of April 19, as British regiments advanced on Concord, “Let us stand our ground. If we die, let us die here!”

And it was not the troops alone who suffered from camp fever. Many of those who came to nurse them were sickened, or carried the disease home, and thus it lay waste to one New England town after another. Of the parishioners of a single church in Danbury, Connecticut, more than a hundred would die of camp fever by November.

His Loyalist bias notwithstanding, Thompson’s portrayal was largely the truth. Such British commanders as Burgoyne and Percy were hardly to be blamed for dismissing Washington’s army as “peasantry,” “ragamuffins,” or “rabble in arms.” Except for Greene’s Rhode Islanders and a few Connecticut units, they looked more like farmers in from the fields than soldiers.

A good musket man could get off three to four rounds per minute, or a shot every fifteen seconds.

Like most southerners, Washington did not want blacks in the army and would soon issue orders saying that neither “Negroes, boys unable to bear arms, nor old men” were to be enlisted. By year’s end, however, with new recruits urgently needed and numbers of free blacks wanting to serve, he would change his mind and in a landmark general order authorize their enlistment.

In truth, the situation was worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington. Seeing things as they were, and not as he would wish them to be, was one of his salient strengths.

ON FIRST ARRIVING IN CAMBRIDGE, Washington had been offered the home of the president of Harvard, Samuel Langdon, for his residence. But finding it too cramped for his needs and those of his staff (his military “family”), the general moved a few days later to one of the largest, most elegant houses in town, a gray clapboard Georgian mansion half a mile from the college on the King’s Highway. Three stories tall, with an unobstructed view of the Charles River, it belonged to a wealthy Loyalist, John Vassall, who, fearing for his life and the lives of his family, had abandoned the place, fine furnishings and all, to take refuge in Boston. For Washington, who had a fondness for handsome architecture and river views, the house suited perfectly and would serve as his command headquarters through the siege, with his office established in a drawing room off the front hall.

threw the rock himself, to the delight of all present. The Philadelphia physician and patriot Benjamin Rush, a staunch admirer, observed that Washington “has so much martial dignity in his deportment that you would distinguish him to be a general and a soldier from among 10,000 people. There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chambre by his side.”

Though Washington was often said to be the richest man in America, he probably did not rank among the ten richest. He was very wealthy, nonetheless, and in large part because of his marriage to Martha Custis. His wealth was in land, upwards of 54,000 acres, including some 8,000 acres at Mount Vernon, another 4,000 acres in Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nearly all of which he had acquired for speculation. In addition, he owned more than one hundred slaves, another measure of great wealth, whose labors made possible his whole way of life.

He was by no means an experienced commander. He had never led an army in battle, never before commanded anything larger than a regiment. And never had he directed a siege.

IN THE FIRST DAYS OF SEPTEMBER, Washington began drawing up plans for two bold moves. He had decided to carry the war into Canada with a surprise attack on the British at Quebec. A thousand men from the ranks longing for action volunteered at once. Led by an aggressive Connecticut colonel named Benedict Arnold, they were to advance on Quebec across the Maine wilderness, taking a northeastern route up the Kennebec River. Hastily conceived, this “secret expedition” was based on too little knowledge of the terrain, but in small units the men began marching off for Newburyport, north of Boston, from where they would sail by sloop and schooner to the mouth of the Kennebec.

IN LATE SEPTEMBER, the discovery that the surgeon general of the army and head of the hospital at Cambridge, Dr. Benjamin Church, was a spy, the first American traitor, rocked everyone. Church had been one of the local dignitaries who had escorted Washington into Cambridge the day of his arrival. He was as prominent and trustworthy a man as any in the province, it was thought, a member of the Provincial Congress, poet, author, a Harvard classmate of John Hancock, and an outspoken patriot. Yet the whole time he had been secretly corresponding with the British in cipher, and was in their pay.

That such a scheme hatched by a junior officer in his twenties who had had no experience was transmitted so directly to the supreme commander, seriously considered, and acted upon, also marked an important difference between the civilian army of the Americans and that of the British. In an army where nearly everyone was new to the tasks of soldiering and fighting a war, almost anyone’s ideas deserved a hearing.

Of greater and more immediate interest to the British command was the prospect of abandoning Boston altogether, of packing up and sailing away. As things stood, it was clearly no place to launch an offensive operation. New York should be made the “seat of war,” Gage had stressed in correspondence with the administration in London, and Howe and the others were of the same opinion.

Brigadier General James Grant had said months earlier that Boston should be abandoned while there was still time. “We cannot remain during the winter in this place, as our situation must go on worse and that of the rebels better every day,” Grant had insisted in a long letter from Boston to Edward Harvey, Adjutant General of the British army in London, on August 11. Grant, a grossly fat, highly opinionated Scot, who had served in the French and Indian War, had an extremely low opinion of Americans. (It was he who had boasted to Parliament that with 5,000 men he could march from one end of the American continent to the other.) The only step that made sense, he wrote, was to burn Boston and move on to New York. Besides, he wanted to turn the fleet loose to burn every principle town along the New England coast. “Lenity is out of the question.”

Instead of striking at the enemy where they were well fortified, they would lure the enemy out to strike at them, as had been done at Bunker Hill. From the accounts of spies and British deserters, it was by now known that Howe had sworn he would “sally forth” if ever the Americans tried to occupy Dorchester. And so it was resolved that preparations begin “with a view of drawing out the enemy.”

It was an utterly phenomenal achievement. General Heath was hardly exaggerating when he wrote, “Perhaps there never was so much work done in so short a space of time.” At daybreak, the British commanders looking up at the Heights could scarcely believe their eyes. The hoped-for, all-important surprise was total. General Howe was said to have exclaimed, “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.” The British engineering officer, Archibald Robertson, calculated that to have carried everything into place as the rebels had—“a most astonishing night’s work”—must have required at least 15,000 to 20,000 men. Howe, in his official account, would be more conservative and put the number at 14,000.

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.

But the decision to make a stand at New York was based more on Washington’s political judgment than on military strategy. It was his political sense that Congress and the patriots of New York expected every effort to be made to hold the city, and that anything less would have devastating political effect on the people at large and thus on the American cause, which Washington fervently hoped would soon become the cause of American independence.

The friendship of Knox and Greene that had begun in Knox’s Boston bookshop continued to grow, as the two officers found themselves increasingly important in the overall command and nearly always in agreement on matters of consequence. In their admiration of and loyalty to Washington, they were of one heart and both had begun helping Washington in his dealings with Congress.

SUDDENLY, with the impact of an explosion, news of a Loyalist plot to assassinate the commander-in-chief burst upon the city. A dozen men were arrested, including the mayor of New York, David Matthews, and two soldiers from Washington’s own Life Guard. The plot reportedly was to kill Washington and his officers the moment the British fleet appeared.

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 staff further noted, an additional 15,000 to 20,000 could be expected “hourly” on still more ships from England under the command of General Howe’s brother, Admiral Richard Lord Howe.

By renouncing their allegiance to the King, the delegates at Philadelphia had committed treason and embarked on a course from which there could be no turning back. “We are in the very midst of a revolution,” wrote John Adams, “the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.”

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. Such courage and high ideals were of little consequence, of course, the Declaration itself being no more than a declaration without military success against the most formidable force on earth. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, an eminent member of Congress who opposed the Declaration, had called it a “skiff made of paper.” And as Nathanael Greene had warned, there were never any certainties about the fate of war. But from this point on, the citizen-soldiers of Washington’s army were no longer to be fighting only for the defense of their country, or for their rightful liberties as freeborn Englishmen, as they had at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill and through the long siege at Boston. It was now a proudly proclaimed, all-out war for an independent America, a new America, and thus a new day of freedom and equality.

Knox’s guns had proven more deadly to his own men than to the foe. Six American artillerymen were killed, the only fatalities of the day, when their cannon blew up due to their own inexperience or overconfidence, or possibly, as said, because a great many were drunk.

It had been a scene that those in the room would long remember. Washington had performed his role to perfection. It was not enough that a leader look the part; by Washington’s rules, he must know how to act it with self-command and precision. John Adams would later describe Washington approvingly as one of the great actors of the age. To Washington it had been an obligatory farce. He had no faith, no trust whatever in any peace overtures by the British, however properly rendered. He had agreed to take part in such an “interview,” one senses, partly to show the British—and his own staff—that he could go through the motions quite as well as any officer and gentleman, but more importantly to send a message to the British command absent any ambiguity. And in this he was unmistakably successful.

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.

But while the incoming stream of reinforcements had become a daily spectacle, desertions were increasing by the day, and signing up new recruits was proving ever more difficult, in part because that summer of 1776 was a bumper year on American farms and men could rightly claim to be needed at home. “Their complaints are without number,” the colonel of a Connecticut regiment wrote.

But Washington worried that a landing on Long Island might be a diversion in advance of a full assault on New York. And with no way of knowing, he felt compelled now to violate one of the oldest, most fundamental rules of battle, never to divide your strength when faced by a superior force. He split his army in roughly equal parts on the theory that he could move men one way or the other over the East River according to how events unfolded.

In fact, the Americans of 1776 enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world. Their material wealth was considerably less than it would become in time, still it was a great deal more than others had elsewhere. How people with so much, living on their own land, would ever choose to rebel against the ruler God had put over them and thereby bring down such devastation upon themselves was for the invaders incomprehensible.

The Marylanders, who until that morning had never faced an enemy, fought no less tenaciously than their commander. Washington, watching from a Brooklyn hill, is said to have cried out as he saw the Marylanders cut down time after time, “Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose!”

Numbers of individual Americans were indeed severely beaten after surrendering, or, like Captain Jewett, run through with bayonets, as reliable accounts attest, but no mass atrocities were committed. The letter in the Massachusetts Spy—a letter quoted repeatedly—was very likely a fake, fabricated as propaganda. Nor was there truth to an account in a London paper of Hessians burying five hundred American bodies in a single pit. Some American prisoners, including Jabez Fitch, recorded acts of genuine civility and kindness on the part of their captors. Even the infamous General Grant, wrote Fitch, “was so good as to make us a present of a side of mutton.” For their British and Hessian captors, and particularly for the Hessians, the prisoners were great curiosities, a first chance to see close up what the rebel foe looked like. “They could not have been taken as soldiers as they had no uniforms, but only torn blouses of all colors,” wrote one astonished Hessian. Lieutenant von Bardeleben, too, was surprised to see how badly clothed the Americans were.

“We cannot yet account for their precipitate retreat,” wrote General Grant. Like many of the British, Grant failed to understand how the Americans, having labored for months on their massive fortifications, could so readily abandon them. General Howe had performed most admirably and deserved his success, Grant thought. The lesson of Brooklyn, Grant decided, was that if pushed the Americans would never face the King’s troops again. Lord Percy agreed. “They feel severely the blow of the 27th,” he wrote to his father, “and I think I may venture to assert that they will never again stand before us in the field. Everything seems to be over with them, and I flatter myself now that this campaign will put a total end to the war.” To Lord Germain as well, he predicted, “This business is pretty near over.”

AS COMMENDABLE as Washington’s leadership during the retreat had been, good luck had played a very large part, and wars were not won by withdrawals, however well handled. Nor could a successful evacuation compensate for the losses suffered in dead and wounded and the thousand or more who had been taken prisoner by the enemy. 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.

From the lead landing craft, Lord Rawdon saw the rebels break instantly, “happy to escape” to the nearest woods. “We pressed to shore,” he wrote, “landed, and formed without losing a single man.” Not all the Americans got away. As another British officer would write, “I saw a Hessian sever a rebel’s head from his body and clap it on a pole in the entrenchments.”

When an advance party of Hessians appeared, and the fleeing men refused to make a stand, Washington is said to have flogged some of their officers with his riding crop. A few soldiers turned and fired on the enemy, killing and wounding several. When a number of other Americans surrendered, with their hands uplifted, the Hessians shot or bayoneted them.

Again, as on Long Island, the enemy effort had gone like clockwork. But why their commanders had delayed in crossing the island, why they had not pushed straight on to the Hudson, remained a puzzle. Had they advanced another mile or so, they could have cut the island in two, just as Nathanael Greene had predicted, sealing off any chance Putnam and his troops had to escape. In explanation, a romantic story spread—a story that would become legendary—that a Mrs. Robert Murray, a Quaker and an ardent patriot, had delayed William Howe and his generals by inviting them to afternoon tea at her country home at Inclenberg, later known as Murray Hill. “Mrs. Murray treated them with cake and wine, and they were induced to tarry two hours or more,” the story went, and thus Mary Lindley Murray was credited with saving part of the army, perhaps even the cause of liberty. She would be portrayed as a veritable Circe charming the gallant Britons with her feminine wiles. Possibly she did invite the officers to tea, and she may have been extremely charming, but she was also a woman in her fifties and the mother of twelve children.

On September 19, against the judgment of most of the British high command, including presumably his brother the general, Lord Howe issued a direct appeal to the people of America, in the form of a proclamation warning that the stubbornness of their representatives in Congress was leading to their downfall and misery. Americans ought to “judge for themselves,” he wrote, “whether it be more consistent with their honor and happiness to offer up their lives as a sacrifice to the unjust and precarious cause in which they are engaged,” or “to return to their allegiance, accept the blessings of peace,” and thus be “secured in the free enjoyment of their liberty and properties.” The proclamation seemed only to irritate everyone on both sides, and was all but forgotten after the night of September 20–21, when fire raged out of control in New York and a large part of the city burned to the ground.

Whatever the circumstances of his capture, Hale admitted to being a spy, and General Howe ordered him hanged without trial. Hale was twenty-one years old, a handsome, athletic graduate of Yale, a schoolmaster and wholehearted patriot. Raised on a Connecticut farm, he was one of six brothers who served in the war. He had signed up more than a year before, taken part in the Siege of Boston, and lately joined Colonel Knowlton’s Rangers. Yet thus far he felt he had rendered no real service to the country, and when Knowlton, on orders from Washington, called for a volunteer to cross the lines and bring back desperately needed intelligence, he had bravely offered to go. A fellow Connecticut officer, Captain William Hull, who had known Hale in college, tried to talk him out of it, warning that he was by nature “too frank and open for deceit and disguise,” and that no one respected the character of a spy. Hale had said only that he would “reflect, and do nothing but what duty demands.” The next thing Hull knew, his friend had disappeared.

He was hanged on the morning of September 21, in an artillery park near the Beekman house, a country estate not far from the East River that served as Howe’s headquarters. 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 second-to-last word: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”) On September 26, a British officer wrote in a letter, We hung up a rebel spy the other day, and some soldiers got out of a rebel gentleman’s garden a painted soldier on a board, and hung it along with the rebel, and wrote upon it, General Washington, and I saw it yesterday beyond headquarters, by the roadside. 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.

But as Washington had no way of knowing, Congress had already acted on most of what he wanted, due largely to the efforts of John Adams as head of the Board of War and in floor debate. Every soldier who enlisted for the “duration” of the war was to receive $20 and one hundred acres of land. New Articles of War, drawn up by Adams and based largely on the British Articles of War, went far to ensure justice for the individual soldier, provided stiffer punishments for major offenses (up to one hundred lashes), and increased the number of crimes for which the penalty was death. Adams also proposed for the first time the creation of a military academy, as Knox had urged, but nothing came of the motion.

The Battle of White Plains was the battle of Chatterton’s Hill and the British and the Hessians carried the day. But it was at a cost of more than 250 casualties, twice what the Americans suffered. Nor was it a victory that achieved anything.

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.

The British blamed the Hessians. (“The Hessians are more infamous and cruel than any,” wrote Ambrose Serle, after hearing reports of British plundering.) The Hessians blamed the British. The Americans blamed both the British and the Hessians, as well as the New Jersey Loyalists, and the British and Hessian commanders seemed no more able to put a stop to such excesses than Washington had been. The stories, amplified as many may have been, were a searing part of a war that seemed only to grow more brutal and destructive. Accounts of houses sacked, of families robbed of all they had, became commonplace. American reports of atrocities were often propaganda, but many were also quite accurate. The Pennsylvania Journal, the Pennsylvania Evening Post, and the Freeman’s Journal carried reports of the sick and elderly being abused, of rape and murder. No one was safe, according to the British officer Charles Stedman. “The friend and the foe from the hand of rapine shared alike.”