1776

by David McCullough

Convinced that his army at Boston was insufficient, the King had dispatched reinforcements and three of his best major generals: William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton.

it had been Isaac Barré, in a past speech in defense of the Americans, who had first called them “Sons of Liberty,” and the name had taken hold.

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.

“The first of all qualities [of a general] is courage,” he read in the Memoirs Concerning the Art of War by Marshal Maurice de Saxe, one of the outstanding commanders of the era. “Without this the others are of little value, since they cannot be used. The second is intelligence, which must be strong and fertile in expedients. The third is health.”

he noted, inordinate quantities of rum—“for without New England rum, a New England army could not be kept together.” The rebels, he calculated, were consuming a bottle a day per man.

Washington’s army, wrote Thompson, was “the most wretchedly clothed, and as dirty a set of mortals as ever disgraced the name of a soldier. . . . They would rather let their clothes rot upon their backs than be at the trouble of cleaning ’em themselves.” To this “nasty way of life” Thompson attributed all the “putrid, malignant and infectious disorders” that took such a heavy toll.

The tricorn, a dressier hat, was more likely to be worn by officers and others of higher status, such as chaplains and doctors.

In order that officers could be distinguished from those in the ranks, Washington directed that major generals wear purple ribbons across their chests, brigadiers, pink ribbons. Field officers were to be identified by different-colored cockades in their hats. Sergeants were to tie a red cloth to their right shoulders. Washington himself chose to wear a light blue ribbon across his chest, between coat and waistcoat. But then there was never any mistaking the impeccably uniformed, commanding figure of Washington, who looked always as if on parade.

His Excellency was on horseback, in company with several military gentlemen. It was not difficult to distinguish him from all others. His personal appearance is truly noble and majestic, being tall and well proportioned. His dress is a blue coat with buff colored facings, a rich epaulet on each shoulder, buff underdress, and an elegant small sword, a black cockade in his hat.

The next several pages give an accurate description of Washington’s “army”

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.

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.”

Washington’s effect on the troops and young officers was striking. “Joy was visible on every countenance,” according to Nathanael Greene, “and it seemed as if the spirit of conquest breathed through the whole army.”

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.

As a Virginian, Washington represented the richest, most populous of the thirteen colonies.

Meanwhile, Washington put increasing trust in Greene, as well as another impressive young New Englander, Henry Knox, to whom he assigned one of the most difficult and crucial missions of the war.

“General Washington fills his place with vast ease and dignity, and dispenses happiness around him,” Knox wrote.

If the desperate American need for leaders had thrust young men like Nathanael Greene into positions beyond their experience, the British military system, wherein commissions were bought and aristocrats given preference, denied many men of ability roles they should have played. Had Captain John Montresor been a major general, the outcome of the struggle might have been quite different.

If I shall be able to rise superior to these, and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it, to blind the eyes of our enemies; for surely if we get well through this month, it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages we labor under.

Without Knox, there would have been no triumph at Dorchester Heights. Henry Knox, in sum, had saved the day.

By sunset the enemy ships at anchor down the bay numbered more than one hundred.

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.

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 average British regular was in his late twenties, or about five years older than the average American soldier, but the average regular had served five or six years in the army, or five or six times longer than the average volunteer under Washington.

For most of the redcoats, soldiers and young officers, like nearly all of the Americans, the battle to come was to be their first.

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.

These are the times that try men’s souls. ~Thomas Paine, The American Crisis December 1776