The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

Other shortages mirrored those plaguing the British. “We have suffered prodigiously for want of wood,” Greene added. “We have burnt up all the fences and cut down all the trees for a mile around the camp.” The army would burn eight thousand cords in six months, and on particularly cold days, the firewood demand equaled the timber from a four-acre woodlot. Despite efforts by the Committee on Wood in Watertown to organize cutting expeditions, a number of regiments were forced to eat their provisions raw, and many soldiers shivered in their sleep. While 120 barracks were under construction in Cambridge and Roxbury—each man got fourteen square feet of living space—a lumber shortage kept some in tents into January. Hunger in the ranks led to pilfering from nearby farms. “The devil would now and then tell us that it was no harm sometimes to pull a few potatoes and cabbages,” one private confessed.

In an era of improbable ascents, Henry Knox’s rise was among the least likely. At age nine, he had been forced to drop out of Boston Latin Grammar School when his father abandoned the family for the West Indies after his shipbuilding business collapsed. The boy went to work, both in the bindery and as an autodidact, teaching himself passable French and studying Plutarch’s Lives and Caesar’s Commentaries. At eighteen he joined a militia artillery company, training on brass 3-pounders under British tutelage and firing salutes for the king’s birthday. As a witness to the Boston Massacre, he testified at the subsequent trials and soon after opened his London Book-Store, peddling Bibles, law books, and almanacs in an effort, as he advertised, “to exterminate ignorance and darkness.” Knox himself was an attraction. “He was affable without familiarity, dignified without parade, imposing without arrogance,” one admirer wrote. Within three years the shop had become “a fashionable morning lounge” for browsing British officers and well-heeled Bostonians alike, an emporium offering stationery, wallpaper, quills, flutes, Keyser’s pills, telescopes, “cordial cephalic snuff,” reading glasses, and Hill’s “never-failing cure for the bite of a mad dog.” And books: twenty volumes of Voltaire, ecclesiastical histories, the eleven-volume Complete History of England, treatises on shoeing horses and how to treat venereal disease with mercury, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and various pirated Irish...

Harvard gave Washington an honorary degree, and Congress ordered a gold medal struck showing the goddess Liberty holding a spear and leaning on the commanding general’s shoulder as British ships receded in the distance. “Under your directions,” Hancock told him, “an undisciplined band of husbandmen in the course of a few months became soldiers.” True, he had yet to fight a battle or demonstrate particular martial competence; Boston had been “half a war,” as John Adams observed. It remained to be seen how long and how well those husbandmen would fight under Washington’s command. Among other small deceptions, he allowed Congress to believe that the Dorchester Heights gambit was his idea, rather than a stratagem imposed by his war council.

Appointed postmaster general, he donated his £1,000 annual salary to care for wounded soldiers, then organized a system of mail riders every twenty-five to thirty miles from Maine to Savannah, ready to travel day or night. He sketched elaborate motifs for Continental currency to thwart counterfeiters. He designed an infantry pike, organized Delaware River defenses, and urged, unsuccessfully, the use of long bows in combat, since an archer “can discharge four arrows in the time of charging and discharging one bullet.” Diligent in attending the various congressional committees to which he was assigned, Franklin immersed himself in the procurement of lead, saltpeter, and gunpowder.

The American penchant for subjugating those deemed in need of deliverance was hardly extinguished by the calamity in Canada. As the historian Eliot A. Cohen has observed, that impulse would recur often in the centuries to come, “with mixed motives and uncertain outcomes.” Canada proved a foreshadow.

Most smugglers got through, although few voyages would be as dramatic as that of the American brigantine Nancy. Returning in June from the Virgin Islands with rum, sugar, and 386 barrels of gunpowder for the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety, she was sighted through the haze off the New Jersey coast by the British thirty-two-gun frigate Orpheus and the fourteen-gun sloop Kingfisher. Chased onto a shoal in Turtle Gut Inlet, seven miles north of Cape May, Nancy’s eleven-man crew, aided by rebel sailors from several nearby vessels, manhandled all but a hundred barrels into the dunes while enemy gunfire tore Nancy’s sails to rags, riddled her hull, and sheared off the mainmast. Seamen dumped the remaining powder in the hold and fashioned a fuse from a spare sail and a hot coal. Just as British tars in a longboat pulled up to take possession of the brig, Nancy detonated with a blast reportedly heard in Philadelphia. “The pieces of the vessel was falling all round for some time,” a midshipman on Orpheus recorded, “and the air was totally darkened with the explosion.” Seven British sailors died, and the shower of debris included “two laced hats and a leg with a garter.”

In warfare, salt was almost as much a unum necessarium as gunpowder. Without the preservative, armies and navies could not stockpile meat and fish. Two bushels of salt—more than a hundred pounds—were needed to cure a thousand pounds of pork. Beef required even more. Salt also was used to tan leather, fix the dyes in military uniforms, churn butter, and supplement livestock feed. Before the war, Americans had imported 1.5 million bushels annually, half from the West Indies and half from Britain or southern Europe. The British trade embargo strangled two-thirds of those imports. Profiteers and hoarders drove up the price, from two shillings a bushel to fourteen by late summer; it would soar as high as seventy-five shillings by July 1777. Salt bandits were reported in Virginia. “This article is exceedingly scarce,” a diarist wrote. “If none comes in, the people will revolt.”

The final toast was drunk to “civil and religious liberty to all mankind”—all mankind, that is, except Tories. Civil liberty for loyalists had become another rare commodity. Throughout the colonies, partisan belligerence increased as the insurgency metastasized into a civil war. Congress had resolved that anyone in America who professed allegiance to King George was “guilty of treason.” Rhode Island required males over sixteen suspected of “being inimical to the united American colonies” to swear an oath of allegiance; those who resisted could be fined and disenfranchised. Connecticut law now punished “inimicals” who defamed Congress with fines and imprisonment. Loyalists could be barred from traveling, running a tavern, or operating a ferry; their property could be taxed at double normal rates. Loyalist teachers, lawyers, doctors, and apothecaries had trouble keeping their jobs or their clients. Blacksmiths in Massachusetts refused to shoe the horses of suspected inimicals. Some were tarred and feathered, and in one case a loyalist’s horse got the same treatment for good measure. For a brief period in June 1776, mail to or from anyone in Albany whose last name began with “Mc” was examined, apparently on the theory that the Scots and Irish were especially suspect. A mob threw rocks at loyalist women on Cape Cod; Rhode Island outlawed prayers for the king. One New Yorker wrote that for those still true to the Crown or simply indifferent to rebellion, “taciturnity is the gre...

Few were hanged, at least not yet; incivility rarely turned to bestiality. But no one could say how brutal the war would become. Conformity, censorship, and zealotry now flourished. Even small sins, such as “speaking diminutively of the country congress,” might be punished with forced public apologies, boycotts, ostracism, or property confiscation. A mild word of praise for the British government—or simply being suspected of thinking loyal thoughts—could provoke a beating. Militias served as a political constabulary, bolstered by the Continental Army. When Queens County, a loyalist stronghold on Long Island, voted 788 to 221 against sending representatives to the provincial congress, the names of those in the majority were published in the newspaper; they were forbidden to travel, hire a lawyer, or practice a trade. More than a thousand militiamen and Continentals then swept through Queens, arresting opposition leaders, seizing weapons, and extracting allegiance oaths—except from the 250 obdurate men who fled into the swamps to await General Howe’s arrival.

Perhaps half a million Americans remained committed to the Crown. One scholarly computation asserted that loyalists made up 16 percent of the total population—or about 20 percent of white colonials. Of roughly 3.2 million Americans alive from 1775 to 1783, 513,000 demonstrated loyalty by supporting the British cause, fighting with one of two hundred loyalist units, or eventually going into exile. Other estimates posited that as many as a third of all Americans remained loyal. Although that was probably an exaggeration, their numbers without doubt ran high in certain belts and pockets: along the frontier from the western Carolinas through western New York, for instance, and along the coast of the middle colonies from the lower Chesapeake to Long Island, as well as in the Hudson valley. Loyalists often had shallow roots in America; many were recent immigrants rather than native-born. Others had ties that bound them to the mother country, as placemen or merchants trading with London or Glasgow. “The height of my ambition,” a New Yorker wrote, “was and is to live and die a British subject.” Anglican churchgoers tended toward loyalism where they were a minority, as in New England, but not where they were dominant, as in South Carolina. (All Anglican clerics were ordained in Britain and swore allegiance to the king.) Families could be sundered just as painfully as communities or colonies, like the Eastchester, New York, clan of Judge Jonathan Fowler, who personally immigrated to...

Loyalists typically abhorred both civil disobedience—once begun, where would it end?—and mob violence, including rogue committees of safety formed by “half a dozen fools in your neighborhood,” as one man put it, with the arbitrary authority to wreck the lives of their political opponents. “Which is better,” the Boston clergyman Mather Byles asked, “to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?” Most loyalists believed in law, stability, and beneficent British rule, “against which a deluded and hysterical mass, led by demagogues, threw themselves in a frenzy,” as the historian Bernard Bailyn wrote. Yet with each passing month, loyalist weaknesses became more evident, including the absence of national leaders and an inability to match the rebels in organization, propaganda, or emotional pitch. By the summer of 1776, it had become clear that only massive British support could prop up the loyal cause.

Charleston claimed to be the “London of the Low Country,” the richest, most sophisticated town in North America’s richest colony. Eight of the ten wealthiest men in America were said to be South Carolinians, and Charleston’s collective worth was supposedly sixfold that of Philadelphia. “Every tradesman is a merchant, every merchant is a gentleman, and every gentleman one of the noblesse,” a local newspaper boasted. Three thousand broad-wheeled wagons a year rolled into the port with rice, indigo, and other exports. Its master shipwrights had long built sloops, schooners, and brigs for merchant houses in Europe and America. By the early summer of 1776, the town had grown to twelve thousand residents—half white and free, half neither. Every farthing of Charleston’s affluence derived from slavery, as plain as the blue-stained palms of the indigo pickers sold on the Custom House auction block, or the ships packed with shackled Gambians and Angolans at Fitzsimmons’ Wharf, or the pillory near So Be It Lane for “negroes, mulattoes, and mestizos, who are apt to be riotous and disorderly,” according to a town ordinance. In recent years, rumors of war and then war itself had brought “cucumber times”—hardship and disquiet—to noblesse and chattel alike, but the town maintained a cosmopolitan swank. Three theaters produced the likes of King Lear and John Dryden’s All for Love, music societies sponsored frequent concerts, and specialty shops sold toothpick cases, scented pomatum, gilt w...

On Saturday, June 8, as several British warships eased across the bar and reconvened in Five-Fathom Hole, Major General Charles Lee cantered into Charleston with a pack of yapping dogs at his heels and two thousand Continental soldiers from Virginia and North Carolina close behind. Sent by Congress as commander of the newly created Southern Department, Lee, now forty-four, was deemed “the first officer in military knowledge and experience,” in Washington’s recent assessment, although “rather fickle and violent, I fear, in his temper.” Lee intended to prove the commander in chief correct, on all counts. No more flamboyant figure ever served the American cause in uniform, whether he was wearing his hussar’s black dress garnished with a fox pelt and gold-inlaid steel pistols, or his green sherryvallies with leather stripes and buttoned seams, or his Polish general’s costume—bone white, faced in blue, and adorned with the red ribbon and enameled star of the Order of Saint Stanislaus. So slender that he seemed to lack shoulders, he had a receding chin, high forehead, tiny hands, and small, deep-set eyes; to call Lee homely was to insult homely men. “His nose is so large,” a German officer wrote, “that its shadow darkens the other half of his face.” Despite the fancy uniforms, he was habitually unkempt and reputedly owned but three shirts, each in such disrepair that he’d named them Rag, Tag, and Bobtail. The dogs trailed him everywhere, including a favorite Pomeranian called Sp...

The leaner, edited result remained a stirring manifesto of republicanism, a radical assertion that power derived not from God or through bloodlines but from the people, and should benefit the many, not just the affluent or well-born. Of the ninety or more declarations and petitions drafted by the colonies in recent months, as counted by the historian Pauline Maier, none surpassed this document in elegance, clarity, or breathtaking vision. That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners—Jefferson alone had two hundred—was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and “unalienable rights,” at least not in the eighteenth century. But as Edmund S. Morgan would write, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.”

Simply getting horses to New York was proving to be an ordeal. At Howe’s request, twenty-one equestrian transports had been leased, some of them Dutch vessels with scuttled decks to allow greater air circulation. Each ship typically carried several dozen animals in narrow stalls, their legs sometimes padded with straw trusses, their hooves hobbled, and their bodies guyed to overhead hooks to prevent toppling when the transport rolled. Of 950 horses shipped to Howe this summer, 412 would die in transit, the carcasses hoisted with slings from the stinking holds and pitched into the sea. Scores more were so enfeebled by the crossing that they died soon after arrival. Some transports proved particularly lethal, like the Jonge Pieter, which had embarked seventy-two horses—typically costing sixteen guineas each—and delivered just sixteen alive. The French ambassador in London, who carefully tracked Britain’s war exertions, calculated that these equestrian shipping costs alone exceeded £10,000. “This ruinous and mad war,” he wrote in a secret dispatch to Versailles, “is the reverse of the philosopher’s stone for England.”

Some died even before the battle was joined, for summer diseases had lacerated the army. “I am extremely sorry to inform Congress our troops are very sickly,” Washington wrote Hancock in early August. Of his 17,225 privates, only 10,514 were present and fit for duty; many were unfit, as an ensign informed his diary, because “a dysentery prevails considerable in the army at this time.” Typhoid and typhus also prevailed; the diseases, respectively spread by fecal contamination and by lice, would not be distinguishable until the next century. Malaria grew common, too. “The air of the whole city seems infected,” an American doctor wrote. “In almost every street there is a horrid smell.” Camp filth and fetid water—some ponds were used for both drinking and washing—contributed to a third of the army falling sick in the summer of 1776. General William Heath observed that “in almost every barn, stable, shed, and even under the fences and bushes, were the sick to be seen.”

Britain, more than any other naval power, had honed the skills needed for amphibious warfare; drawing lessons from failures earlier in the century against the Spanish and French, the navy had developed specialized landing craft, combat loading and command procedures, fleet organization, naval gunfire and logistical support, and the reconnaissance of hostile shores. Assaults against Louisbourg, various Caribbean islands, the French coast, and a masterful operation at Quebec in 1759 all helped make Long Island look simple, although the Sullivan’s Island debacle was a reminder that much could go wrong between sea and shore.

Faith in Washington plummeted. “Would to heaven General Lee were here, is the language of officers and men,” a Delaware colonel reported. Such doubts were justified. The commanding general had misread the battlefield and botched the battle. Though Congress wanted New York defended, Washington had failed to recognize that holding Long Island—the key to holding New York—would be impossible with a weak, divided, overmatched army that lacked naval power. Once the fight began, he did little more than stand on his fortified hill and wait for the bad news to drift in. Even as darkness descended on Tuesday night, he neglected to realize that the Heights of Guana had been completely lost. In the coming days he would tell Hancock that he could still defend New York “if the men would do their duty,” an unseemly affront toward the troops by their leader. In his first true test as a battle captain, Washington was found wanting. “In general,” John Adams tartly concluded, “our generals were outgeneraled.” Washington’s best, most redeeming qualities would have to emerge on another field, on another day.

Fear of fire had distressed New York for well over a hundred years. In the mid-seventeenth century, the town bought its first ladders and fire hooks and commissioned cordwainers to make 150 leather water buckets. Officials banned wooden chimneys, thatched roofs, and haystacks. Wardens prohibited blazes in hearths on windy days, and all fires had to be banked or covered in the evening. Watchmen with rattles walked the streets, sniffing for smoke. Two new fire engines were purchased from a London firm in 1731 for £200; twenty men pumped foot treadles on each machine to force water through the leather pipes. Ten fires plagued New York in the spring of 1741, including one in Fort George that spread to the governor’s mansion, an army barracks, and a Church of England chapel; confessions of arson—in some cases coerced if not extracted by torture in the “Great Gaol” below city hall—led to hysterical cries of “The Negroes are rising!” The town convicted and executed almost three dozen suspects, burning thirteen black men at the stake and hanging another seventeen blacks and four whites—the supposed ringleaders. Eighty-four slaves were also sold into West Indies bondage, and seven white men were exiled.

Major General Nathanael Greene, who would earn acclaim as one of the finest commanders in American military history, seemed an unlikely great captain. “I was educated a Quaker, amongst the most superstitious sort,” he had written in 1772, a fifth-generation Rhode Islander and the third of eight sons in a black-garbed clan that made anchors and heavy chains. Taught Euclid and a smattering of Latin, young Nathanael otherwise educated himself to dispel “the mist of ignorance,” devouring Horace, Swift, Pope, Locke, Blackstone, Jacob’s Law Dictionary, Book-keeping Methodized, and various military treatises, including Frederick the Great’s Instructions for His Generals. Though he could be thin-skinned and moody, his imitation of the fumbling, pudgy Dr. Slop in Tristram Shandy was much praised by his friends for comic verve. A severe asthmatic whose togs smelled of forge smoke, Greene was a double-chinned, blue-eyed bumpkin with a deep chest, brawny shoulders, and heavy palm calluses, which he shaved to make his hands more supple.

The prisoners would be marched in shuffling columns to New York, heckled by loyalists and soldiers’ trulls, who screeched, “Which is Washington? Which is Washington?” American officers who signed paroles were permitted to rent rooms in town or on Long Island; enlisted men were crammed into Dutch churches and unheated sugar houses used as penitentiaries. Redcoat recruiters offered pardons to turncoats willing to enlist in the king’s service. Provost marshals also scrutinized the rebel ranks for British deserters, like Thomas Cairns and Edward Crosby, both accused of absconding from the 18th Foot, and Thomas Cox, who had deserted while on guard duty in Boston in April 1775; all three were found guilty of “bearing arms in the rebel service” and condemned to death. Some loyalists believed that everyone captured should be put to the sword. “The most rigid severity at the first would have been the greatest mercy and lenity in the end,” wrote Thomas Jones, a former New York supreme court judge and Yale graduate. But Captain Mackenzie told his diary on November 17, “I am of opinion it is right to treat our enemies as if they might one day become our friends.” Few friends would emerge from the ordeal ahead, given the barbaric treatment of American prisoners. Within eighteen months, roughly two-thirds of those captured at Fort Washington would be dead from disease, exposure, or malnutrition. No American defeat in the first five years of war would be more catastrophic, wrenching, or ...

“I am old and good for nothing,” he had told Benjamin Rush, his fellow congressman. “As the storekeepers say of their remnants of cloth, I am but a fag end, and you may have me for what you are pleased to give.” So it happened that Congress in late October had been pleased to dispatch him to France in hopes of signing “a treaty with his most Christian majesty,” King Louis XVI, and to obtain “twenty or thirty thousand muskets and bayonets, and a large supply of ammunition, and brass field pieces to be sent under convoy of France.” The instructions tucked into his valise also empowered him to hire “a few good engineers” and to buy or borrow eight ships of the line, “of seventy-four and sixty-four guns, well-manned.” Franklin, this fifteenth child of a Boston candlemaker, was to descend on Versailles like a bolt of the lightning he had so famously tamed, using a diplomat’s ploys to persuade the most sophisticated court in Europe to abandon its neutrality in exchange for little more than American gratitude and a chance to further abash perfidious Britain. “It will be proper for you to press for the immediate and explicit declaration of France in our favor,” Congress had advised him, and to threaten an American reconciliation with England in the event of any French hesitation. Rarely had a supplicant—a beggar, really—set out with greater presumption, but rarely had Versailles seen anyone like Benjamin Franklin.

Yet as Franklin well understood, a belligerent fleet of privateers was greatly aiding the American cause. Exploiting a form of naval warfare used since the thirteenth century, colonial governments in the fall of 1775 had begun issuing letters of marque and reprisal to authorize attacks on enemy vessels by private shipowners. Congress followed suit a few months later. A report to the House of Lords indicated that privateers had taken 733 British merchantmen since the first shots at Lexington; those ships would be among 3,400 captured during the war—a vast flotilla of impounded Betsys, Bettys, Hannahs, Janes, Isabellas, Susannahs, and more than a few Johns. About two thousand armed American privateers, carrying eighteen thousand guns and seventy thousand sailors, would prey on enemy shipping on both sides of the Atlantic. Massachusetts alone sent out five Bunker Hills, fifteen Resolutions, no fewer than twenty-one Revenges, and many a Washington, Franklin, and General Arnold. Privateers inevitably competed with the Continental Navy for manpower, munitions, and booty. Discipline was looser on a privateer—naval officers prohibited cursing and required sailors to attend church service twice daily—and the rewards were greater, since those holding private commissions kept the full value of prizes, while Congress now forced naval ships to remit to the public treasury half the value of enemy merchantmen seized. A solicitation in one port beckoned “all gentlemen volunteers who are d...

The damage to British trade and military victualling was substantial. Insurance premiums on vessels traveling from the West Indies to England at times exceeded 20 percent of the value of the cargo and the ships—higher than during the Seven Years’ War—and were still rising. Lloyd’s of London estimated that in the first two years of war, rebel privateers would capture several times more merchantmen than the Americans lost in vessels of all sorts. A loyalist trader in Nova Scotia who had five ships taken that fall told his diary, “No protection afforded as yet from government.… The people are much engaged in privateering, and very successful.” British merchant captains began painting black squares on their hulls in hopes that simulated gun ports would scare away marauders; the Nelly, seized while sailing from Honduras to London with a cargo of mahogany and turtles, was found to brandish six real guns and twelve made of wood. An Englishman reported from the Caribbean that in one week fourteen British ships were escorted into Martinique as American prizes, some of them straggling West Indiamen culled from sugar convoys despite protection from Royal Navy escorts. “We go on briskly taking prizes,” Abigail Adams told John. “We have a plenty of sugars.”

The firm was, in fact, the government front recently set up for shipping military supplies to America without implicating Versailles or embarrassing Louis XVI. A tall, slender, elegant man said to be the Hortalèz managing director occasionally flitted down the rue Vieille du Temple, but he, too, was not what he seemed, and he never had been. Pierre-Augustin Caron, better known as Beaumarchais, was among the most improbable figures affiliated with the American rebellion; with his celebrated gift for “oozing through keyholes,” he was also among the great characters of eighteenth-century France.

Minor court positions came to Beaumarchais, including walking in livery with a sword on his hip in the procession that preceded the king’s meat course. He made money as an arms dealer in the Seven Years’ War, as a lumber merchant, and as an agent for the Crown, including one mission in which he quashed the publication of Secret Memoirs of a Prostitute, a salacious pamphlet about a royal courtesan; Beaumarchais bought all the copies from a blackmailer and burned them in a London limekiln. In another recent mission to Britain, he retrieved from a renegade French expatriate an iron safe containing secret war plans drafted in Versailles for an attack on southern England. More government offices came to him, notably lieutenant general of the preserves in the bailiwick, and captain of the warren of the Louvre. Among other adornments, he wore an enormous diamond ring given to him by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria for services rendered, according to the biographer Georges Lemaitre. He was forever embroiled in spats, duels, lawsuits, indictments, judgments, and misjudgments. “My life,” he admitted, “is a combat.” During a squabble over a woman in 1773, a sword-wielding duke attacked him in his study, inflicting wounds on the coachman, cook, and footman trying to intervene; Beaumarchais, a witness reported, was “as cheerful and assured as if he had passed the most tranquil day.” His bestselling memoir, published in 1774, drew praise from Goethe and Voltaire. In late February 1775,...

Bit by bit the king came round, despite warnings from his finance minister that war would bankrupt France. American élan captured French imaginations and inspired young nobles, who clamored to help the insurgents against British barbarity; even Marie Antoinette was aflutter with enthusiasm for these New World paragons of courage and ingenuous virtue. At Vergennes’s direction, a French agent disguised as an Antwerp merchant traveled to Philadelphia and told Congress that France had no interest in reclaiming Canada and that American mariners would be welcome in French ports. “Everyone here is a soldier,” the agent reported from Philadelphia with delusional gusto. “The troops are well-clothed, well-paid, and well-commanded.… Nothing frightens them.”

Franklin had visited France twice in the 1760s, joking that his tailor and peruke maker “transformed me into a Frenchman.… They told me I was become twenty years younger and looked very gallant.” Now he was the American, a slightly paunchy embodiment of his country, authentic and unpretentious in an inauthentic, pretentious age. Excerpts from the final edition of his Poor Richard’s Almanack, published in 1758, would be reprinted 145 times before the end of the century, including twenty-eight French translations; reportedly even priests found his aphorisms on prudence, thrift, and diligence to be instructive. Now Parisians pursued his coach when he traveled through the city, reciting laudatory couplets composed in his honor. The French assumed that as a Pennsylvanian he must be a Quaker, and it was said that a Parisian rake could succeed at seduction just by dressing in black homespun and claiming devotion to America. The powerful, the learned, and the rich were eager to meet this “ornament of the New World”; beautiful women called him mon cher Papa, and he ruefully admitted that he was hard-pressed to obey the commandment against coveting thy neighbor’s wife.

Soon after retreating across the Delaware, Washington also began to get reports of rape by British and Hessian soldiers, especially in a rural area north of Trenton. A magistrate, Jared Sexton, took sworn testimony that proved horrifying: the widow Mary Phillips reported being gang-raped, as did Mary Campbell, five months pregnant, and Elizabeth Cain, age fifteen. Rebekhah Christopher reported being raped by two men. Abigail Palmer, age thirteen, said she was raped by soldiers who threatened to blind her with bayonets if she screamed. Sexton’s affidavits were printed in the Pennsylvania Evening Post with the victims’ names redacted, although they were included in a report subsequently sent to Congress. Other testimonials accumulated as county justices, clergymen, and the governors of New Jersey and New York investigated further, identifying victims as young as ten and as old as seventy in what the historian David Hackett Fischer described as “an epidemic of rape.” “God made these men,” a Quaker said of the assailants, “but I am sure the devil governs them.” General Greene told the governor of Rhode Island in mid-December that enemy “ravages in the Jerseys exceeds all description. Men slaughtered, women ravished, and houses plundered. Little girls not ten years old ravished. Mothers and daughters ravished in the presence of their husbands and sons.”

General Grant blamed indiscipline on lax officers, correctly noting that scurrilous behavior could “lose you friends and gain you enemies.” Just so: New Jersey militiamen who had been reluctant to join Washington now assailed their oppressors with raids and ambushes. New Jersey, like Westchester County, soon became a dark borderland of uncertain, shifting loyalties and spasmodic violence. Howe’s staff estimated that rebel bandits by mid-December had rustled seven hundred oxen and almost a thousand sheep and hogs from British foragers. Patrols were bushwhacked, couriers seized, and eight British baggage wagons captured. Six hundred raiders struck Hackensack while the redcoats were campaigning downstate, seizing fifty Tories. As Howe prepared to return to New York, Captain Münchhausen wrote, “It is now very unsafe for us to travel in Jersey. The rascal peasants meet our men alone or in small unarmed groups.… They shoot them in the head, then quickly hide their rifles and pretend they know nothing.”

A New Yorker recounted seeing inmates rotating in groups of a half dozen for ten minutes at a time to crowd each tiny, unglazed window above Crown Street: “Every narrow aperture of those stone walls filled with human heads, face above face, seeking a portion of the external air.” Prisoner Samuel Young later described guards slopping food at suppertime “as if to so many hogs—a quantity of old biscuit, broken and in crumbs, mostly molded, and some of it crawling with maggots.” Another prisoner wrote, “As soon as the bread fell on the floor it took legs and ran in all directions. So full of life.” Some ate undigested bran picked from horse droppings or “damnified pork” soaked in bilgewater during the voyage from England. Inmates sold their breeches or coats to buy scraps or beef bones sold by the guards; others ate insects and rodents. “Cold and famine were now our destiny,” a survivor wrote. “Old shoes were bought and eaten with as much relish as a pig or a turkey.” One sugar house prisoner reportedly gnawed the flesh from his arms to ward off starvation; another died while trying to eat a brick.

The lucky ones could build a fire every three days. Many cell blocks lacked hearths or wood. Vermin infested the bedding straw. “It was bad in every sense of the word,” wrote a surgeon’s mate captured in August, “a dirty place, the prisoners wallowing in their own filth.” A British captain acknowledged, “If once they are taken sick, they seldom recover.” Each morning corpses were pitched from the cells, then hauled off on the dead cart to trenches beyond the Jews’ Burial Ground and other grave sites. Prisoners also endured psychological torture. Major Otho Holland Williams of Maryland, badly wounded and captured in mid-November, described being forced to sit on a coffin in a wagon bed with a noose around his neck in a mock execution; others were required to select the rope with which they preferred to be hanged—someday—from several lengths dangled before them. Colonel Robert Magaw, the garrison commander captured at Fort Washington, and six other imprisoned officers wrote to General Howe in mid-December, noting conditions “too melancholy for recital” and requesting proper care for the sick and wounded. By the end of December, according to the historian Edwin G. Burrows, disease and starvation would kill at least half of the Americans captured on Long Island and as many as two-thirds of those taken at Fort Washington—more than two thousand men in all.

Among Washington’s visitors this morning was Benjamin Rush, the garrulous, animated Philadelphia physician. Rush—a “sprightly, pretty fellow,” in John Adams’s assessment, but “too much of a talker to be a deep thinker”—had come to tender both medical services and political advice. Medically educated in Edinburgh and London after graduating from college in Princeton at age fourteen, he held progressive views: against slavery, capital punishment, and strong drink; for women’s rights, free education, and medical care for the indigent. Given that sickness already had killed far more American soldiers than bullets, he also had opinions on how to keep an army healthy: daily washing of hands and feet; frequent washing of bodies; vigorous scrubbing of cook pots; cropping hair close to the skull to discourage lice; eating mostly vegetables; disinfecting blankets with sunshine. His ardent support for the rebellion had intensified with the recent imprisonment by the British in New Jersey of his father-in-law, Richard Stockton, a fellow signer of the Declaration. “Every particle of my blood,” Rush wrote, “is electrified with revenge.”

Victory at Trenton revived his reputation and enhanced his stature. Odes would be penned in his honor, with such immortal couplets as “Washington, though least expected near, / Opened fire upon the Hessians’ rear.” As Dr. Rush had urged, in late December Congress granted the commanding general autocratic powers for six months to pay enlistment bounties, raise additional regiments, appoint all officers below the rank of general, confiscate provisions, and arrest those who refused Continental currency or “are otherwise disaffected to the American cause.” Rodney told his diary, “Gen’l. Washington is dictator.” As if reassuring itself, Congress declared that the commander in chief “can safely be entrusted with the most unlimited power.”

Certainly Washington’s eighteen months in command had brought bitter lessons: that war was rarely linear, preferring a path of fits and starts, ups and downs, triumphs and cataclysms; that only battle could reveal those with the necessary dark heart for killing, years of killing; that only those with the requisite stamina, aptitude, and luck would be able to see it through; and finally—the hardest of war’s hard truths—that for a new nation to live, young men must die, often alone, usually in pain, and sometimes to no obvious purpose. He, more than anyone, would be responsible for ordering those men to their deaths.