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

by Rick Atkinson

The grand army under Washington had yet to fight a general action, but in the past year hundreds of American troops had died of disease, misadventure, or wounds incurred in various skirmishes, plus the thousands lost in Canada. What would casualties be like once the fighting began in earnest? Congress had made clear its determination to defend New York to the death; John Adams described the city as “a kind of key to the whole continent,” and Washington agreed it was “a post of infinite importance.” Should the British “get that town & the command of the North River,” he added, “they can stop the intercourse between the northern & southern colonies, upon which depends the safety of America.” By now he had sufficiently scouted the terrain—on Staten and Long Islands, and along the rivers—to confirm the difficulties that Charles Lee had identified when Washington sent him to oversee New York’s defenses in late winter. “What to do with the city, I own puzzles me,” General Lee had written him. “Whoever commands the sea must command the town.” The city of New York was set in an archipelago with almost eight hundred miles of waterfront, carved by the advance and retreat of glaciers fifty millennia earlier.