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

by Rick Atkinson

Franklin shot back, “Forces have been sent out and towns have been burnt. We cannot now expect happiness under the domination of Great Britain. All former attachments have been obliterated.” Each colony had “gone completely through a revolution,” Adams added, stripping authority from the Crown and empowering Congress and local assemblies. There could be no return to the old imperial ways. Rutledge suggested that Britain seek alliances with the independent states “before anything is settled with other foreign powers,” a thinly veiled reference to American overtures to France.

Howe interrupted him. Britain did “not require unconditional submission,” he said. Dr. Franklin and his colleagues ought “not go away with such an idea.” Finding no agreement possible after three hours of palaver, Howe walked his guests back to his barge and watched impassively as they glided through late afternoon shadows toward the far shore. In a note to Washington a few hours later, Rutledge reported that “our conference with Lord Howe has been attended with no immediate advantage.” Adams wrote Abigail that Howe “is a well-bred man but his address is not so irresistible.… His head is rather confused, I think.” Franklin, ever the finger-drumming chess player, was thinking of his next move, and the moves after that. “We

With each passing day, New York felt less like a fortress and more like a trap to many American soldiers. They were “cooped up, or are in danger of being so, on this tongue of land where we ought never have been,” Colonel Joseph Reed, the adjutant general, told his wife, Esther, in early September. “We cannot stay, and yet we do not know how to go.… The motions of the enemy are very dark and mysterious.” A third of the army’s twenty-four thousand men were still sick. One camp emitted “a complication of stinks,” a visitor wrote. “The army here is numerous but ragged, dirty, sickly, and ill-disciplined.”

Just past the stroke of eleven, the cannonade began, broadside after broadside ripping from seventy carriage guns. Fieldpieces joined in from the far shore. After almost three weeks of inaction, General Howe’s troops bayed their approval. “The ships kept up a constant fire,” Captain Hamond of the Roebuck observed, “… making altogether the finest scene one has ever beheld.”

British officer reported that sixty surrendering Americans were bayoneted; that was doubtless an exaggeration, although some prisoners likely were executed and at least one severed rebel head was seen impaled on a pole.

A thousand yards to the northwest, Washington had raced seven miles from his new headquarters toward the sound of the guns. He now sat his horse on a farm lane edged with stone walls near the post road, conferring with Generals Putnam and Parsons about how to keep the British from pushing north. Hundreds of panting men, with muskets and without, rushed away from the East River. “Take the walls!” Washington shouted at them. “Take the corn field!” Some tried to form a hasty defensive line, but “in a most confused and disordered manner,” Parsons acknowledged. Many more scattered inland, glancing over their shoulders. One regimental commander, unable to turn his men, threatened to fire on them, to no avail. “The demons of fear and disorder seemed to take possession of all and everything,” Private Martin would write. “The ground was literally covered with arms, knapsacks, staves, coats, hats.”

shewed their men the example of running.” Other senior officers asserted that Washington, Putnam, and General Mifflin “caned and whipped” the men, or that the commanding general flung his hat to the ground in exasperation. Greene, who was not on the scene, reported that the enemy had closed within eighty yards before Washington—“so vexed at the infamous conduct of the troops that he sought death rather than life”—could be persuaded to quit the field.

General Howe came ashore at two p.m. and made his way inland to Inclenberg, a hilltop estate dotted with orchards and soaring hardwoods. Here Clinton had halted his grenadiers after severing the post road. He lacked field guns, and the commanding general’s written orders required him to protect the East River bridgehead before advancing. Had the regulars continued another mile or so to the Hudson, bisecting the island, Putnam’s division would have been trapped in lower Manhattan. Instead, Howe spent the next three hours bringing his second lift ashore—over six brigades with another 9,000 soldiers, plus artillery.

That respite was just long enough. An American column of 3,500 men snaked from the city at midafternoon on Sunday for the twelve-mile march along the Hudson toward Harlem Heights. Three British warships—Renown, Repulse, and Pearl—had hurried the evacuation by lobbing a few broadsides into the town. Dressed in a sleeveless waistcoat over a dirty shirt, Putnam rode up and down the line astride a wild-eyed, foaming horse, barking encouragement and urging speed. His new aide, Major Aaron Burr, galloped to a cantonment a mile above the city, persuaded the officers there that the risk of a running battle with the British was less than the risk of being trapped, then guided the men to safety. Left behind in New York were the entrenchments, redoubts, redans, and ditches built over the past eight months but now useless. Also abandoned was over half of Washington’s heavy artillery—sixty-four guns,

“They evacuated the city in the utmost precipitation,” a British captain wrote, “… taking nothing with them but their fears.” White flags sprouted from doorways and rooftops as a Hessian brigade swung south on the post road late in the afternoon. Marines came ashore by the Grand Battery, and the 22nd Foot patrolled the Bowery. On the northern cusp of the island, along the Harlem River, Continental sentries stood with bayonets fixed to keep deserters from bolting for New England. Only women and the very sick were permitted to pass, but “soon however a vast body collected, & the father of confusion himself could not have stirred a greater hubbub,” wrote Philip Vickers Fithian, a New Jersey chaplain. “Some swore. Some begged & pleaded. And some, like timorous children, cried.”

that Putnam had been captured, that Washington had lost an arm, that Colonel Knox was missing. The last was true until the artillery chief appeared on Harlem Heights to great huzzahs late on Sunday. He had seized a boat and escaped up the Hudson, forfeiting to the Hessians a baggage wagon with most of his wardrobe. In a letter to his brother he asked for a bolt of blue twill for a new uniform, or, if necessary, “brown cloth, superfine.” Despite the British success, he added defiantly, “I see nothing of the vast about them, either in their designs or execution. But good God, if they are little, thou knowest full well we are much less.… As the army now stands, it is only a receptacle for ragamuffins.” Teeming rain fell Sunday

“Nothing appeared but fright, disgrace, and confusion.” Others, like Chaplain Fithian, saw God’s vengeful hand. “We are a sinful nation, O Lord,” he acknowledged. “But is it written in thy book concerning us that we must always fly before our enemies?” Washington had lost another battle, most of another island, and his first city. American casualties in what he called “this disgraceful and dastardly” rout included about 50 killed and, according to a British tally, 371 captured. The prisoners were locked in Dutch and Presbyterian churches converted to jails. Jubilant loyalists sporting red ribbons emerged from New York cellars “like overjoyed Bedlamites,” Serle reported, welcoming their liberators with shouts of “God save the king!” It was said that the longer the ribbon, the more intense the loyalty. Captain Henry Duncan of the Eagle had his coxswain row him to a dock, where “I was met by a mob who gave me three cheers, took me on their shoulders, carried me to the governor’s fort, put me under the English colors now hoisted, and again gave me three cheers.” Governor William Tryon also came ashore for the first time in nearly a year to reclaim his colony. He was greeted by “a great concourse of people,” one diarist wrote. “Joy and gladness seemed to appear in all countenances.” Hundreds would sign a petition congratulating the Howe brothers. Many also endorsed a “declaration of dependence,” affirming their fealty to George III; displayed in Scott’s Tavern on Wall Street, i...

Monday, September 16, brought the rebels a modest measure of redemption and self-respect. Washington had planned three roughly parallel defensive lines north of the craggy Harlem Heights bluffs, with the new, pentagonal Fort Washington even farther up the island. About ten thousand fit-to-fight men crowded these wooded uplands, hacking at the ground with picks and spades; another six thousand occupied King’s Bridge and crossings into Westchester County.

Before first light, on Washington’s orders, a patrol of 120 men slipped below the lines through the thick forest fronting the Hudson. They were Rangers, a New England troop newly created for scouting and woodland skulking, modeled on a similar unit in the last French war. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Knowlton, the rangy, thirty-six-year-old Connecticut farmer celebrated for his rail-fence valor at Bunker Hill, led them south. At daybreak British pickets on the Bloomingdale road spied shadows darting through the trees. Shots flew back and forth. Four hundred regulars scampered up the road to confront the intruders until the Rangers rose from behind a stone wall and threw a scorching volley at fifty yards’ range. For half an hour the foes traded gunshots.

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.

No persuasive evidence ever emerged that the fires had been set deliberately. Those slain, given no opportunity to defend themselves legally, may have been fighting the blaze or fleeing for their lives. British authorities reportedly detained two hundred other suspects, but all were released despite rewards offered for incriminating testimony. Seven years later, a British commission failed to resolve whether the fire was accidental, deliberate, or a combination of both, although it was generally agreed that no American order led to the city’s burning. In September 1776, however, those about to spend the winter in a badly charred town believed the worst of the American high command. “Many circumstances lead to conjecture that Mr. Washington was privy to this villainous act, as he sent all the bells of the churches out of town, under pretense of casting them into cannon,” Tryon wrote Germain. General Howe added, “We have reason to suspect there are villains still lurking here, ready to finish the work they have begun.” Washington, for his part, believed the fire was serendipitous. “Had I been left to the dictates of my own judgment, New York should have been laid in ashes before I quitted it. To this end I applied to Congress, but was absolutely forbid,” he told his overseer at Mount Vernon. “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”

Curious regulars surely eyed Captain Montresor’s white marquee, where a young American officer captured out of uniform on Long Island now waited for the hangman to summon him to his death. At age twenty-one, Captain Nathan Hale deserved a longer life and a better fate. “He was calm,” Montresor later reported, “and bore himself with gentle dignity.” Born and raised in Connecticut, Hale was described by a fellow officer as having “very fair skin, blue eyes, flaxen or very light hair which was always kept short.… His bodily agility was remarkable.” At Yale, which he entered at fourteen, he was “as active as electric flame,” a classmate observed, a student of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, logic, rhetoric, metaphysics, ethics, and more. As a schoolmaster in New London, he taught thirty-two boys for an annual salary

In another week, Howe would offer full amnesty to all “deserters from His Majesty’s service” despite “the heinousness of their crimes.” But with his newly captured city in ashes, he was in no mood to forgive rebel iniquity. He ordered Hale remanded to the provost marshal for execution in the morning; Howe’s edict declared him to be “a spy for the enemy, by his own full confession.”

Much would be made of Hale’s last words, and admirers later credited him with a line paraphrased from Joseph Addison’s Cato, revered by republicans: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” More likely is Captain Mackenzie’s contemporary account that “he behaved with great composure and resolution … and desired the spectators to be at all times prepared to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.” Whether Hale was forced up a ladder and fitted with a noose dangling from a tree limb or hanged by having a cart drawn from under his feet, he departed this earth at eleven o’clock on a bright, hot morning. His corpse was left dangling for several days as a macabre warning, and above him British soldiers suspended the figure of a soldier painted on a board upon which they scribbled, “George Washington.”

Hale died, and the war went on. Today was more brutal than yesterday, and tomorrow would be worse still. Sensible men prepared to meet death in whatever shape it might appear. In a somber letter to a friend in Ireland, Lieutenant Cliffe of the 46th Foot described the fraught week in New York. “The horrors of a civil war are every day before my eyes,” he wrote. “I also saw a spy hanging up, a captain of the rebels, a very genteel-looking fellow, and Gen. Washington’s effigy hanging over him.” Then Cliffe averted his gaze and added: “I never saw a more beautiful country.”

Completely surrounding the Americans would require a military genius beyond William Howe’s capacity. Able, sensible, and often plodding, the British commander seemed unsure of his course even though he now had the whip hand in New York. “I look upon the further progress for the campaign to be rather precarious,” he had warned Germain in late September. A sally to Rhode Island to secure another winter port might be possible, but he expected no help this year from Carleton’s army in Canada; nor were great victories likely from his own legions. Washington’s position in Manhattan seemed too strong to attack frontally, and “innumerable

the Hudson showed the hazard of audacity, even if it discomfited the enemy. Howe continued: In my situation, I presume I must not risk, as a check at this time would be of infinite detriment to us.… I have not the smallest prospect of finishing the contest this campaign, nor until the rebels see preparations in the spring that may preclude all thoughts of further resistance. He closed by asking for another ten warships in early 1777, plus extra seamen. “We must also have recruits from Europe,” he added, “not finding the Americans disposed to serve with arms.”

Dispersing enemy armies was hardly equivalent to annihilating them. “I must not risk,” Howe had told London, and risk he would not. At three p.m. on Friday, October 11, his regiments began to strike their tents, limber their guns, and prepare for a modest flanking move to Frog’s Neck, a narrow peninsula jutting

“The Congress seems to stumble every step. I do not mean one or two of the cattle, but the whole stable.” Washington should threaten resignation, he added, “unless they refrain from unhinging the army by their absurd interference.” The ranks were thrilled to see him, and word of his arrival aroused “the universal satisfaction of the camp,” a New Jersey chaplain wrote. “We expect soon a stroke that will decide the victory of this campaign.” Lee promptly recognized that any such stroke likely would come from the enemy: Frog’s Neck could not long hold the British lion. He implored Washington to immediately withdraw into Westchester to avoid encirclement. The commander in chief listened attentively, appreciative as usual of Lee’s tactical advice. On Wednesday, he and fifteen of his generals gathered at Lee’s new headquarters to furiously debate the matter before voting almost unanimously to retreat north.

agreed—with Lee’s concurrence—to retain “as long as possible” a final Manhattan bastion at Fort Washington on the assumption that a couple thousand defenders could hold the high ground indefinitely or, if endangered, escape across the Hudson to New Jersey. Thirteen thousand American soldiers trudged north out of Manhattan and from around King’s Bridge in a slow, sinuous column along the west bank of the Bronx River.

Washington also reorganized his army into seven divisions: Lee took command of the largest unit, with the task of anchoring the left wing along Long Island Sound.

For ninety minutes Howe’s troops collected themselves before surging forward again, this time also pounding the American line with cannon fire. At fifty yards the 13th Continental rose again, and again lacerated the enemy as calmly as though shooting “at a flock of pigeons or ducks,” one witness said. After seven volleys, the regiment fell back, shoulders hunched and heads ducked low as they sprinted to the rear. This time when howling British and Hessian soldiers lunged forward, the 3rd Continental, hidden behind a double stone wall on the right, waited until the last instant, then stood and let fly.

There would not be another opportunity. Vaulting a wall at the head of his company, intent on closing with the enemy he despised, he was hit by bullets in the left arm, upper thigh, and right leg above the knee. A rebel musketman dashed forward to snatch his hat and canteen before Evelyn’s men could drag him out of range. More volleys swept back and forth, seventeen

But admonition and reprisal seemed to have little deterrent effect on the Germans. “They were unfortunately led to believe before they left the province of Hesse-Kassel that they were to come to America to establish their private fortunes,” Osborn wrote, “and hitherto they have certainly acted with that principle.” Ambrose Serle told his diary in October, “They spare nobody, but glean all away like an army of locusts.” The avowed British intent to restore order and protect loyal subjects had begun to ring hollow: winning hearts and minds, Howe and his lieutenants knew, was difficult when pockets and larders were pillaged. “The Hessians destroy all the fruits of the earth without regard to Loyalists or rebels,” wrote Major Kemble, the deputy adjutant general, “the property of both being equally pretty to them.” He added, “No wonder if the country people refuse to join us.”

For more than a week, indulged by Howe’s deliberate advance, the Americans had convened at White Plains. The village here consisted of two churches, two taverns, a courthouse, and seventy scattered houses.

“The scene was grand and solemn,” an American soldier later wrote. “All the adjacent hills smoked as though on fire, and bellowed and trembled with a perpetual cannonade.… Fences and walls were knocked down and torn to pieces.” Brush fires scorched the soles of Hessian shoes; Heister’s troops held their cartridge boxes above the flames as they pressed up the slope. A two-gun American battery—possibly commanded by young Hamilton—threw a few answering rounds until an enemy cannonball struck one carriage “and scattered the shot about, a wad of tow blazing in the middle,” Haslet reported. “The artillerymen fled.” Private Elisha Bostwick from Connecticut later wrote: A cannonball cut down Lt. Young’s platoon, which was next to that of mine. The ball first took the head of Smith, a stout, heavy man, & dashed it open; then it took off Chilson’s arm … then took Taylor across the bowels. It then struck Sergeant Garret of our company on the hip [and] took off the point of the hip bone. By midafternoon, blue-coated Hessians had emerged from the smoke to form a skirmish line on Chatterton’s southwest brow. The rebel militia promptly bolted again, unhinging McDougall’s right flank.

Even if Howe had ceded the ground at White Plains, the battle hardly felt like a triumph of American arms. “Our generals showed not equal judgment to that of the enemy,” a Maryland lieutenant complained. Yet Washington’s generalship had been creditable enough, given his determination to sidestep pitched brawls he was unlikely to win. Though he had again misread the terrain, he made amends, fought hard for a few hours, then slipped away when necessary. Howe would claim that the American casualties amounted to “not less than 250,” though they likely were closer to 175. British and Hessian casualties totaled 254, including severe losses in the 35th Foot,

As the November days grew shorter and the November nights colder, an unaccountable buoyancy could still be found in rebel ranks despite the perpetual retreat. “The army are no ways disheartened,” a young artillery lieutenant named Samuel Shaw wrote his parents near Boston. “We seem pretty generally to believe we shall beat them at last.”

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

he was called to arms. Joining the Kentish Guards militia, a smart outfit with red jackets trimmed in green, he had failed to win a lieutenancy because of a chronic limp that supposedly disfigured the company’s march order. “I feel more mortification than resentment,” he wrote. Eight months later, in May 1775, the Rhode Island Assembly promoted Private Greene to General Greene, no doubt influenced by his family and personal connections but perhaps also sensing martial potential. His commission commanded him to “resist, expel, kill, and destroy.”

wrote Private John Adlum, age seventeen. Two Pennsylvania regiments in the garrison, the 3rd and 5th Continentals, were badly weakened by sickness, shrinking from more than a thousand men in June to barely four hundred in mid-November. Even the healthy were enfeebled by months of drudgery, “at once so thankless and preposterous,”

By the mid-eighteenth century, military engineers had developed principles for constructing forts, from the number of men needed to defend each bastion—a thousand or so—to the number of cannons per bastion—a dozen or so—to the need for cavalry sorties and water cisterns. For a typical six-week siege, a hundred tons of powder might be required. When hard-pressed by attackers, a recent British field manual advised, “engines may be contrived to fling heavy stones … or to blow dust or sand in their faces,” much as besieged Tyre had flung heated sand at Alexander’s shock troops, or Hannibal in a sea battle had heaved pots filled with snakes onto enemy ships. Fort Washington violated virtually all of these precepts and precautions. Worse, the British high command knew with precision the weaknesses of both their opponents and the citadel.

Haverstraw to ride south into New Jersey with two thousand men. Jumping the Hudson had required a circuitous march of more than sixty miles, because once again the Royal Navy had run the river gantlet and had eyes on the ferry crossings farther south. During the sortie upriver, the frigate Pearl and two victuallers had provoked sixty rounds from Magaw’s gunners, some of which struck home with the usual perforated sails, splintered oak, and a busted mizzenmast. But now the vessels sat anchored off Dobbs Ferry.

He still suspected that the enemy intended to lunge through New Jersey toward Philadelphia. It seems to be generally believed on all hands that the investing of Fort Washington is one object they have in view. But that can employ but a small part of their force. Whether they intend a southern expedition must be determined by time. To me there appears a probability of it.

After marching with his main army from Dobbs Ferry to King’s Bridge on Tuesday, November 12, Howe completed his battle plan: four commands with thirteen thousand men, including twenty Hessian regiments, would converge on Fort Washington like fingers clenching into a fist. On Thursday night, thirty flatboats rowed undetected up the Hudson’s east bank, past the citadel and into Spuyten Duyvil Creek to the Harlem River, where they prepared to load seventeen hundred assault troops.

At one p.m. on Friday, November 15, a mounted British officer carrying a white flag trotted from King’s Bridge up the steep, dusty ramp to Fort Washington. Lieutenant Colonel James Patterson, Howe’s adjutant general, carried a simple ultimatum, which he handed to the American officer sent to intercept him: the rebel garrison was to surrender within two hours or every man would be put to the sword. Magaw, whose headquarters was in the Morris house, scribbled a defiant reply—“Actuated by the most glorious cause that mankind ever fought in, I am determined to defend the post to the very last extremity”—then sent a courier across the Hudson with copies of this correspondence for Greene and a request for advice.

He was in the barge again with Greene and Putnam at dawn. As the sun peeped above Manhattan at seven a.m. on this bright, fair Saturday, the first booming could be heard from British cannons on the Harlem River and from the Pearl, which had edged down the Hudson to bombard an American redoubt fifteen hundred yards north of the citadel.

Dead Germans tumbled down the slope. A chaplain described seeing a green-coated Jäger “shot through the head. His brother stood over the body, complaining that he could not be buried. Another Jäger had both eyes shot out. He still lived.” The struggle was particularly vicious around a three-gun battery on the upper tip of the American defenses near Spuyten Duyvil Creek, where Lieutenant Colonel Moses Rawlings and several hundred Maryland and Virginia riflemen fought with what Washington later called “veteran bravery.”

On the far side of the battlefield, in the south, General Percy accompanied by Admiral Howe led 4,200 British and German troops against 800 defenders. After pushing up from Harlem Heights and waiting for Highlanders to sweep past the Morris estate, Percy’s wing surged ahead

The commander in chief demands an immediate & categorical answer to his second summons of Fort Washington. The garrison must immediately surrender prisoners of war, and give up all their arms, ammunition, & stores of every kind. The general is pleased to allow the garrison to keep possession of their baggage, and the officers to have their swords. Magaw asked for four hours to deliberate; he was given thirty minutes. The Hessian captain later said of the American colonel, “His fate seemed hard to him.” Men wept and cursed and hung out white flags as word of the capitulation spread.

Americans showed abject submission. Men pleaded for water, for mercy, for treatment of their wounds. Dusk sifted over the forlorn citadel, to be known henceforth as Fort Knyphausen and not to be repossessed by the Americans for more than seven years.

Howe’s losses on November 16 were substantial: 458 casualties, including 77 killed in action, more than two-thirds of them German. Of the British dead, half belonged to the Black Watch.

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.

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 fatal.

the disaster aggravated regional enmities. Captain Graydon, like other Pennsylvanians, believed that Greene, the Rhode Islander, would not have exposed three thousand New Englanders to such peril. Much of the army was stupefied by this latest defeat. “I found myself as unable to preach as they were to hear,” a New Jersey chaplain advised his diary.