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

by Rick Atkinson

mother country. Almost imperceptibly, a quarrel over taxes

flagrante delicto

General Gage. One of his lieutenants had

April, some 1,778 firelocks had been handed over, plus 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 ancient blunderbusses. Gage insisted that swords also be added to the pile. “Nearly half the inhabitants have left the town already,” the merchant John Andrews wrote a friend on May 6. “You see parents that are lucky enough to procure papers, with bundles in one hand and a string of children in the other, wandering out of town … not knowing where they’ll go.” Provisions grew short, prices soared, fresh food vanished. “Pork and beans one day,” Andrews wrote, “and beans and pork another.” Loyalists from the countryside slipped

fashioned from blankets and muskets. On their heels came not only Pigot’s regiments but Howe’s regular regiments

showing that more British officers died at Bunker Hill than

it,” Walpole wrote, “but liked

the

tractable, Clinton had agreed to venture farther south, writing Howe

chicane.” Yet the expedition sailed off with several convictions oddly intact, including the certainty that a faithful multitude of southern loyalists still awaited liberation and that

Rogue’s March,” the severed head was first wheeled in a barrow to the Mortier house, then impaled on a spike outside the Blue Bell Tavern.

nostrums. Many required new musket cartridges;

countermarched. Garbled shouts could be heard, and a few random shots echoed along the dense green face of the ridgeline. The commanding general turned his horse and headed back to the Brooklyn ferry. After returning to his headquarters, he would set aside the cares of this day by devoting a few minutes to Mount Vernon. In an eight-paragraph note to his overseer, Washington offered advice on where best to sell flour, when to plant new trees, and how to find nails to renovate the north end of the house. As for his British enemies here in New York, he confessed before closing the letter, “What their real design is, I know not.”

drew his sermon from the twelfth chapter of Jeremiah: “And it shall come to pass, after I have plucked them out, I will return and have compassion on them.” 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,

how best to quell the American insurgency. “They

downstream, then scrambled up the lower slopes

guns