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July 21 - September 4, 2023
and the 22-sail convoy that appeared on August 4 after a four-month voyage from the river Clyde carrying three thousand Highlanders, including the 42nd Regiment of Foot in feathered bonnets and the dark tartan kilts that had inspired the regimental nickname, “the Black Watch.”
Nearly thirty thousand Hessians would be hired to fight in America, where a quarter of them were destined to die; many more would desert or be captured, and barely half would see their fatherland again.
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.
“After a few beatings, the people will begin to return to their senses,” another officer predicted, “… wearied with disorder and panting after the sweets of peace.”
The shots echoed and reechoed, like the sound of doom. The catastrophe had begun.
Washington had watched the final struggle from the crown of Cobble Hill, a conical elevation where a four-gun battery had been emplaced a mile northwest of the Vechte house. “Great God!” he was quoted as muttering. “What must my brave boys suffer today?”
No battle in the eight-year war would be larger in the number of combatants—more than forty thousand, naval forces included—and few would be more lopsided.
For the Americans, defeat brought despondency and exhaustion.
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.
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.
The last boats could be dimly seen gliding through the gray mist toward Manhattan. One of them carried General Washington. British horsemen galloped to a hill above the river and fired a few carbine rounds. They hit nothing but fog.
Franklin agreed that “the conversation might be held as amongst friends.” Adams quipped that the admiral could consider him “in any character which would be agreeable to your lordship except that of a British subject.”
Howe’s large brown eyes grew solemn. “If America should fall,” he said, “I should feel and lament it like the loss of a brother.” “My lord,” Franklin replied, with a nod and a droll smile, “we will do our utmost endeavors to save your lordship that mortification.”
“I could wish the transactions of this day blotted out of the annals of America,” Colonel William Smallwood of Maryland wrote. “Nothing appeared but fright, disgrace, and confusion.”
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.”
In late August, Hannah Arnold, who was raising her brother Benedict’s three young sons, had written him from New Haven that she hoped “you may again in peace sit down under your own vine and fig, and none make you afraid. The little boys are well.”
One by one the thirteen surviving boats slid past the enemy, oars muffled with rags, the wounded draped in blankets to smother their moans. British voices could be heard on the water, between the hammer blows of carpenters repairing battle damage. Washington and Congress brought up the rear. Arnold hardly dared draw breath at the rail, a bright-eyed raven on this raven night.
From the quarterdeck, Arnold “roared derision at the British when they missed and doffed his battered hat to the enemy in recognition of a fair hit,” the historian Harrison Bird later wrote.
“It has pleased providence to preserve General Arnold. Few men ever met with so many hair-breadth escapes in so short a space of time.”
Many feared they had won a tactical victory while frittering away the strategic advantage; the four weeks Carleton spent building Inflexible likely cost Britain a year, although Captain Douglas asserted that the vessel had provided the margin of victory in commanding the lake.
This year it had been Benedict Arnold’s turn. “No man ever maneuvered with more dexterity, fought with more bravery, or retreated with more firmness,” declared James Thacher, an American army physician. Upon Britain’s retraction into Canada—“of as great consequence as if they had been defeated,” in Brigadier General Arthur St. Clair’s assessment—Arnold promptly headed south with reinforcements for General Washington.
Once again he had demonstrated that he was the most competent battle commander in an American uniform, and perhaps the finest combat officer for either side, able to lead other men through peril, on land or otherwise, with ferocity, prudence, judgment, luck, and an implacable will.
A badly paid soldier could not be expected to “ruin himself and his family to serve his country,” Washington wrote. “Something is due to the man who puts his life in his hand, hazards his health, & forsakes the sweets of domestic enjoyment.”
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.
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.
For Washington, the losses were frightful: 59 killed, 96 wounded, and 2,830 taken prisoner, including 230 officers. The Americans had also lost 2,800 muskets, 41 guns, and heaps of salt meat, potatoes, and other provisions.
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 New York campaign had ended, miserably, and New Jersey’s miseries had begun. Washington and his generals had nearly lost the war several times in the past three months, through miscalculation, misfortune, imprudence, and deficient military skills.
“I firmly believe if heaven had not something very great in store for America, we should ere this have been a ruined people,” wrote Lieutenant Shaw, the artilleryman.
Behind them remained hundreds of dead comrades, thousands more taken prisoner, and tens of thousands of countrymen left to the mercy of an occupying army. Yet for all the misfortune of the recent weeks, for all the heartbreak and exhaustion, a flame still burned in these few as they tramped deeper into New Jersey.
Not all were what they seemed. A twenty-two-year-old named Pierre Charles L’Enfant was said to be a lieutenant of engineers, but in fact he had studied art and architecture in Paris, at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture; one day he would design the new capital of Washington, D.C.
Here, in French eyes, stood Rousseau’s natural, uncorrupted man, an antique sage from the American Eden, emblematic of simplicity, austerity, and honesty.
Thomas Paine had failed at everything he ever attempted in Britain: shopkeeping, teaching, tax collecting (twice), and marriage (also twice).
Their captain, later described by another officer as “a mere stripling, small, slender, almost delicate … with a cocked hat pulled down over his eyes,” danced from gun to gun, occasionally patting a barrel “as if it were a favorite horse.” Captain Alexander Hamilton, the son of a wandering Scottish wastrel and a sugar islands harlot jailed for adultery, had escaped a dreary St. Croix boyhood when benefactors sent him to New York for an education. “I wish there was a war,” Hamilton had written as an ambitious teenager. Now he had his wish.
The British, after all, had to win the war; the Americans only had to avoid losing it.
As Alexander Hamilton would later observe, Charles Lee had the preposterous notion that he was a great man. For two years he had served the patriot cause creditably by demanding discipline in the ranks and lauding the combat prowess of American soldiers against their British enemies. But he was fickle, disloyal, intemperate, and incautious—and now these defects brought him low.
Or it had been: on Monday, December 23, Colonel Carl Emil Ulrich von Donop led his brigade on a pointless chase after several hundred rebel raiders near Mount Holly, a dozen miles farther south, determined to “get rid of these troublesome guests.”
As he stood to leave, the doctor picked up a scrap of paper that had fallen to the floor. On it Washington had scribbled the evening’s watchwords for his sentries: “Victory or Death.”
If every nerve is not strained to recruit the new army with all possible expedition, I think the game is pretty near up.”
“I cannot desert a man—& it would certainly be a desertion in a court of honor—who has deserted everything to defend his country.”
young Captain Hamilton dragged himself into the ranks from a Pennsylvania farm where he had convalesced after what he called a “long and severe” illness. His artillery company, reduced to thirty men with two guns, joined Stirling’s brigade.
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country. But he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
“Press on. Press on, boys!” Washington urged, trotting along the line and at one point grabbing his horse’s mane to avoid being thrown when his mount slipped.
In half a morning, Howe had lost almost a thousand of his fourteen thousand men in New Jersey.
Soon beguiled by this new world, many Hessians eventually chose not to return home.
“The country,” one biographer would write, “awakened to the belief that its general was a genius.” If that judgment proved premature, victory made a bold, resolute man bolder and even more hell-bent. Washington, a Hessian conceded, was without doubt “a very good rebel.”
“I am up very early this morning to dispatch a supply of fifty thousand dollars to your Excellency,” he wrote, adding, “The year 1776 is over. I am heartily glad of it & hope you nor America will ever be plagued with such another.”
Our army raised a shout, and such a shout I never since heard,” an American militiaman said. “They shouted as one man.”
Inspiration is rare enough in the tumult of battle, and genius rarer still. But as Washington listened to his lieutenants discussing their predicament, he abruptly saw with preternatural clarity a stratagem as bold as crossing the Delaware on Christmas night: the army would pivot east, looping into Cornwallis’s rear at Princeton before marching north toward the British logistics compound at New Brunswick.
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.
