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October 25 - November 29, 2018
The real Revolution was so troubling and strange that once the struggle was over, a generation did its best to remove all traces of the truth. No one wanted to remember how after boldly declaring their independence they had so quickly lost their way; how patriotic zeal had lapsed into cynicism and self-interest; and how, just when all seemed lost, a traitor had saved them from themselves.
Without the discovery of Arnold’s treason in the fall of 1780, the American people might never have been forced to realize that the real threat to their liberties came not from without but from within.
Indeed, to insist that Washington could do no wrong is to deny him his greatest attribute: his extraordinary ability to learn and improve amid some of the most challenging circumstances a commander in chief has ever faced.
The danger was that the revolutionaries’ almost knee-jerk urge to undermine whoever was in charge would ultimately lead to anarchy.
Rather than the aristocratic buffoons and bloody hirelings of later American legend, Generals Howe, Clinton, Carleton, Cornwallis, and Burgoyne were bright, ambitious, and conflicted men forced to fight a people whom they considered to be their countrymen.
His sense of insecurity brought to a fever pitch after the debacle in the South, he did what Clinton did best: act so obnoxiously that even when he proposed the most logical move, those he was attempting to convince felt compelled to do the opposite.
Standing on the battlements of the fort that bore his name, Israel Putnam watched as the British grenadiers reluctantly gave up the attack. “General Howe,” he said, “is either our friend or no general.”
It was the brainchild of David Bushnell, a Yale graduate who during the Siege of Boston began to tinker with the idea of creating a craft equipped with an explosive device that he called a “torpedo” in reference to the torpedo fish, a type of ray capable of stunning its prey with an electric shock.
Rather than Washington and his army, it was the Howe brothers’ misguided obsession with reaching a peace accord that saved America in the summer of 1776.
of Harlem fourteen miles to the north of the city.
That didn’t prevent him from remaining hypersensitive to any slight, and like many honor-obsessed gentlemen in the eighteenth century he had challenged more than one man to a duel.
Arnold had a fatal tendency to criticize and even ridicule those with whom he disagreed.
Arnold had a talent for rubbing people the wrong way. And yet, if a soldier had served with him during one of his more heroic adventures, that soldier was likely to regard him as the most inspiring officer he had ever known.
By gaining what was known as the “weather gage,” the Americans would have the nautical equivalent of the fortified high ground the New Englanders had enjoyed at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
By taking the Inflexible out of the fight, Arnold had, in effect, rendered the four weeks spent building the three-masted ship a waste of the enemy’s time.
There was also a coldness about Arnold—an insensitivity to the cost of what he demanded of others.
But two weeks later, when Carleton ordered his troops back up the lake to St. Johns for the winter, Arnold could take consolation in knowing that no matter what the cost, he had done it—he had prevented the British from taking Fort Ticonderoga and continuing to Albany and, eventually, to New York.
Until the day the Delaware went from being a moat to being a bridge, there was nothing much for Howe to do but wait in his comfortable headquarters in New York, where his mistress, the blond and beautiful Elizabeth Lloyd Loring of Boston, was waiting for him.
Some later claimed that the Hessians had been hopelessly drunk after the Christmas celebrations of the night before, but as Greenwood and others testified, this was not the case. If any side indulged in alcohol, it was the Americans, who broke into the Hessian liquor supply and became raucously inebriated.
According to a recent intelligence report, the British had assigned Arnold “the character of a devilish fighting fellow.”
On one side were the New England radicals like John and Samuel Adams who had led the push for independence, with their native Massachusetts distinguishing itself as, in John Adams’s words, “the barometer at which every other [state] looks.”
The radicals turned a deaf ear to Washington’s insistence that creating a disciplined standing army was the only way to defeat the professionals of the British army, and they had little enthusiasm for finding a way to finance it. For
Washington had finally hit upon a way to win this seemingly
unwinnable war—not through military brilliance but by slowly and relentlessly wearing the enemy down.
A few days later, Congress refused to restore Benedict Arnold’s seniority, and on July 11 he submitted his resignation.
“Where a goat can go, a man can go, and where a man can go, he can drag a gun.”
In the days and years ahead, the death and scalping of Jane McCrea became a permanent fixture in the folklore of the Revolution.
Even more than their love of liberty, the New Englanders’ multigenerational fear of native peoples was what finally moved
them to rise up and extirpate a British army that had dared to reawaken this ancient source of terror, despair, and guilt.
Arnold might be vain, overly sensitive to a slight, and difficult to work with, but there were few officers in either the American or British army who possessed his talent for almost instantly assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy.
Desperate for reinforcements from the north to support the defense of Fort Mifflin and yet with no official word from Gates, Washington was reduced to sending his twenty-two-year-old aide Alexander Hamilton on a mission “to lay before [General Gates] the state of this army and the situation of the enemy and to point out to him the many happy consequences that will accrue from an immediate reinforcement being sent from the northern army.”
Hamilton took less than a week to make the grueling three-hundred-mile trip to Albany.
“Heaven has been determined to save your country; or a weak general and bad counselors would have ruined it.”
You are fighting for what you can never obtain, and we are defending what we never mean to part with.”
As Martin and the five hundred defenders of Fort Mifflin had learned firsthand, “great men get great praise, little men nothing.”
Of course, Gates’s newfound image as a warrior was based largely on what Benedict Arnold had been able to initiate offensively in spite of Gates’s preference for a purely defensive mode of war.
After the Battle of Brandywine, a British officer listed the nationality of the rebel prisoners. If this list is any indication, most of the soldiers in Washington’s army had been born not
in America but in England, Ireland, and Germany, with only 82 of the 315 prisoners (approximately 25 percent) listed as native born. This meant that while the vast majority of the country’s citizens stayed at home, the War for Independence was being waged, in large part, by newly arrived immigrants.
What the Gates faction did not know was that Washington had an extremely well-placed spy. One of the commander in chief’s aides was a twenty-three-year-old South Carolinian named John Laurens, whose father, Henry, happened to be the new president of the Continental Congress.
At the center of the talented group of young men who constituted Washington’s military family were John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton had grown up in poverty on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Laurens had grown up on his father’s rice plantation near Charleston, South Carolina. Both men were intimately familiar with African slavery and both believed that it was incompatible with the ideals of liberty and freedom for which they were fighting. For America to be truly free, slavery must come to an end, and Laurens believed he knew how it could one day come about.
With these men, John proposed to create a company of black soldiers that would test the efficacy of a bold new plan he had devised: to eradicate the institution of slavery by offering the promise of freedom to any enslaved man who was willing to serve in the Continental army for the duration of the war.
As difficult as it may be to believe today, Britain’s islands in the Caribbean were of considerably more economic importance in the eighteenth century than all thirteen American colonies combined.
Virtually every officer in the Continental army had reached the point where he had begun to wonder whether all the lost income and personal suffering had been worth it. Those
In the years to come, the woman artillerist whom Martin had seen on a hillside near the Monmouth Courthouse became the basis of the legend of Molly Pitcher.
What he chose not to reveal was that his help was contingent on his receiving half of whatever settlement came the Connecticut sailors’ way.
As Peggy Shippen could no doubt attest, the battle-scarred Benedict Arnold was sexy.
We are without Peggy’s own account of her courtship, but according to family tradition, as well as what we know of her future behavior, she was exceedingly high-strung (one friend described her as having “great sensibility”). At some point her father apparently responded to Arnold’s entreaties with an outright refusal. This seems to have triggered one of the histrionic displays of emotion for which Peggy later became well known and ultimately led, according to one account, to her father “reluctantly” giving his consent.
Passionate, excitable, and intelligent, they were kindred spirits in a world gone mad.
Arnold’s prior history of controversy was well known, and in retrospect Washington should never have made him military governor, a position that required personal skills that Arnold simply did not have.
He must do what he had always done: attack his enemies and redeem himself through a single, extraordinary act. At
