On days of “wet weather” and “very bad traveling,” recorded a soldier named Solomon Nash marching with a Massachusetts artillery company, they made only ten to fourteen miles, while moving ten brass field pieces.
Marching did not trouble him anything like he had expected, Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins wrote to his Sarah after a few days on the road.
I am willing to serve my country in the best way and manner that I am capable of, and as our enemy are gone from us, I expect I must follow them…. I would not be understood that I should choose to march, but as I am engaged in this glorious cause, I am will[ing] to go where I am called.
He had vowed to “march with cheerfulness,” and plainly the spirits of the whole army were greatly improved by being on the move and by the warm reception along the way.
“I am a good deal tired of marching,” he confessed after crossing into Connecticut, “though we get very good entertainment [hospitality] in general. People are very kind to us.” Like the majority of Massachusetts men, Hodgkins had never been so far from home.
Most of the regiments marched only as far as New London. From there they were to proceed by water down Long Island Sound, keeping close to the Connecticut shore to avoid enemy cruisers. But with movement of any kind subject always to the elements—and never more than by water—precious days were lost waiting for favorable winds. Or at great risk ships embarked in the teeth of foul weather. On April 11, Nathanael Greene and his brigade pushed off in a blinding snow squall. Four days later, with still no word from them, Washington, who was by then in New York, reported to Congress that he feared for their lives. As it was, Greene and his men did not reach New York until April 17.
By whatever means they traveled, all seemed to understand what lay ahead. They were going to meet the enemy on the field of battle for the first time. They were headed for “troble,” as Hodgkins wrote.
No one knew how many British there might be, yet few let that bother them. An enthusiastic new recruit in the Connecticut ranks, a farm boy named Joseph Plumb Martin, would recall, “I never spent a thought about numbers. The Americans were invincible in my opinion.”
As another soldier remembered, there was scarcely a militia man who did not think himself equal to two or three of the British.
APPRAISING THE SITUATION from his new headquarters at No. 1 Broadway, a magnificent town house just back from the Battery at the southernmost tip of New York, Washington had no illusions about the difficulties to be faced. He was gravely, realistically apprehensive about the magnitude of the enemy force en route. He fretted over when their ships might appear, and how, with no naval strength, to defend a city bounded by navigable rivers on two sides and a harbor of a size sufficient to accommodate the largest fleet imaginable.
New York was not at all like Boston, geographically, strategically, and in other ways. At Boston, Washington had known exactly where the enemy was, and who they were, and what was needed to contain them. At Boston the British had been largely at his mercy, and especially once winter set in. Here, with their overwhelming naval might and absolute control of the waters, they could strike at will and from almost any direction. The time and place of battle would be entirely their choice, and this was the worry overriding all others.
General Lee, after appraising the situation in February, had been extremely dubious. “What to do with the city? I own [it] puzzles me. It is so encircled with deep navigable water that whoever commands the sea must command the town,” he had succinctly summed up the situation.
Washington, however, expressed no such misgivings. He would later tell Congress he had not a doubt that he could defend the city, and he was eager to do so, for all his anxieties. New York had “vast importance,” he wrote, because control of its harbor could mean control of the Hudson River and thus the whole Hudson–Lake Champlain corridor north to Canada, which if seized by the enemy could isolate New England from the other colonies—which, in fact, was exactly the British intention.
But the decision to make a stand at New York was based more on Washington’s political judgment than on military strategy. It was his political sense that Congress and the patriots of New York expected every effort to be made to hold the city, and that anything less would have devastating political effect on the people at large and thus on the American cause, which Washington fervently hoped would soon become the cause of American independence.
Possibly he had discussed the subject of New York with members of Congress the previous year, before leaving to take command at Cambridge. And John Adams’s letter of January 6, describing New York as “a kind of key to the whole continent” and affirming that “no effort to secure it ought to be omitted,” was anything but ambiguous.
Still, Congress had issued no specific directive to defend the city. The decision was Washington’s alone and he promised unequivocally “to exert myself to the utmost to frustrate the designs of the enemy.”
At Boston, where the comparatively few Loyalists of Massachusetts had either fled the country or were bottled up with the British, there had never been a serious threat from “internal foes,” in Washington’s phrase. (The spy Benjamin Church had turned out to be an aberration.) In New York the atmosphere was entirely different. The city remained divided and tense. Loyalist, or Tory, sentiment, while less conspicuous than it had been, was widespread and ranged from the militant to the disaffected to those hesitant about declaring themselves patriots for a variety of reasons, trade and commerce not being the least of them.
Two-thirds of the property in New York belonged to Tories. The year before, in 1775, more than half the New York Chamber of Commerce were avowed Loyalists. When on a Sunday in January 1776 a prominent pastor, the Reverend John Rodgers, preached an impassioned sermon from the pulpit of the Presbyterian Church on Wall Street, exhorting young men to be brave and fight for the cause of their country, he was himself being notably brave in speaking out. “We are involved in the calamities of a civil war,” he had said, and so it felt in New York.
The city and Long Island would provide Washington with five regiments by summer and they would be led by officers bearing prominent names—Livingston, Fish, Roosevelt, Remsen, and Cowenhoven, among others—but the numbers of Loyalists still in the city were considerable, and they included men and women from all levels of society.
Across the East River on Long Island, in the villages and the rich outlying farmlands, where the population was still mostly Dutch, Loyalists were a decided majority. Staten Island, at the far end of the harbor, or the Upper Bay, was another Loyalist stronghold. Thus the potential for conspiracy, sabotage, or organized armed resistance was all too real. At the moment, armed Loyalist bands were in hiding in the swamps of Long Island, awaiting the chance to take action.
For months British warships, including the 64-gun Asia, had been a formidable presence, anchored in the Upper Bay, reminders that the city was entirely at their mercy. It was only on April 8, just a week before Washington’s arrival, that the Asia and its entourage withdrew to the outer approaches to the harbor beyond the Narrows, the water passage between Long Island and Staten Island. On board the King’s ship Duchess of Gordon, William Tryon, a seasoned soldier-politician who was the royal governor of New York, maintained a headquarters and was believed to be secretly directing Loyalist operations.
At Boston, Washington had benefited greatly from a steady supply of valuable intelligence coming out of the besieged town, while Howe had known little or nothing of Washington’s strengths or intentions. Here, with so much of the population still loyal to the king, the situation was the reverse.
Washington’s New England army was intact, to be sure—exhausted from its march, as he reported to Congress, but intact and in place. In addition, new battalions had arrived from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and still more were expected from Maryland and Delaware. All were urgently needed, but they also compounded the threat of regional animosity and discord, which Washington still feared might tear the army and the
country apart. “We have nothing, my dear sir, to depend upon, but the protection of a kind Providence and unanimity among ourselves,” he wrote to John Adams from his Broadway headquarters.
Furthermore, as he knew, discipline was hardly improved, and too many of the new troops were raw recruits as unruly as those of the summer before. Some who were lauded as shining examples of patriotism looked hardly fit for battle, like the Connecticut unit comprised entirely of “aged gentlemen.”
When they were ordered to New York [reads an old account] this company was the first that reached the place of rendezvous. They were twenty-four in number; and their united ages reached one thousand. They were all married men, and left behind a hundred and fifty-nine children and grandchildren.
Nor did the look and manner of Washington’s New England troops necessarily inspire confidence among those from other colonies. In the stilted phrasing of a young captain from Pennsylvania, Alexander Graydon, “The appearance of things was not much calculated to excite sanguine expectations in the mind of the sober observer.” To Graydon, who in what he wrote did little to conceal his feelings of superiority, the Yankees were a “miserably constituted,” “unwarlike” lot who did “not entirely come up to the ideas we had formed of the heroes of Lexington and Bunker Hill.” Most officers were still indistinguishable from their men. Deportment seemed altogether absent.
Not until the arrival of the men from Marblehead under Colonel John Glover did Captain Graydon see any New England troops that met his approval. “But even in this regiment,” he noted, “there were a number of Negroes, which to persons unaccustomed to such associations had a disagreeable, degrading effect.”
One further large and important difference between New York and the experience at Boston was also clear: this time there would be little call for councils of war to decide whether or not to fight.
WASHINGTON HAD ARRIVED in the city with no ceremony at midday, Saturday, April 13, and went directly to work at the Broadway headquarters. Some days later, after Martha Washington arrived, they would establish a country residence at a beautiful estate overlooking the Hudson River, the Abraham Mortier house (later known as Richmond Hill) two miles north, beyond the city limits.
But No. 1 Broadway remained the commander’s base of operations. Known also as the Kennedy Mansion, it was a famous New York landmark. It had been built a generation earlier by a Scottish immigrant and successful New York land speculator named Archibald Kennedy and had remained the home of a son, Captain Archibald Kennedy of the Royal Navy, until his recent departure for England. The house fronted on Bowling Green and was considered the height of elegance, with a grand stairway, a banquet hall, and a parlor fifty feet long. A garden to the rear reached down to the shore of the Hudson and from a rooftop platform and cupola, one could see for miles in every direction.
As at Cambridge, Washington insisted on having his military “family” in residence with him and thus on duty all the time.
Unfamiliar with the terrain, Washington set about inspecting the fortifications begun earlier by General Lee, works that had been subsequently carried on under General William Alexander of New Jersey, better known as Lord Stirling, after Congress sent Lee to take command in South Carolina. Lord Stirling was a rich, socially prominent, hard-driving, hard-drinking patriot who at age fifty-eight looked the part of commander and claimed his title as a Scottish earl through his father. The claim was questionable, but sincere on his part and generally accepted by his fellow officers and the troops he led. Washington thought well of him and with good reason.
Lee and Stirling had had too little time and too few troops to do the job. Men of the town had been pressed into labor, including large numbers of slaves, but this was hardly enough. “It will require at least eight thousand men to put this place in any posture of defense,” Stirling had stressed.
Washington found the defenses only about half done, and even with the troops he had, he knew more were needed. Crowding the streets of the city, the army seemed an overwhelming multitude. The soldiers themselves were emboldened by their numbers. But only half were fit for duty and Washington worried exceedingly over what the toll from disease would be with the return of warm weather, and from such dissipations as were now readily at hand. Washington had seen enough of New York on prior visits to dislike and distrust the city as the most sinful place in America, a not uncommon view.
Larger than Boston but smaller than Philadelphia, New York had a peacetime population of perhaps 20,000 people crowded into an area of less than a square mile, less than a tenth of the Island of Manhattan—or York Island, as it was then known—which from the Battery to its northern boundary at the Harlem River reached nearly eleven miles. That far larger stretch north of the city, known as the Outward, was a mix of woods, streams, marshes, and great rocky patches interspersed with a few small farms and large country estates, all the way to King’s Bridge, where a narrow wooden bridge over the Harlem connected the island to the mainland.
Normally it was a city of thriving commerce, shipbuilding, and seagoing trade, and with much to see and talk about. “The inhabitants are in general brisk and lively,” wrote one visitor. The women were “handsome,” he recorded—as did others new to the city—though, he added, “it rather hurts a European eye to see so many Negro slaves upon the streets.”
Broadway, straight and wide, was the grand thoroughfare lined with shade trees and fine houses and churches. Queen Street, close to the crowded East River wharves, was the bustling business center. City Hall stood on Wall Street, or “in” Wall Street, as people said.
Henry Knox, stopping at New York for the first time on his way to Ticonderoga in November, had admired the “principle streets much wider than ours” and brick houses “better built than in Boston.” New Yorkers, however, were another matter, as he reported to his adored Lucy:
The people—why the people are magnificent: in their carriages, which are numerous, in their house furniture, which is fine, in their pride and conceit, which are inimitable, in their profaneness, which is intolerable, in the want of principle, which is prevalent, in their Toryism, which is insufferable.
But the city had greatly changed. It had become an armed camp, and thousands of people—perhaps a third of the population—had fled, fearing it was soon to be the scene of terrible calamity. One would “think the city almost evacuated,” wrote a dispirited resident. Business was at a standstill.
Large numbers of troops were quartered in vacant buildings and many of the finest mansions. (“Oh, the houses of New York, if you could see the insides of them!” grieved another resident.) King’s College, west of the Commons, one of the largest, handsomest buildings in town, had been taken over as an army hospital, once the library books were removed, lest the soldiers burn them for fuel.
For the troops from New England a roof overhead of any kind seemed the height of luxury, and New York, however changed, a center of wonders. Joseph Hodgkins decided, “This city York exceeds all places that ever I saw,” though he found the living “excessive dear.”
“They have all the simplicity of ploughmen,” a New Yorker wrote of the Yankee soldiers. And according to one local paper, the New York Packet, they were unexpectedly well behaved, “their civility to the inhabitants very commendable.” They attended prayers “evening and morning regularly,” their officers setting the example, the paper noted. “On Lord’s day they attend public worship twice, and their deportment in the house of God is such as becomes the place.”
But an earnest young Presbyterian chaplain with the New Jersey troops, a graduate of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Philip Vickers Fithian, found the level of piety alarmingly below his expectations and worried what the consequences might be to the American cause of so many of all ranks so habitually taking the name of the Lord in vain. “But alas, swearing abounds, all classes swear,” he noted sadly.
Lieutenant Isaac Bangs of Massachusetts, who in his journal would provide one of the fullest accounts of unfolding ev
ents that spring and summer, wrote of his walking tours about town and such sights to be seen as the waterworks and the larger-than-life equestrian statue of King George III, which dominated Bowling Green in front of Washington’s headquarters. “The design was in imitation of one of the Roman emperors,” Bangs wrote. The King was represented “about a third larger than a natural man,” and both horse and rider were “neatly constructed of lead [and] gilt with gold,” and “raised on a pedestal of white marble” fifteen feet high.
With twenty or more churches of differing denominations to choose from (something unknown in Massachusetts), the lieutenant attended as many as possible—an “English” church (most likely Trinity Church on Broadway, which was Church of England), a Congregational meeting, a high Dutch church (probably Old Dutch Church on Garden Street), where only Dutch was spoken, and the city’s one synagogue, Shearith Israel, on Mill Street. He liked the Dutch church best, he decided, preferring the priest’s manifest piety to the “pomp” of the English church, though he understood not a word of the Dutch sermon. On a later Sunday he and a friend attended a Quaker meeting, but after sitting through two hours during which not a word was said, they happily repaired to a nearby tavern.
In his conscientious way, Bangs proceeded to investigate the darker side of city life that so worried his commander, embarking into the section called the Holy Ground, a foul slum and brothel district west of the Commons, much of which was owned by Trinity Church, hence the name. By some estimates as many as five hundred prostitutes plied their trade there. Robinson Street especially was notorious for its rough gin shops and bawdy houses. If there was trouble after dark in New York, it was nearly always in the Holy Ground.
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