Bangs, a Harvard graduate with training in medicine, had initiated his own tour of inspection out of concern for the health of his men—though also out of curiosity, as he conceded—and was appalled by what he saw.
“When I visited them [the prostitutes] at first I thought nothing could exceed them for impudence and immodesty, but I found the more I was acquainted with them the more they excelled in their brutality.” How any man could desire “intimate connection” with such “creatures” was more than he could comprehend. But so it was, and among officers and soldiers alike, “till the fatal disorder [syphilis] seized them.”
On April 22, less than a week after the Continental Army moved into the city, all hell erupted in the Holy Ground. The mutilated bodies of two soldiers were found concealed in a brothel. One of the victims had been “castrated in a barbarous manner,” as Bangs recorded. In furious retaliation, gangs of soldiers went on a rampage, tearing to pieces the building where the murders had taken place. Some days later, the remains of “an old whore” were discovered dumped in a privy, “so long dead that she was rotten,” as Bangs also recorded.
Washington condemned all such “riotous behavior.” Were it to happen again, the perpetrators would be subjected to the severest punishment. If they resisted arrest, they would be “treated as a common enemy,” meaning they would be shot dead on the spot.
He ordered a curfew and warned that any soldier found “disguised with liquor” would be punished. Still, it seems, business was business and not to be intruded upon. “Every brutal gratification can be so easily indulged in this place,” wrote William Tudor of Boston, Washington’s judge advocate, to his fiancée, “that the army will be debauched here in a month more than in twelve at Cambridge.”
The whores, the trulls, “these bitchfoxly, jades, hags, strums,” as wrote another officer, Colonel Loammi Baldwin, continued “their employ which is become very lucrative.” Baldwin, an apple grower from Massachusetts, was one of the officers dispatched to the Holy Ground with military patrols, under orders to deal only with drunken or unruly soldiers—“hell’s work,” as he said. Since almost no soldiers had uniforms, it was all but impossible to distinguish who among the drunks and brawlers were soldiers and who were not, in dark, shadowed streets lit only by dim oil lamps. Baldwin and his patrol broke up “knots of men and women” fighting, cursing, “crying ‘Murder!’ ” and “hurried them off to the Provost dungeon by half dozens.” Some were punished and some “got off clear—hell’s work.”
Meantime, the army was “growing sickly.” Smallpox appeared and several soldiers died. Frightful rumors swept through the city, including one that the British had returned to Boston and taken Dorchester Heights. With more bad news from Canada, Washington was directed by Congress to send reinforcements. When approximately 3,000 men under General Sullivan departed by ship up the Hudson, Washington informed Congress he had to have at least 10,000 more.
Drill went on in the streets and on the Commons. Work on defenses continued under steadily increasing pressure.
GENERAL LEE, considered an expert on defense, had concluded that without command of the sea New York could not be held. Still, as he had said, it could be an “advantageous” battlefield. If the British were determined to take the city, they could be made to pay a heavy toll.
Crucial to Lee’s plan was the defense of that part of Long Island directly across the East River and particularly the imposing river bluffs near the tiny hamlet called Brooklyn, which was also spelled Breucklyn, Brucklyn, Broucklyn, Brookland, or Brookline, and amounted to no more than seven or eight houses and an old Dutch church that stood in the middle of the Jamaica Road, the main road inland from the Brooklyn ferry landing.
From the New York side of the river, the village was out of sight, three-quarters of a mile back from the partly wooded “noble bluff” known as Columbia Heights or Brooklyn Heights. All one saw looking across from New York, as Washington frequently did, was the steep face of the bluff rising above the river and crowned now by the beginnings of Fort Stirling, and to the right, also on the brow of the bluff, the country house of Philip Livingston, a wealthy New York importer and delegate to the Continental Congress.
When finished, the large square bastion of Fort Stirling, mounting eight cannon, was expected to command the East River and New York just as Dorchester Heights commanded Boston and its harbor. From Brooklyn Heights one looked down on all of New York City, the harbor, the rivers, and the long, low hills of New Jersey beyond. It was one of the grandest panoramas to be seen on the entire Atlantic seaboard.
The East River, no river at all but a saltwater estuary nearly a mile wide, was famously difficult to navigate, with swift, contrary currents and tides of as much as six feet. Because of winds and tides, ferryboats to and from Brooklyn often had great difficulty. Even with three men pulling at the oars, crossing the river could take over an hour.
The Hudson, or North, River was greater still, more than two miles wide, and so, as Lee had acknowledged, impossible to keep closed to the enemy. But with batteries along the New York shore of the Hudson, the British might think twice before risking their valuable ships.
Washington agreed with the general outlines of the plan, including, most importantly, the premise that an effective defense of New York City would depend on the defense of Long Island. If New York was the key to the continent, then Long Island was the key to New York, and the key to the defense of Long Island was Brooklyn Heights. “For should the enemy take possession of N[ew] York when Long Island is in our hands,” Lee had written to Washington, “they will find it almost impossible to subsist.”
That New York or Long Island, or both, could be a trap, neither of them seems to have seriously considered, or at least acknowledged for the record.
Given the importance of Long Island, Washington put General Greene in command there, and by the first week of May, Greene and his men, with the addition of a Pennsylvania rifle company, were encamped at Brooklyn. In little time there were several thousand troops on Long Island—which seemed a great many, but were less than a third of those in and around New York—and their efforts began to show. As would be said, the experience at Boston had made them “veterans at least of the spade.”
In addition to Fort Stirling, three more forts were under construction on the other, or eastern, side of the hamlet of Brooklyn, these intended as a defense of Fort Stirling and Brooklyn Heights. If the British were to come ashore on the broad beaches to the west, in the vicinity of the village of Gravesend—as was widely expected—and attack from the open plains to the south, this line of defense would check their drive for the river.
To the left was Fort Putnam, named for Rufus Putnam, who marked out most of the fortifications. In the middle was star-shaped Fort Greene, mounting six cannon and commanding the Jamaica Road. On the right was Fort Box, named for one of Greene’s officers, Major Daniel Box.
Each of these bastions was to be surrounded with a broad ditch and all were to be connected by a line of entrenchments reaching a mile or more. With hundreds of axmen at work, trees were cut to give full sweep to the fire of the cannon, and along most of the line, pointed stakes—pickets—were driven into the ground. Farther still to the right, at an isolated point on the Upper Bay called Red Hook, a fifth defense, Fort Defiance, was being built. From Fort Putnam on the left to Fort Defiance on the right was nearly three miles.
As the days grew longer and steadily warmer, the hard labor continued with unrelenting determination. Any soldier caught leaving the works without proper liberty would do “constant duty” for a week, Greene warned. One Rhode Island officer riding herd on the men, Colonel Ezekiel Cornell, became known as “Old Snarl.”
Greene himself was tireless in his efforts. Nothing escaped his notice. He was everywhere on horseback surveying the work, or scouting the lay of the land, making himself familiar with the whole terrain from Brooklyn to Gravesend, and particularly the densely wooded ridge about a mile and a half to the south known
as the Heights of Gowan, which ran like a natural defense between the forts and the broad flatlands to the south.
Earthworks and gun emplacements were also under way on little Governor’s Island between the Heights and Red Hook, in the direct path of the entrance to the East River. “We have done a great deal,” Washington could claim in early May. “Governor’s Island has a large and strong work erected…. The point below (called Red Hook) has a small, but exceedingly strong barbette [mounted] battery—and several new works are constructed and many of them almost executed at other places.”
Barricades were thrown up within the city itself. In the words of a surviving British intelligence report, “every street facing both North and East Rivers has wooden trunks made across ten feet thick filled with earth, in order to intercept any troops that may attempt a landing.”
There were guns along the banks of the Hudson, heavy cannon at old Fort George by the Battery, and more at the Whitehall dock on the East River.
Henry Knox was proud to report that 120 cannon were in place in and about the city and this time ample ammunition was standing by. The one glaring problem was an acute shortage of artillerymen. Knowing how many soldiers in the ranks were without muskets or arms of any kind, Knox persuaded Washington to reassign five or six hundred of them to the artillery. Never mind that they were entirely inexperienced, almost any live body being preferable to nothing.
The daily labors of the artillerymen were hardly less wearisome than those of the troops digging trenches and throwing up earthworks, and potentially a great deal more dangerous, as the diary of the Massachusetts soldier Solomon Nash gives some suggestion.
Monday, May 13…Fetched one 32 pounder from the fort and placed it to the eastward of the grand battery…. Employed in piling up shot.
Thursday, May 16…Some of us employed…in firing our cannon with double charges in them to prove them and they all proved good but two. One of them split at the muzzle and the other at the grand battery burst all in pieces. One piece went 30 or 40 rods [about 200 yards] and fell upon a house…through the roof and all the floors to the last one, which hurt the house very much, but hurt nobody.
Wednesday, May 22…Employed in making cartridges….
Friday, May 31…Bigger part of our regiment employed in making cartridges. So ends this month.
In early June, Knox and Greene rode together to the rugged uppermost end of York Island to survey a craggy ridge 230 feet above the Hudson, the highest point on the island, as the site for still another major defense, and work soon commenced on what was to be called Fort Washington, intended to keep the British navy from coming up the river. Another fort, to be known as Fort Constitution, was also planned for the opposite side of the Hudson.
The friendship of Knox and Greene that had begun in Knox’s Boston bookshop continued to grow, as the two officers found themselves increasingly important in the overall command and nearly always in agreement on matters of consequence. In their admiration of and loyalty to Washington, they were of one heart and both had begun helping Washington in his dealings with Congress.
Greene, in a letter stressing the urgent need for more troops, told John Adams, head of the Board of War, that if Congress were to provide support for those soldiers maimed or killed that this in itself would increase enlistments and “inspire those engaged with as much courage as any measure that can be fixed upon.” He wrote, too, of the low morale among officers whose pay was not enough to defray even ordinary expenses. Good officers were “the very soul of an army,” Greene wrote. The Congress must not be overconfident. “The fate of war is very uncertain,” he warned.
Suppose this army should be defeated, two or three of the leading generals killed, our stores and magazines all lost, I would not be answerable for the consequences that such a stroke might produce in American politics.
At Adams’s request, Knox provided a list of recommended books on military matters, and in a letter to Adams of May 16, Knox expressed in the strongest terms his belief that it was time to declare American independence. Like Washington, like Greene—and like Adams—Knox longed ardently for a separation from Britain, and the sooner the better.
The future happiness or misery of a great proportion of the human race is at stake—and if we make a wrong choice, ourselves and our posterity must be wretched. Wrong choice! There can be but one choice consistent with the character of a people possessing the least degree of reason. And that is to separate—to separate from that people who from a total dissolution of virtue among them must be our enemies—an event which I de[v]outly pray may soon take place; and let it be as soon as may be.
As Martha Washington had joined the commander-in-chief in New York, so Lucy Knox and Caty Greene traveled from New England to be with their husbands, each young woman bringing an infant born within the year—little Lucy Knox and George Washington Greene. An undated invitation sent from Greene’s Long Island quarters that spring reads: “Gen Green[e] and Lady present their compliments to Col. Knox and his Lady and should be glad of their company tomorrow at dinner at 2 o’clock.”
II
THROUGH DAYS OF TOIL ON DEFENSES, through endless hours taken up with military routine, endless problems of supply and paperwork, and the innumerable day-to-day preoccupations of those trying to carry on with the little that remained of normal civilian life, the thought that the British could appear any time was seldom out of mind. Every soldier, every civilian, it seemed, had one eye cocked on the harbor for the first sign of British sails. Every waking day began with the thought that it could be the day.
Washington ordered a signal system set up between Long Island, Staten Island, and New York. On May 18 a rumor flew through the city that the British had been sighted off Sandy Hook in the Lower Bay, and though there was nothing to it, the story carried for days.
The number of sentries at gun emplacements was doubled. They were “not to suffer any person whatever…to go into the batteries at night,” Washington’s order read. “Nor is any person whatever, but generals or field officers of the army, and officers and men of the artillery who have real business there, to be permitted even in daytime.”
More orders followed. Soldiers were to “lay upon [sleep with] their arms and be ready to turn out at a minute’s notice.” To practice the use of their arms, they were each to fire at least two rounds, and practice moving rapidly from their camps into the trenches and fortifications, to become familiar with the ground they would have to cover when the attack came.
According to his own returns, Washington had 8,880 men at hand, 6,923 of whom were fit for duty. At the same time, he received reliable word that no fewer than 17,000 hired German troops were on the way to serve under the British command, and that the full enemy force could number as many as 30,000.
When Washington was called to Philadelphia to consult with Congress, arrangements were made for fast horses to be held ready at intervals along the road, so that if necessary he could get back to New York with “utmost expedition.” It was the first time Washington had left the army since taking command. No sooner had he departed, on May 21, leaving General Putnam in charge, than the rumor spread that he had gone to Philadelphia to resign his command. When he returned, on June 6, after an absence of two weeks, it was to a rousing welcome with drums rolling and five regiments parading.
“Through Broadway we marched, round the King’s statue,” wrote Lieutenant Bangs, jubilant, like all the army, at the commander’s presence among them once more.
There was further bleak news from Canada, including word that General John Thomas, who had been sent north with the expectation that he could set things straight there, had died of smallpox.
The one positive development for Washington was that during his stay in Philadelphia he had convinced Joseph Reed to rejoin the army, to serve as the army’s adjutant general—its administrative head—with the rank of colonel, in place of General Horatio Gates, who had been sent by Congress to see what he could do about Canada.
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sp; Reed returned full of misgivings. He questioned his fitness for the job—“It is so entirely out of my line,” he told his wife—and in a few days he was ready to quit again. But Washington’s faith in the gifted Reed, and his need for a confidant, were no less than ever. To Washington his return was a godsend.
SUDDENLY, with the impact of an explosion, news of a Loyalist plot to assassinate the commander-in-chief burst upon the city. A dozen men were arrested, including the mayor of New York, David Matthews, and two soldiers from Washington’s own Life Guard. The plot reportedly was to kill Washington and his officers the moment the British fleet appeared.
Patriot mobs took to the streets to hunt down Loyalists. Those they seized were beaten, tarred and feathered, burned with candles, or made “to ride the rail,” the cruel punishment whereby a man was forced to straddle a sharp fence rail held on the shoulders of two men, with other men on either side taking a grip on his legs to keep him straight, and thus the victim was paraded through the streets.
“Dear Brother,” a New Yorker named Peter Elting wrote approvingly on June 13, “We had some grand Tory rides in this city this week and in particular yesterday. Several of them were handled very roughly, being carried through the streets on rails, their clothes tore from their back and their bodies pretty well mingled with the dust.”
A local Moravian pastor, Ewald Shewkirk, writing in his diary of such “very unhappy and shocking scenes,” noted also, “Some of the generals, and especially Putnam, and their forces had enough to do to quell the riot and make the mob disperse.”
Washington shifted his headquarters to City Hall. Knox and his wife moved into No. 1 Broadway, while Martha Washington remained at the Mortier house beyond the city—all this apparently out of concern for Washington’s safety.
What was learned of the plot, in the course of a court-martial of the two soldiers from the Life Guard, was less sensational than first reported, but serious indeed, even if the evidence was thin. According to the accused themselves, the plan had been to recruit other soldiers to sabotage gun emplacements “when the fleet arrives,” in return for royal pardons and financial bonuses (“encouragement as to land and houses”). Besides the mayor, the others arrested and imprisoned included two doctors, a shoemaker, a tailor, a chandler, and a former schoolteacher. But only one of the soldiers was convicted, an English immigrant named Thomas Hickey, whose defense was that he had gotten involved only “for the sake of cheating Tories and getting some money from them.”
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