Before I was near the fort the British began to fire at it with a field piece with round shot, at the men who were standing in huddles between the fort and the lines within the abbitis that was round the fort. When I arrived at this work, I sat upon it looking at the enemy who were firing at us with the field piece and not more than four hundred yards of us, or from where I was then sitting, when at length a ball took off a part of two men’s heads and wounded another. I then went into the fort.
By one o’clock nearly all the defending force had been driven inside the fort, where there was scarcely room for them.
An hour or so later, the Hessian commander, Knyphausen, demanded surrender. Colonel Magaw said he needed time to decide, and asked for half an hour. General Howe arrived and ordered the Americans to surrender immediately, and with no terms other than a promise of their lives.
It was three o’clock when Magaw capitulated, and about four when the entire garrison of 2,837 Americans marched out of the fort between two lines of Hessians and lay down their arms.
IN A DISASTROUS CAMPAIGN for New York in which Washington’s army had suffered one humiliating, costly reverse after another, this, the surrender of Fort Washington on Saturday, November 16, was the most devastating blow of all, an utter catastrophe. The taking of more than a thousand American prisoners by the British at Brooklyn had been a dreadful loss. Now more than twice that number were marched off as prisoners, making a total loss from the two battles of nearly four thousand men—from an army already rapidly disintegrating from sickness and desertions and in desperate need of almost anyone fit enough to pick up a musket.
(As Frederick Mackenzie recorded, the British were astonished to find how many of the American prisoners were less than fifteen, or old men, all “indifferently clothed,” filthy, and without shoes. “Their odd figures frequently excited the laughter of our soldiers.”)
The crushing defeat at Fort Washington, the capture of its garrison, plus quantities of arms, tools, tents, blankets, and some 146 brass and iron cannon, had been accomplished by the British and Hessians in a matter of hours. And it need never have happened.
Fifty-nine Americans had been killed and 100 or more wounded. The British lost 28 killed and over 100 wounded. Hessian losses were heavier, 58 killed and more than 250 wounded.
Bad as it was, it could have been even worse. In the view of both General Grant and Colonel Mackenzie, an all-out slaughter of Americans had been avoided only because General Knyphausen stopped Colonel Rall and his Hessians from entering the fort. “They had been pretty well pelted [in the battle], were angry and would not have spared the Yankees,” Grant wrote. “The carnage would then have been dreadful,” wrote Mackenzie, “for the rebels were so numerous they had not room to defend themselves with effect, and so frightened they had not the power.”
What lay ahead of the Americans taken prisoner was a horror of another kind. Nearly all would be held captive in overcrowded, unheated barns and sheds, and on British prison ships in the harbor, where hundreds died of disease.
WASHINGTON IS SAID TO HAVE WEPT as he watched the tragedy unfold from across the river, and though this seems unlikely, given his well-documented imperturbability, he surely wept within his soul. He had faced ruin before, but never like this. To his brother Jack he would write, “I am wearied almost to death with the retrograde motions of things.”
Nathanael Greene, in an anguished letter to Henry Knox, said, “I feel mad, vexed, sick, and sorry. Never did I need the consoling voice of a friend more than now. Happy should I be to see you. This is a most terrible event. Its consequences are justly to be dreaded.”
Both Washington and Greene had been badly mistaken in their judgment. Both worried over what would become of their reputations. Indeed, it would be hard to say which of them was the most sensitive to what others thought of them, and criticism of both was to be severe, and especially among those who had been taken prisoner. Alexander Graydon, writing more than a generation later, could still barely contain his disdain for the decisions that had been made.
Most immediate and blistering was the reaction of Charles Lee. By his own account, Lee became so furious over the news of Fort Washington he tore out some of his hair. “I must entreat that you will keep what I say to yourself, but I foresaw, predicted, all that has happened,” Lee wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush, an influential member of Congress, who, Lee knew, would never keep it to himself. Lee claimed his last words to Washington were, “Draw off the garrison, or they will be lost.”
“Had I the powers, I could do you much good,” he told Rush not very subtly, “but I am sure you will never give any man the necessary power.”
“Oh, General,” Lee admonished Washington in a letter, “why would you be over-persuaded by men of inferior judgment to your own?”—thereby inviting the commander to blame it all on Nathanael Greene.
Washington had failed to override Greene’s judgment and make a clear decision of his own, and, as commander-in-chief, he was, of course, ultimately responsible. Greene’s responsibility for what happened ceased with Washington’s arrival at Fort Lee on November 13, three days before the attack. Washington never blamed himself for the loss of Fort Washington, but then he never openly blamed Greene either, which he could have. He said only that he had acted on the judgment of others.
Nor, importantly, did he fire Greene, or shuffle him off to some meaningless, out-of-the-way command. He undoubtedly thought less of the young general than he had before. Still, he knew Greene’s strengths. Only weeks before, Greene had demonstrated both rare foresight and a marked gift for organization when he recommended to Washington, and Washington agreed, that a series of supply depots be established across New Jersey, along what might, of necessity, become the army’s path of retreat, should the British make a drive toward Philadelphia.
Washington needed Greene. He knew that Greene, like Knox, would never give up, never walk away, any more than he would, or lose sight of what the war was about, any more than he would. Washington would repay loyalty with loyalty, and this, after so many bad decisions, was one of his wisest decisions ever.
Only one American hero was to emerge from what happened at Fort Washington. She was Margaret (“Molly”) Corbin, the wife of a Pennsylvania soldier, John Corbin, who had gone into battle at her husband’s side, and when he was killed, stepped into his place, to load and fire a cannon, until she fell wounded, nearly losing one arm. After the surrender, she was allowed by her captors to return home to Pennsylvania.
THE USUALLY UNHURRIED WILLIAM HOWE made his next move with hardly a pause. Three nights later, he sent 4,000 British and Hessian troops under the cover of darkness and drenching rain across the Hudson to land upstream from Fort Lee at a point called Closter. There, led by Cornwallis, they scaled the Palisades, climbing a steep, almost perpendicular footpath, and once on top, advanced on Fort Lee. It was a daring attack very like the one Howe himself, as a young officer, had led up the steep slopes of Quebec early on the morning of the British triumph there in the French and Indian War.
Warning of the attack reached Fort Lee in advance, possibly from a local farmer, possibly from a British deserter—accounts differ. Washington rushed to the scene from Hackensack and shouted orders to abandon the fort at once. Everything was to be left behind, guns, stores, hundreds of tents, even breakfast cooking on the fire. When the British arrived, they found the place deserted, but for a dozen men who had gotten into the rum supply and were all drunk.
Washington and his army fled in haste down the road and over the Hackensack River farther into New Jersey.
Chapter Seven
Darkest Hour
I hope this is the dark part of the night, which is generally just before day.
—General Nathanael Greene
I
THE RETREAT OF GEORGE WASHINGTON and his battered little army, southward across New Jersey, began the morning of November 21. They were headed for a crossing point called Acquackanonk on the Passaic River, five miles away,
retreat being their only choice and rivers offering the one possible defense against the oncoming foe in “dead flat” country, as Washington described it, with no stone walls. Once over the Passaic, they pushed on another twenty miles down the west bank of the river to the little port town of Newark.
Heavy rains had left the narrow road sloppy with mud, and the men were in tatters, many without shoes, their feet wrapped in rags. Washington rode at the rear of the column, a point long remembered by a newly arrived eighteen-year-old Virginia lieutenant named James Monroe. “I saw him…at the head of a small band, or rather in its rear, for he was always near the enemy, and his countenance and manner made an impression on me which I can never efface.”
By young Monroe’s estimate, Washington had at most 3,000 men, yet his expression gave no sign of worry. “A deportment so firm, so dignified, but yet so modest and composed, I have never seen in any other person.”
Washington had set the army on the road in the early morning but not before getting off an urgent request to General Lee at North Castle, New York, in which he had made his worries and troubles abundantly clear. The men were “broken and dispirited.” They had no tents, no baggage, no entrenching tools. (Every pick and shovel had been left behind at Fort Lee.) As things were, he dared not risk contact with the enemy, Washington wrote, and “so must leave a very fine country open to their ravages.”
He urged Lee to cross the Hudson with his brigades and join forces before it was too late. New Jersey was too rich a prize to give up without even the “appearance” of a fight. Were New Jersey to fall, it could have devastating effect on Pennsylvania.
To be certain Lee understood what he wanted, Washington said it again. “I would have you move over by the easiest and best [swiftest] passage.”
Yet it was a request only, not an order.
The letter had been dictated to Joseph Reed and sent off by express rider in a dispatch case into which Reed put a letter of his own to Lee. But of this Washington was told nothing.
Reed’s letter was a stunning indictment of Washington. At best, it could be taken as a desperate indiscretion; at worst, an underhanded act of betrayal.
His commander’s indecision over whether to abandon New York and again at Fort Washington had left Reed badly shaken. His confidence in Washington was shattered. But instead of confiding his feelings to Washington, he secretly poured them out to Lee, leaving no doubt as to who he thought should be leading the army in its hour of need.
He wished “most earnestly” to have Lee “where the principle scene of action is laid,” Reed wrote, seconding what Washington had said. Then, claiming he had no wish to flatter Lee, he went on to do just that and to make his main point.
I do not mean to flatter or praise you at the expense of any other, but I confess I do think it is entirely owing to you that this army, and the liberties of America, so far as they are dependent on it, are not totally cut off…. You have decision, a quality often wanted in minds otherwise valuable…. Oh! General, an indecisive mind is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall an army. How often have I lamented it this campaign. All circumstances considered, we are in a very awful and alarming situation—one that requires the utmost wisdom and firmness of mind. As soon as the season will admit, I think yourself and some others should go to Congress and form the plan of the new army.
Washington worried about the health of his men. He worried about rumors of a British invasion to the south of Newark at Perth Amboy, at the mouth of the Raritan River, where New Jersey and Staten Island were separated by only a narrow channel.
In less than two weeks, on December 1, the enlistments of 2,000 of his troops would be up, the men free to go. It was the same nightmare prospect he had faced at Boston exactly a year before, and with the misery of the men greater now than ever, and morale suffering, there seemed every chance that his army would evaporate before his eyes.
Privately, Washington talked with Reed about the possibility of retreating to western Pennsylvania if necessary. Reed thought that if eastern Pennsylvania were to give up, the rest of the state would follow. Washington is said to have passed his hand over his throat and remarked, “My neck does not feel as though it was made for a halter.” He talked of retreating to the mountains of Augusta County, in western Virginia. From there they could carry on a “predatory war,” Washington said. “And if over-powered, we must cross the Allegheny Mountains.” He knew, as the enemy had little idea, just how big a country it was.
The problem was not that there were too few American soldiers in the thirteen states. There were plenty, but the states were reluctant to send the troops they had to help fight the war, preferring to keep them close to home, and especially as the war was not going well. In August, Washington had had an army of 20,000. In the three months since, he had lost four battles—at Brooklyn, Kips Bay, White Plains, and Fort Washington—then gave up Fort Lee without a fight. His army now was divided as it had not been in August and, just as young Lieutenant Monroe had speculated, he had only about 3,500 troops under his personal command—that was all.
Desperate for help, he sent Reed off to Burlington, New Jersey, on the eastern bank of the Delaware River, upstream from Philadelphia, to impress upon the governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, the urgent need for reinforcements. As it was, New Jersey militia were not turning out in any numbers that could make a difference.
General Mifflin was dispatched on a similar mission to Philadelphia, to alert Congress to the “critical state of our affairs,” and do everything possible to round up Pennsylvania troops and send them on with all speed.
These were two critical undertakings, and in the choice of Reed, his closest confidant, and the very able Mifflin, the Philadelphian who had shown such valor in command of the rear guard at Brooklyn, Washington felt confident he was sending two of the best men he had, and that this would not be lost on any who listened to what they had to say.
The first report from Mifflin was bitterly disappointing. His fellow Pennsylvanians were “divided and lethargic,” Mifflin wrote, “slumbering under the shade of peace and in the full enjoyment of the sweets of commerce.” From Reed, Washington heard nothing.
IT RAINED HEAVILY on November 22, the day the army reached Newark, and rain fell through that night and again the next day. “The sufferings we endured are beyond description—no tent to cover us at night—exposed to cold and rains day and night,” one soldier would remember. Colonel Samuel Webb, writing at the time, said it was impossible to describe conditions as they were. “I can only say that no lads ever showed greater activity in retreating than we have…. Our soldiers are the best fellows in the world at this business.” Webb, who had only just recovered from wounds received at White Plains, served still on Washington’s staff.
But of greatest importance, as time would tell, was the impression made on Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense, who had recently volunteered to serve as a civilian aide on Greene’s staff. Greene, with his love of literature and political philosophy, had taken a great liking to the brilliant Paine, an impoverished English immigrant, who, like Greene, had been raised a Quaker, and whose pamphlet, Common Sense, since its appearance early in the year, had become more widely read than anything yet published in America. Greene called him Common Sense. (“Common Sense and Col. Snarl, or Cornell, are perpetually wrangling about mathematical problems,” Greene had reported to his wife during less troubled times before the fall of Fort Washington.)
Sick at heart over the suffering and despair he saw, but inspired by the undaunted resolution of many around him, Paine is said to have committed his thoughts to paper during the retreat, writing at night on a drumhead by the light of a campfire. He himself, however, said it was not until later, at Philadelphia, that in a “passion of patriotism,” he began what he called The Crisis, with its immortal opening lines:
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 t
heir country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
On November 24, Washington sent off another message to General Lee saying he must come by a “safe and secure route,” and asking that he bring a particular 24-pound cannon, “provided it can be done without great inconvenience.”
With Loyalists more prevalent in New Jersey than in any other of the thirteen states, and American deserters continuing to go over to the enemy, Washington’s plight was well known to the British command.
“The fact is,” wrote Lord Rawdon, “their army is broken all to pieces, and the spirit of their leaders and their abettors is all broken…. I think one may venture to pronounce that it is well nigh over with them.”
SINCE THE FALL of Fort Washington there had been a major shift in British plans. General Clinton was reassigned. He was to sail with an expedition of 6,000 troops to take Rhode Island, or more specifically Newport. For in the time when the fortunes of the rebel army were going steadily from bad to worse, rebel privateers off the New England coast had been attacking British supply ships with increasing success, and Admiral Lord Howe was in need of a secure, ice-free winter roadstead in the vicinity for some of his fleet.
Clinton thought ill of the Rhode Island expedition. He had argued that it be postponed and that instead he and his forces land at Perth Amboy and thus outflank and destroy the crippled rebels in one sweeping, concentrated effort before the onset of winter snow. Or, Clinton proposed, he could carry his attack directly to Philadelphia, by sailing up the Delaware. “This, in all probability,” he later wrote, “would have dispersed the Congress, and…deranged all their affairs.”
It was a critical moment in the management of the war, with Clinton and William Howe once more opposed on how best to proceed. Clinton continued to see Washington’s army as the heart of the rebellion, and the envelopment of the army, therefore, as the most expeditious strategy. Howe wanted to keep the Americans on the run, and continue to clear the board, so to speak—to clear New Jersey and Rhode Island of the rebel forces just as he had cleared New York, and by such conquests of vital territory bring the deluded American people and their political leaders to their senses and end their demonstrably futile rebellion.
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