999 “bag him”: Franklin Wickwire and Mary Wickwire, Cornwallis: The American Adventure (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 96.
1000 “We…durst not attack them”: Archibald Robertson, Archibald Robertson, Harry Miller Lydenberg, ed. (New York: New York Public Library, 1930), 119.
1001 “They could not possibly suppose”: Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, January 7, 1777, NYHS.
1002 “I shall never forget”: George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Those Who Fought and Lived It (New York: Da Capo Press, 1957), 219.
1003 “Parade with us”: Alfred Hoyt Bill, The Campaign of Princeton: 1776–1777 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 108.
1004 “A resolution was taken”: David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 336.
1005 “It’s a fine fox chase”: Alfred Hoyt Bill, The Campaign of Princeton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), 110.
1006 “by aiming at too much”: George Washington to John Hancock, January 5, 1777, in PGW, VII, 523.
1007 “If there are spots”: Douglass Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, IV (New York: Scribner, 1951), 359.
1008 “The two late actions”: Nathanael Greene to Thomas Paine, January 9, 1777, in PNG, II, 3.
1009 “the fashion in this army”: Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six: I (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 524.
1010 “I am apt to think”: L. H. Butterfield, Adams Family Correspondence, II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 151.
1011 “The energetic operation”: Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, I (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1989), 195.
1012 “Nothing could have afforded me”: William Cobbett. The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, XVIII (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), 1366–1368.
1013 “disagreeable”: London General Evening Post, March 4, 1777.
1014 Lord Germain saw at once: K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783, XIV (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1976), 46–47.
1015 “A people unused to restraint”: George Washington to Lord Stirling, January 19, 1977, in PGW, VIII, 110.
1016 “He will be the deliverer”: Nathanael Greene to James Varnum, September 7, 1781, in PNG, X, 36.
Bibliography
A Note on Sources
For a year of such momentous events and historic consequence as 1776, source material dating from the time is appropriately voluminous. The primary sources I have drawn on—the letters, diaries, memoirs, maps, orderly books, newspaper accounts, and the like—are listed in the bibliography. But those of the utmost importance have been the letters of George Washington, Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, Joseph Reed, and Joseph Hodgkins. That these men found the time, and energy, to write all that they did, given the circumstances, is a wonder, and ought to be acknowledged as another of their great services to their country. Washington, in the time covered by this narrative, from July of 1775 to the first week of 1777, wrote no fewer than 947 letters!
On the British side, the letters of the irrepressibly opinionated James Grant were also a particularly rich and welcome source. Privately held at Ballindalloch Castle in Scotland, the ancestral home of the Grants, the papers are now available on microfilm at the Library of Congress.
Of the more than seventy diaries I have consulted, much the most valuable have been those of Jabez Fitch, James Thacher, Philip V. Fithian, Ambrose Serle, Archibald Robertson, Frederick Mackenzie, and Johann Ewald. Of the memoirs, those of Alexander Graydon, Joseph Plumb Martin, and John Greenwood are outstanding.
I have drawn a great deal also from three of the earliest histories of the Revolutionary War, all published in the last decade of the eighteenth century, when memories were still relatively fresh and many of the principals were still alive. The History of the American Revolution by David Ramsay and The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America by William Gordon are both the works of Americans. (Ramsay was a physician from South Carolina; Gordon, a Massachusetts clergyman.) The third is the first full account by an Englishman and by someone who actually fought in the war: The History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War by Charles Stedman.
In addition, I have relied on a number of exceptional secondary works on the war overall: Angel in the Whirlwind by Benson Bobrick; The War for America, 1775–1783 by Piers Mackesy; The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff; A Revolutionary People at War by Charles Royster; and A People Numerous and Armed by John Shy.
Christopher Ward’s two-volume The War of the Revolution, published more than fifty years ago, remains an excellent military study. Don Higginbotham’s The War of American Independence is masterful, clear, and balanced. (Its bibliographical essay is especially valuable.) And the grand old multivolume classic, The American Revolution by Sir George Otto Trevelyan, first published in 1899, is a joy for the prose alone, but also filled with illuminating observations and details to be found almost nowhere else.
Of the books on the war in 1776, four are first-rate and essential: Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer; 1776: Year of Illusions by Thomas Fleming; The Year That Tried Men’s Souls by Merritt Ierly; and The Winter Soldiers by Richard M. Ketchum. And four skillfully edited anthologies of the letters and reminiscences of many who played a part in the war, both American and British, have been mainstays: The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, in two volumes, edited by Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris; The Revolution Remembered, edited by John C. Dann; Rebels and Redcoats, edited by George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin; and Letters on the American Revolution, 1774–1776, edited by Margaret Wheeler Willard.
One of the early surprises of my research was to find how very much material there is on the Siege of Boston. (I could readily have focused on that alone.) Yet for some strange reason, it is a subject that has been largely overlooked by historians for years. The one book of consequence, The First Year of the American Revolution by Allen French, was published in 1934. But it is an expert study, and in combination with Mr. French’s extensive notes, on file at the Massachusetts Historical Society, it has been invaluable.
For the war in New York, the best accounts are Under the Guns and Battle for Manhattan, both by Bruce Bliven, Jr.; The Battle of Long Island by Eric I. Manders; The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776 by John J. Gallagher; and The Battle for New York by Barnet Schecter. The earliest scholarly work, The Campaign of 1776 Around New York and Brooklyn, written by Henry P. Johnston and published by the Long Island Historical Society in 1878, has been indispensable.
The best study of the Siege of Fort Washington is “Toward Disaster at Fort Washington,” by William Paul Deary, an unpublished dissertation submitted to the Columbian School of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University, in 1996.
Of the books devoted to the campaign in New Jersey, I have drawn from the first serious work on the subject, William S. Stryker’s Battles of Trenton and Princeton, published in 1898, as well as Arthur S. Lefkowitz’s more concise The Long Retreat, published in 1998; The Campaign of Princeton, 1776–1777 by Alfred Hoyt Bill; and The Day Is Ours by William M. Dwyer.
The biographies that have been of continuous value throughout my work include first and foremost Douglas Southall Freeman’s George Washington, and especially volumes III and IV. Though a bit old-fashioned in manner, Freeman’s Washington still stands second only to The Papers of George Washington in its comprehensive treatment of Washington’s leading part in the war and in its plenitude of exceptional footnotes.
Other biographies repeatedly consulted are George III: A Personal History by Christopher Hibbert; Theodore Thayer’s Nathanael Greene; The Life of Nathanael Greene by George Washington Greene; North Callahan’s Henry Knox; John Richard Alden’s General Cha
rles Lee; General John Glover and His Marblehead Mariners by George Athan Billias; William B. Willcox’s insightful study of Sir Henry Clinton, Portrait of a General; The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution by Ira D. Gruber; The Command of the Howe Brothers During the American Revolution by Troyer Steele Anderson; and Cornwallis: The American Adventure by Franklin and Mary Wickwire.
The American Rebellion, another mainstay, is Sir Henry Clinton’s own narrative of his campaigns, edited by William B. Willcox.
And, like all who write about the Revolutionary War, I am everlastingly indebted to The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909 by I. N. Phelps Stokes, American Archives by Peter Force, and the Encyclopedia of the American Revolution by Mark Mayo Boatner III.
I have, as well, referred repeatedly to portraits by John Trumbull, most of whose works are at the Yale University Art Gallery, and by Charles Willson Peale, particularly those at the National Independence Park in Philadelphia. In the works of these two great painters, both of whom served in the war, we see not only the faces of the protagonists on the American side but a delineation of character.
Finally, I must include five historic houses that figure in the story:
The old white-frame homestead at East Greenwich, Rhode Island, where Nathanael Greene was born and raised, still stands and still belongs to the Greene family. Its treasures include the cradle Nathanael Greene was rocked in, numbers of his books, and even the musket he bought from a British deserter before marching off to war. The handsome, foursquare house Greene built shortly before he was married also still stands at Covington, Rhode Island, near the site of his iron foundry.
Mount Vernon, Washington’s home in Virginia, is in many ways the autobiography that Washington never wrote, in all that it tells us about him. Then there are two that served as his headquarters during the course of 1776, the magnificent Longfellow House, as it has long been known, on Brattle Street in Cambridge, and the Morris-Jumel Mansion on Jumel Terrace in New York City, off 160th Street. With the exception of the Greene homestead at East Greenwich, all of these great houses are open to the public, and in their way their old walls can truly talk.
Manuscript Collections
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.
Newspaper, manuscript, and broadside collections
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia
Nathan Sellers Journal
Boston Public Library
Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Loftus Cliffe Papers
Henry Clinton Papers
James S. Schoff Revolutionary War Collection
Colonial Williamsburg Reference Library, Williamsburg, Va.
Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Mass.
John Winthrop Papers
Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Edward Hand Papers
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Peter Force Archives
Geography and Map Division
James Grant Papers
Consider Tiffany Papers
George Washington Papers
Longfellow House National Historic Site, Cambridge, Mass.
George Washington Papers and Park Service Archives
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston
John Adams Papers
Reverend Samuel Cooper Diary
Allen French Papers
Richard Frothingham Papers
Henry Knox Diary
Timothy Pickering Papers
Samuel Shaw Papers
William Tudor Papers
Lieutenant Richard Williams Papers
Hannah Winthrop and Mercy Warren Correspondence
Mount Vernon Department of Collections, Mount Vernon, Va.
Museum of the City of New York Archives
National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Revolutionary Pension Records
New-York Historical Society, New York City
William Alexander, Lord Stirling, Correspondence
Lachlan Campbell Journal
William Duer Papers
Nathan Eells Papers
Henry Knox Papers (Gilder-Lehrman Collection)
Alexander McDougall Papers
Solomon Nash Journal
Joseph Reed Papers
Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City
John Trumbull Papers
Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, London
Lord William Howe Papers
Loyalist Claims Records
Sir George Osborn Papers
Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence
Thomas Foster Papers
Nathanael Greene Papers
Captain Stephen Olney Papers
Society of Cincinnati, Washington, D.C.
Manuscript, Map, and Graphic Material Collections
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.
Books
Abbott, W. W., ed. The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series. Vol. I. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983.
Adair, Douglass, and John A. Schutz, eds. Peter Oliver’s “Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View.” San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1961.
Adams, Charles Francis, ed. The Works of John Adams. Vols. III, IX. Boston: Little, Brown, 1856.
Adams, Hannah. A Summary History of New-England: From the First Settlement at Plymouth to the Acceptance of the Federal Constitution, Comprehending a General Sketch of the American War. Dedham, Mass.: H. Mann & J. H. Adams, 1799.
Adams, Randolph G. Sir Henry Clinton Maps: British Headquarters Maps and Sketches. Ann Arbor, Mich.: William L. Clements Library, 1928.
Alden, John R. General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951.
———. A History of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1969.
The American Revolution in New York: Its Political, Social, and Economic Significance. (Prepared by the Division of Archives and History) Albany: University of the State of New York, 1926.
Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Anderson, Troyer Steele. The Command of the Howe Brothers During the American Revolution. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1936.
Andrews, John. History of the War with America, France, Spain, and Holland. Vol. II. London: John Fielding, 1785–1786.
The Annual Register; or, A View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1775. London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1776.
Arch, Nigel, and Joanna Marschner. Splendour at Court: Dressing for Royal Occasions Since 1700. London and Sydney: Unwin Hyman, 1987.
Atwood, Rodney. The Hessians: Mercenaries from Hessen-Kassel in the American Revolution. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Bailyn, Bernard. Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence. New York: Knopf, 1990.
Bakeless, John. Turncoats, Traitors, and Heroes. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1959.
Balch, Thomas, ed. Papers Relating Chiefly to the Maryland Line During the Revolution. Philadelphia: Printed for the Seventy-Six Society, 1857.
Bancroft, George. History of the United States. Vol. IX. Boston: Little, Brown, 1866.
Barck, Oscar Theodore, Jr. New York City During the War for Independence. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931.
Barnum, H. L. The Spy Unmasked; or, Memoirs of Enoch Crosby. Harrison, N.Y.: Harbor Hill Books, 1975.
Beatson, Robert. Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain from 1727 to 1783. Vol. VI. Boston: Gregg Press, 1972.
Becker, John. The Sexagenary; or, Reminiscences of the American Revolution. Albany, N.Y.: J. Munsell, 1866.
Berger, Joseph, and Dorothy Berger, eds. Diary of America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957.
Bill, Alfred Hoyt. The C
ampaign of Princeton: 1776–1777. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948.
Billias, George Athan. General John Glover and His Marblehead Mariners. New York: Henry Holt, 1960.
———. George Washington’s Generals. New York: Morrow, 1964.
Black, Jeremy. Pitt the Elder: The Great Commoner. Gloucestershire, Eng.: Sutton Publishing, 1999.
Blakeslee, Katherine Walton. Mordecai Gist and His American Progenitors. Baltimore: Daughters of the American Revolution, 1923.
Bliven, Bruce, Jr. Battle for Manhattan. New York: Holt, 1955.
———. Under the Guns: New York, 1775–1776. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
Blumenthal, Walter Hart. Women Camp Followers of the American Revolution. Philadelphia: George S. MacManus Co., 1952.
Bobrick, Benson. Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Bolton, Charles Knowles, ed. Letters of Hugh Earl Percy from Boston and New York: 1774–1776. Boston: Gregg Press, 1972.
———. The Private Soldier Under Washington. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1964.
Bowman, Allen. The Morale of the American Revolutionary Army. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Public Affairs, 1943.
Bowne, William L. Ye Cohorn Caravan: The Knox Expedition in the Winter of 1775–76. Schuylerville, N.Y.: NaPaul Publishers, 1975.
Bridenbaugh, Carl. Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776. New York: Knopf, 1955.
Brooke, John. King George III. London: Constable, 1972.
Brookhiser, Richard. Founding Father. New York: Free Press, 1996.
Brooks, Noah. Henry Knox: A Soldier of the Revolution: 1750–1806. New York and London: Putnam, 1900.
Brooks, Victor: The Boston Campaign: April 1775–March 1776. Conshohocken, Pa.: Combined Publishing, 1999.
Buckley, Gail. American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm. New York: Random House, 2001.
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