“They met, they talked, they parted,” wrote one of Howe’s staff, “and now nothing remains but to fight it out against a set of the most determined hypocrites and demagogues, compiled of the refuse of the colonies, that ever were permitted by Providence to be the scourge of a country.”
The Declaration of Independence had passed a first test. The war would go on.
THE BRITISH MOVED at once. On the morning of Sunday, September 15, with favorable winds and tide this time, five British warships sailed into the East River and commenced a thunderous, point-blank bombardment of American shore defenses on Manhattan. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before,” wrote the admiral’s secretary.
In a letter to Congress, Washington had earlier explained his intention of abandoning New York, and his larger conclusion that he and his army must avoid pitched battles with such a disciplined and numerous enemy, but rather fight a defensive war. But what happened when bargeloads of British and Hessian infantry began crossing from Long Island, coming through the smoke of the cannonade to land at Kips Bay, was no orderly evacuation of the kind Washington intended. Since the escape from Brooklyn Heights, militia had been deserting in droves. Now those who remained abandoned their entrenchments and fled, never firing a shot. Entire units turned and ran. Galloping to the scene on horseback, Washington charged up and down among the fleeing men, trying to rally them to stand and fight. Outraged, Washington lost his celebrated self-control and began cursing and striking at officers with his riding crop.
Muskets, knapsacks, wagons, and cannon were left behind in the pell-mell rush to get away. Washington could only move with the troops, retreating rapidly northward, up the island of Manhattan to the rocky defenses of Harlem Heights.
For Washington and the American army it was a disastrous, shameful day, and when the news reached Philadelphia, the effect on Congress was decided. As Samuel Chase wrote, “Our affairs here wear a very unfavorable aspect.”
His army was falling apart, Washington informed John Hancock in a bleak letter from Harlem Heights on September 25. For the moment, the British were again doing nothing, but unless “some speedy and effectual measures” were adopted by Congress, “our cause will be lost.” The war, it was clear, was not to be “the work of a day.” Short enlistments would no longer answer. There must be an army built on “a permanent footing,” a standing army.
To place any dependence upon militia is, assuredly, resting on a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life, unaccustomed to the din of arms, totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill, which being followed by a want of confidence in themselves, when opposed to troops regularly trained, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge, and superior in arms, makes them timid, and ready to fly from their own shadows.
Love of country and belief in the cause were noble sentiments, Washington continued, but even among the officers, those who acted “upon principles of disinterestedness” were “no more than a drop in the ocean.” There must be good pay for officers. For the men, nothing would satisfy but a bounty and an offer of free land.
Stealing by his troops was rampant. If ever he was to bring discipline to bear, check this “lust for plunder,” and stop wholesale desertions and widespread drunkenness, he must have new rules and regulations authorizing harsher punishments.
But Congress was ahead of him. It had already moved to make the changes Washington called for, and again it was Adams — Adams who had never thought it would be anything other than a long, difficult war — who had taken the lead, both as head of the Board of War and in floor debate.
On September 16, Congress adopted a new plan issued by the Board of War whereby every soldier who signed on for the duration was to be offered $20 and 100 acres of land. On September 20, a set of Articles of War — Adams’s rendering of the British Articles of War — was agreed upon. The severity of punishments was increased, as Washington wished. Washington thought the maximum number of lashes allowed hitherto was hardly sufficient. For such crimes as drunkenness or sleeping on guard duty, Congress increased the punishment from thirty-nine to a hundred lashes, and increased as well the number of crimes for which the penalty was death. On October 1, Adams proposed the creation of a military academy. Although nothing would come of the motion until after the war, it was the first such proposal made.
Little that had happened through the summer had distressed Adams quite so much as the behavior of American troops, and especially reports that Massachusetts men had “behaved ill.” “Unfaithfulness” was something he could not abide, and in his spells of gloom he pondered whether the fault was in the times.
Unfaithfulness in public stations is deeply criminal [he wrote to Abigail]. But there is no encouragement to be faithful. Neither profit, nor honor, nor applause is acquired by faithfulness. . . . There is too much corruption, even in this infant age of our Republic. Virtue is not in fashion. Vice is not infamous.
One day, as he and Benjamin Rush sat together in Congress, Rush asked Adams in a whisper if he thought America would succeed in the struggle. “Yes,” Adams replied, “if we fear God and repent our sins.”
But the most direct and obvious response to the perilous state of Washington and his army, was the attention Congress turned to France. Regrettable as it may have seemed to many, a large majority in Congress now saw that independence could not be won without something more than a people’s army, or without help from the outside.
“We look only to heaven and France for succour,” Rush wrote. At City Tavern and the London Coffee House toasts were now commonly raised to His Most Christian Majesty, young King Louis XVI of France, and to “a speedy alliance” between France and the United States.
Months before, in February, listing all that he was determined to see accomplished along with “independency,” Adams had put an alliance with France at the head of the list. But in notes made in early March, at the time Silas Deane was appointed as a secret envoy, Adams had stressed that there must be no political or military connection with France, only a commercial connection. Later, in July, as head of the Committee of Treaties, he had written into the proposed Plan of Treaties an article that in quite blunt, undiplomatic language made clear his deep-seated distrust of France. Designed to safeguard the territorial integrity of the new United States, it stated that in case of any war “between the Most Christian King and the King of Great Britain, the Most Christian King shall never invade, nor under any pretense attempt to possess himself of” Canada, Florida, nor any city or town on the continent of North America, nor any island “lying near to the said continent.”
By September, given the realities of the war, Adams had relinquished his earlier misgivings over a military connection with France, but when the Plan of Treaties was taken up in debate on the floor and motions were made to insert what he called “articles of entangling alliance,” he fought them tooth and nail, and with success. As he wrote, the plan passed “without one particle” of such stipulations and, in fact, would remain the model for nearly all treaties of the United States for the next twenty-five years.
On September 26, Congress took the momentous step of appointing Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as commissioners to the Court of France, to serve with Silas Deane.
In a letter to Jefferson, who had earlier requested just such an assignment, Richard Henry Lee stressed that it was the “great abilities and unshaken virtue” needed in carrying out such a mission that had directed Congress in its choice. In effect, Lee was telling Jefferson that Congress was counting on him and that there was no assignment more crucial to the fate of the country. “In my judgment, the most eminent services that the greatest of her sons can do America will not more essentially serve her and honor themselves than a successful negotiation with France.”
When Jefferson wrote from Virginia to say that after days of deliberation he had decided he could not accept — because of “circumstances very pecu
liar in the situation of my family,” which was understood to mean the health of his wife — Congress named, in his place, Arthur Lee, a brother of Richard Henry Lee, which was to prove an unfortunate choice.
AUTUMN BROUGHT CLEAR, cool days, with starlit nights cold enough for log fires at City Tavern, where Adams customarily dined. People were putting on flannels again. Wild geese were flying, their honking heard as they beat their way over the city in great V formations. Numbers of the staunchest members of Congress were departing for home, claiming the need for rest. Samuel Chase, Stephen Hopkins, and Joseph Hewes, like Thomas Jefferson, had left in September. In early October, Caesar Rodney and Roger Sherman took their leave. Franklin, who would sail for France on October 26, was already packing.
From Abigail came word that she and the children, having survived the long ordeal of inoculation in Boston, were at last home again in Braintree. Little Charles was still weak and having a “tedious time of it,” but young Johnny, “Master John,” as she now referred to him, had become her post rider, carrying the family mail to and from Boston.
“I have been here until I am stupefied,” Adams told her in a gloomy letter of October 7. The suspense of what was to happen next in New York continued. Turning the situation over and over in his mind, Adams only grew more downcast.
But then four days later, as if a different man, he made his decision. “I suppose your Ladyship has been in the twitters for some time past, because you have not received a letter by every post as you used to,” he wrote in high spirits. “But I’m coming home to make my apology in person.” On Sunday, October 13, he and Bass saddled their horses and started for Braintree.
• • •
IT HAD BEEN a little more than eight months since Adams arrived in Philadelphia in February, and except for the few days taken up with the expedition to meet with Lord Howe, he had never strayed out of the city. True to his parting words to Jonathan Sewall on the hill above Casco Bay two summers before, he had shown unflinching devotion to the cause of his country, “swim or sink, live or die.” He had never walked away from work that needed doing. He had never failed to speak his mind when it counted, to take a stand and fight for what he believed. Yet remarkably, he had never lost his temper or attacked anyone in a personal way, no matter the bitterness or inner fury to be found in some of his private writings.
For eight difficult, wearisome months, working under the greatest imaginable stress and with the full realization of all that was riding on what transpired in Congress, he had kept his head, kept driving toward the single surpassing objective of independence. The timing, the wording, the spirit of the Declaration, the plan of confederation, the approach to treaties, the winning of the war, were all, he saw, essential to achieving the large, overriding goal of an independent America. And beyond independence, as he consistently emphasized, was the ultimate need for a republican form of government built on a foundation of checks and balances.
Writing of Adams that September, Benjamin Rush told a friend, “This illustrious patriot has not his superior, scarcely his equal for abilities and virtue on the whole of the continent of America.” Later, Rush would say of Adams, “Every member of Congress in 1776 acknowledged him to be the first man in the House.” Jefferson was to remember Adams as “the colossus of independence.”
Few Americans ever achieved so much of such value and consequence to their country in so little time. Above all, with his sense of urgency and unrelenting drive, Adams made the Declaration of Independence happen when it did. Had it come later, the course of events could have gone very differently.
PART II
* * *
Distant Shores
Fortune may have yet a better success in reserve for you, and they who lose today may win tomorrow.
~Cervantes
CHAPTER FOUR
APPOINTMENT TO FRANCE
I cannot but wish I were better qualified.
~John Adams
* * *
I
“WHEN DO YOU EXPECT TO SEE MR. ADAMS?” inquired Mercy Otis Warren in a hurried note from Plymouth.
Surely it must be a “great trial of patience and philosophy” to be so long separated from “the companion of your heart and from the father of your little flock,” continued the older woman, whose tone in correspondence with Abigail Adams was customarily that of the wiser, slightly superior adviser.
Patience, fortitude, public spirit, magnanimity, and self-denial were called for, though she herself, wrote Mercy in candor, could not claim these “sublime” qualities. As Abigail knew, it had been only a short time past when Mercy urged her own husband to resign his commission as a general rather than serve outside New England, and James Warren had complied.
“But oh! the dread of losing all that this world can bestow by one costly sacrifice keeps my mind in continual alarms.”
The note was dated October 15, 1776. By the time Abigail found a moment to reply, a new year had begun and John Adams had come and gone, riding away on still another winter day to still another session of Congress, heading for Baltimore accompanied by a new Massachusetts congressman, James Lovell.
“I had it in my heart to dissuade him from going and I know I could have prevailed,” Abigail wrote to Mercy, “but our public affairs at the time wore so gloomy an aspect that I thought if ever his assistance was wanted, it must be at such a time. I therefore resigned myself to suffer some anxiety and many melancholy hours for this year to come.”
Their separation was more grievous than any, for as she confided discreetly “circumstances” conspired. She was pregnant again. But she took heart, she said, from the late successes of General Washington, an affirming figure for a dark passage. “I am apt to think that our late misfortunes have called out the hidden excellencies of our commander-in-chief. ‘Affliction is a good man’s shining time,’” she wrote, quoting a favorite line from the English poet Edward Young.
In the aftermath of still further defeat in New York — at White Plains, and Fort Washington — the general had beat an inglorious retreat south through New Jersey to the Delaware, his army dwindling to less than 4,000 men, many of whom were without shoes and so thinly clad as to be unfit for service. With the onset of winter, the weather turned bitterly cold. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine, who was with the retreating army. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.”
On December 7, Washington escaped to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, putting the river between his force and the enemy. Only days later, Congress evacuated Philadelphia and moved south to Baltimore, bag and baggage. The prospect for the American cause had never looked so bleak.
But when the British commander, General Howe, called a halt to the campaign on December 14, ordering his troops into winter quarters in New York and leaving New Jersey in the hands of small holding forces, Washington, to the astonishment of everyone, counterattacked. On Christmas night, in driving sleet and snow, he and his ragged army recrossed the Delaware and struck at Trenton the next morning, taking a drowsy Hessian guardpost completely by surprise. On January 2, he struck again, at Princeton, and again with stunning success. Measured by the numbers of troops involved, these were small engagements, but the effect on American spirits could hardly have been greater, and just when all seemed lost.
By mid-January 1777, Washington’s army, too, was settled in winter quarters, miserably, at Morristown, New Jersey, while along the coast of Massachusetts, heavy snow fell in weather as severe as any in memory. In the wake of one February storm, howling winds piled drifts higher than a man’s head. From her window beside the coast road, Abigail looked out at a world of white desolation, a small, slight figure, snow-bound with five children, including her niece, Louisa, and determined to be no summer soldier or sunshine patriot. She had never seen the road so obstructed, she informed John. For days not a soul passed her door.
“I want a bird of passage,” she declar
ed in early March, still having heard nothing from him. “Posterity who are to reap the blessings will scarcely be able to conceive the hardships and sufferings of their ancestors.”
When a first letter from Baltimore arrived on March 9, filled with his distress over no word from her, she replied at once. Her health was as good as to be expected in her condition. Moreover, “’Tis a constant remembrancer of an absent friend, and excites sensations of tenderness which are better felt than expressed.”
By spring she had grown uncomfortably large and clumsy — young Johnny told her he never saw anyone grow so fat — but she was also uncommonly pale. She could never put the “cruel war” out of her mind. Her only brother, William Smith, had gone to sea, as a captain of marines on a privateer. Troops passed continually up and down the coast road — “not an hour in the day but what we see soldiers marching.”
Adams, who by then had returned with the Congress to Philadelphia, wrote every week. He was homesick, weary with work. Attendance in Congress was down to a mere twenty. When Jefferson, claiming personal reasons, failed to return, Adams was especially disappointed. “We want your industry and abilities here extremely,” he wrote to Jefferson. “Your country is not quite secure enough to excuse your retreat to the delights of domestic life.” But Adams was not unsympathetic. “Yet for the soul of me, when I attend on my own feelings, I cannot blame you.”
The Board of War was examining reports of atrocities committed by Hessian troops in New Jersey; Adams was sickened by what he heard. He was exasperated, too, by the constant squabbles of American officers. “They worry one another like mastiffs, scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts,” he told Abigail.
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