by Myron Magnet
TWO WEEKS LATER, Howe invaded Manhattan, sending 4,000 British and Hessians ashore at Kip’s Bay on the low East River shore, intending to cut the island in half. A thunderous hour-long cannonade terrified the few hundred green American defenders, who fled before the enemy advance—or tried to surrender, only to be shot in the head and, in one case, decapitated, his head impaled on a pike. Seeing the battle smoke from his hilltop headquarters in what’s now the Morris-Jumel house-museum in Harlem, Washington leapt into the saddle and galloped downtown with his aides, shouting at the retreating soldiers furiously and cutting at them with his riding whip to stop their “most Shameful and disgraceful” flight, to no avail. “Good God!” he cried. “Have I got such troops as these?” Stunned with rage and vexation, he stood like an equestrian statue alone on the battlefield as fifty redcoats ran toward him, leveling their muskets, until one of his aghast aides grabbed his reins and galloped him away. But as Howe unaccountably failed to cut the island in half, Washington got most of his men back up toward Harlem. The next day, when 1,000 Americans bravely engaged the British in the Battle of Harlem Heights near present-day Columbia University, fought them back, and almost caught them in a trap, even as the redcoats taunted them with the hunting-horn call that means the fox is fleeing before the hounds, Washington’s spirits and his army’s morale rose again.29
But he didn’t grasp how much danger he was in. Howe could trap him on Royal Navy–ringed Manhattan Island by seizing King’s Bridge, linking its northern end to the mainland. On October 12, four weeks after the Kip’s Bay invasion, Howe set out to do that, landing a force behind the Americans on Throg’s Neck on the mainland (now in the Bronx), just where the East River opens out into Long Island Sound. A marshy quasi island, it was useless as a landing place, Howe found, but a storm stranded his men there for a week before they could seek a better one. Luckily, General Charles Lee returned to New York from defeating a bungled British invasion of Charleston, South Carolina, in the nick of time, saw at once the peril Washington faced, and implored him to rush his army off Manhattan before Howe could take the bridge. Washington moved out on the eighteenth, while Colonel Glover’s doughty Massachusetts salts delayed the British with withering fire as they struggled ashore on a firmer beachhead.30
Five days and twenty miles later, the Continentals reached White Plains in Westchester and waited for Howe on a well-chosen ridge high above the Bronx River. When Howe appeared on October 28, he threateningly displayed the fearsome might of his 13,000 British and Hessians in serried ranks and smart uniforms, the sun glittering on their bayonets, in a golden autumnal wheat field. Truly as fierce as they looked, his troops loosed a murderous artillery barrage and then clambered straight up the seemingly impregnable sixty-yard-high rock cliff. Both sides fought resolutely, until the Hessians found a weak spot and began pushing the no-longer-green defenders back. Washington retreated to safety; Howe hesitated, as usual; a cold fall storm blew in, and when it passed on November 1, the Americans had vanished.31
Except 3,000 men still held Fort Washington, in northern Manhattan, which General Washington had wanted to abandon as impotent against Lord Howe’s warships, but had been persuaded to hold by Nathanael Greene—a tall, limping, hardworking, brilliantly blue-eyed Rhode Island Quaker who had learned military tactics from manuals he bought from Henry Knox’s bookshop before becoming Washington’s youngest (and favorite) general at thirty-three.32 The commandant, Colonel Robert Magaw, blustered that his fort was impregnable, that he would defend his post “to the last extremity” and could easily escape across the Hudson if the unthinkable happened. All wrong. Washington watched through his telescope from Fort Lee, on the opposite shore, as Howe’s 13,000 troops battered the citadel with artillery from all sides on November 16. Surrounding the fort with cannon, they called on Magaw to surrender. For all his bravado, the colonel saw he had no chance and filed out with his men to captivity in Britain’s pestilential prison ships. Washington turned his back and wept “with the tenderness of a child.”33
NOT LONG AFTER his miraculous retreat from Brooklyn, Washington began to realize that “on our side the War should be defensive”—a “War of posts,” he called it, in which “we should on all occasions avoid a general Action or put anything to the risque unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn.”34 By the time he began his long retreat down New Jersey after the fall of Fort Washington and abandonment of Fort Lee, he fully understood that he was leading an insurgency and that he didn’t so much have to win the war as not lose it, while harassing, exhausting, and frustrating the British until the London authorities had had enough. “[T]ime, caution, and worrying the enemy . . . was the plan for us,” he summed it up many years later.35 His army could lose cities and melt into the interior, to emerge and fight again. “It is our arms, not defenseless towns, they have to subdue,” he wrote.36 Executing such a strategy meant that he first had to subdue his own impulses, since he preferred activity, initiative, glory.
Though New Jersey had its share of Loyalists, for the most part Washington fought among (and for) sympathetic countrymen, and he knew he depended on “the spirit and willingness of the people” for support, intelligence, and supplies. He stopped at nothing to win hearts and minds. When a court-martial found three members of his own elite guard guilty of looting valuables from a New Jersey civilian’s house, Washington pointedly endorsed the death sentences it imposed, as “examples which will deter the boldest and most harden’d offenders” from “horrible villainies of this nature.”37 Moreover, he expected “that humanity and tenderness to women and children will distinguish brave Americans, contending for liberty, from infamous mercenary ravagers, whether British or Hessian.”38 When he chose Valley Forge as his winter quarters in 1777, he explained to his troops that he had purposely avoided anyplace to which the “virtuous citizens” of Philadelphia had fled from the British, “sacrificing their all,” so as not to compete with them for supplies. “To their distresses humanity forbids us to add.”39
The Howes planned to fight a counterinsurgency, one colony at a time, starting by wooing New Jersey rebels by granting pardons to any who would swear allegiance to the king. And they would romance the Loyalists. “You are deceived if you suppose there are not many loyal and peaceable subjects in that country,” General Howe wrote. “I may safely assert that the insurgents are very few, in comparison of the whole people.” He too executed soldiers who mistreated civilians and stole or destroyed their property, and he condemned the terror tactics of his colleagues who earlier had torched the Massachusetts towns of Charlestown and Falmouth (later renamed Portland, Maine).40
But he had a much harder task than Washington. His men saw the Americans as low-life rebels, not as countrymen, and treated them as such from the moment they came off Lord Howe’s ships onto New York’s Staten Island. As one aristocratic British captain there notoriously joked, “The fair nymphs of this isle are in wonderful tribulation, as the fresh meat that our men have got here has made them as riotous as satyrs. A girl cannot step into the bushes to pluck a rose without running the most imminent risk of being ravished, and they are so little accustomed to these vigorous methods that they don’t bear them with the proper resignation, and of consequence we have the most entertaining courts-martial every day.”41 As for Britain’s Hessian allies: theirs was entirely a for-profit enterprise, and plunder was of its essence. Hearts and minds were the last thing these career mercenaries cared to win.42
NEW JERSEYITES hedged their bets. Wanting to be in the winner’s good graces, many signed the British loyalty oath, however glumly, as they watched Howe’s commander in the New Jersey campaign, Lord Cornwallis—an experienced officer with Whig sympathies, who had amazed his aristocratic family by marrying for love—chase Washington’s cold and shrinking army across the bleak winter landscape for two weeks. The Continentals’ summer clothes turned to rags; they wrapped themselves in blankets. Their shoes disintegrated, and they trudged barefoot or tied rawh
ide to their feet. “No nation ever saw such a set of tatterdemalions,” a British officer scoffed; though the sick and hungry “Raggamuffins,” as Lord Howe’s secretary derided them, kept the pursuing enemy at a respectful distance by rearguard actions of spirited ferocity, with Washington always near them, a calming presence closest to the pursuers.43
By the time they reached the Delaware River north of Trenton and began to cross into Pennsylvania on December 2, they seemed spectral wraiths out of Dante. Charles Willson Peale’s painterly eye glimpsed “the most hellish scene I ever beheld. All the shores were lighted up with large fires, boats continually passing and repassing, full of men, horses, artillery.” As if what he’s describing sounds incredible even to himself, he repeats it: “The Hollowing of hundreds of men in their difficulties of getting Horses and artillery out of the boats, made it rather the appearance of Hell than any earthly scene.” As the soldiers trudged by, “a man staggered out of line and came toward me. He had lost all his clothes. He was in an old dirty blanket jacket, his beard long and his face full of sores . . . which so disfigured him that he was not known by me on first sight. Only when he spoke did I recognize my brother James.”44
Once he’d crossed the river, here was Washington’s plight. His oft-defeated army, from illness, desertion, capture at Fort Washington, and some enlistments that ended on December 1, was down to fewer than 3,000 men. General Charles Lee, who had dawdled over bringing in reinforcements, had fallen into enemy hands, ignominiously captured at an inn, away from his army. Washington, who by mistake had just opened a letter of his filled with criticism of the commander in chief’s “fatal indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even want of personal courage,” took the loss of so disloyal and insubordinate an officer with equanimity.45 Lee’s strictures perhaps stung all the more because Washington had made every mistake in the book in the New York campaign. He had misread the enemy’s intentions; he had divided his forces in the face of superior numbers; he had provided no cavalry; he had hesitated almost fatally to get his army out of Manhattan once he grasped the folly of keeping it there; he had allowed Greene to persuade him against his better judgment to keep men in Fort Washington; he had allowed a wealth of precious tents, flour, ordnance, and ammunition at Forts Washington and Lee to fall into enemy hands. And now, on December 17, he had two weeks before the enlistments for most of the rest of his army expired. “Our only dependance now, is upon the Speedy Inlistment of a New Army,” he wrote Lund Washington, his cousin and trusted manager at Mount Vernon; “if this fails us, I think the game will be pretty well up, as from disaffection, and want of spirit & fortitude, the Inhabitants instead of resistance, are offering Submission, and taking protections from Genl Howe in Jersey.”46
At such a moment of crisis, his thoughts turned, as usual, to Mount Vernon for solace. Could Lund please plant holly trees—or, if unavailable, pines—on the riverbank, and maybe some sycamores or honey locusts? Certainly locusts should go in from the New Garden to the Spinning House, fifteen or sixteen feet apart—close “enough for the limbs to Interlock when the Trees are grown.”47 Similarly, after the Battle of Harlem Heights he had fretted to Lund from the Morris-Jumel house that “such is my situation that if I were to wish the bitterest curse to an enemy on this side of the grave, I should put him in my stead with my feelings,” for “I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born,” and then he immediately comforted himself by adding directions to make his new dining room an embodiment of the balance, harmony, and perfection that seemed so out of reach. “The chimney in the new room should be exactly in the middle of it—the doors and every thing else to be exactly answerable and uniform—in short I would have the whole executed in a masterly manner.”48 And a few days later he wrote his brother Jack, quoting his favorite biblical verse, that he craved nothing so much as “the peaceable enjoymt of my own vine, & fig Tree”—for Mount Vernon was his healing vision of the soldier’s earthly paradise, where, as the prophet Micah promised, men “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.”49
AND NOW CAME one of history’s miraculous turning points, in which a handful of men transformed failure into triumph. Tom Paine heralded it with his magniloquent article, The American Crisis, which he wrote on a drumhead by campfire light, retreating with the Philadelphia Associators, and which the troops huddled together to read aloud just days after it came out in the Pennsylvania Journal on December 19.50 “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine passionately proclaimed, telling his exhausted fellow troopers just what they hungered to hear. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Let there be no talk about “peace in my day,” but think instead that “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” As for General Washington, he is one of those men who never appear “to full advantage but in difficulties and in action,” Paine assured them. “There is a natural firmness in some minds which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude,” wrote Paine, a former corset-stay maker and tax collector, who had arrived from England at age thirty-seven in 1774 with a letter from Benjamin Franklin recommending him as a likely clerk or assistant tutor—though he soon found his true calling. The General, he wrote, is blessed with “a mind that can even flourish upon care.”51
And so it proved. In crossing to Pennsylvania, Washington had the foresight to gather every boat for sixty miles up and down the river, so that the British couldn’t follow, and he had them stashed in creeks and inlets on the Pennsylvania bank—just in case. But General Howe didn’t try to follow. He left Hessian regiments to guard the Delaware’s east bank, including three to hold Trenton, while he eased into a cozy New York winter, planning to take Philadelphia when the spring fighting season opened. Washington, his dwindling troops disheartened, and their enlistments nearly up, saw that without a “lucky blow,” he could never “rouse the spirits of the people, which are quite sunk by our misfortunes.” So when Charles Lee’s reinforcements finally turned up with some militia units on December 22, momentarily boosting Washington’s strength to 7,600 men—still too few to fill Madison Square Garden even halfway—he knew he had to act at once, before his army melted away. He would cross the Delaware on Christmas Day to attack Trenton—a plan of such imaginative, unconventional audacity that no by-the-book English officer could ever dream it up.52
Could the men get across the river in just one night, as he planned, since it had taken five days to cross the other way? his staff worried at the Christmas Eve planning dinner. They were “not to be troubled about that,” Colonel Glover imperturbably pledged, “as his boys could manage it.” On horseback and out front, as usual, Washington would lead the main force of 2,400, which would split into two columns on the opposite shore. Two other detachments would cross elsewhere, to multiply the chances of success. The revealingly desperate password for the operation: “Victory or Death.”53
Once again, as at Brooklyn, Washington marshaled his men at the river’s edge in silence and secrecy on Christmas afternoon, only this time their bare feet left bloody tracks in the snow. Once again, rain and sleet lashed them, which during the night turned to snow and became “a perfect hurricane,” one Boston fifer recalled. Washington crossed first, to take charge if the enemy appeared, and in groups of forty the men squeezed onto flat-bottomed freight scows to cross the churning, ice-clogged river, while Glover’s mariners ferried horses and 400 tons of cannon across too. The storm slowed them down, so Washington feared he had lost the surprise of reaching Trenton before dawn, and it stymied the other two detachments altogether, so they didn’t cross. Even so, wrote Washing
ton, “as I was certain there was no making a Retreat without being discovered, and harassed on repassing the River, I determined to push on at all Events.”54
It was 3 AM on December 26 when the last man safely reached the Jersey side, 4 AM before the line of march formed up and set off, straight into driving snow and hail, with Washington galloping back and forth, exhorting and encouraging them, “in a deep & Solemn voice,” one soldier recalled, to “Press on, boys!” and marveling at how “they seemed to vie with the other” in doing what he asked, in a way that “reflects the highest honor upon them.” When the sky lightened at 6 AM, they’d gone only half the nine miles south to Trenton, and the storm had soaked their powder, leaving them to fight with bayonets alone. That they would catch the enemy sleeping off a Christmas drunk is a legend; the 1,500 Hessians, whose foraging parties American patrols constantly harried and whom Loyalist spies kept informed, had slept on their arms for three nights and were on rigid alert, even though most viewed American prowess with wry contempt and felt certain that the storm made an attack that day unlikely.55