The effect was stunning. Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America was printed in Philadelphia in January 1776 and became the first American publishing sensation, selling 120,000 copies by the year’s end. Yates paid two shillings for a copy, a relatively high price for a pamphlet, but he was hardly alone. Wherever he went in Albany—at Cartwright’s Inn, on the docks, in the fort, on the streets of his riverside neighborhood—people were waving copies of Common Sense. “The cause of America,” Paine proclaimed, as though he had read the same histories of the past century that Yates had, “is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” Perhaps as many as one-third of Americans were still loyal to Britain. Paine spoke directly to them, spelling out the flaw in their reasoning: “I have heard it asserted by some, that as America hath flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, that the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness, and will always have the same effect. Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert, that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat.” But was not England their mother country? “Then the more shame upon her conduct,” said Paine. “Even brutes do not devour their young.” He made a case for radical change, and did it in powerful, plainspoken sentences: “A government of our own is our natural right.” And, speaking directly to America as if it were not only already a nation but a sentient being, he gave it a mission: “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”
Yates felt the same energy as Paine: this was not a time for moderation. He was in constant motion in the early months of 1776: out to the hinterlands and in daily meetings of the Committee, dealing with loyalists, raising troops for the militia, appointing officers and, constantly, trying to find money and gunpowder.
Yates and others also met with Iroquois leaders in Albany in hopes of keeping the Indians out of any fighting that would come. But the Continental Congress sent word that they wanted to take over Indian affairs. Yates considered this “very unfortunate,” for Albany’s residents had more than a century of experience in dealing with the Iroquois. He acquiesced, but with a frostiness that indicated he felt the gentlemen in Philadelphia were making a mistake.
New York had thus far held three provincial congresses to attempt to deal with the rapidly deteriorating situation at a colony-wide level. All had ended in disorder and disagreement, with the conservative faction each time gaining enough leverage to quash votes toward declaring outright war and independence. Delegates to similar gatherings in Virginia and Massachusetts, and at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, were growing impatient with the vacillation of the New Yorkers. At the end of May the Continental Congress asked each provincial congress to form a functioning government, but New York’s, with the conservatives holding sway, declined to do so.
That set up new elections. On June 27, 1776, yet another delegation was elected to yet another provincial congress. Yates was one of twelve men voted to it from the Albany region. Here he was, then, preparing to go to New York City, even as a constant stream of news was flowing upriver to him, from Manhattan and elsewhere. The Continental Congress was meeting again in Philadelphia, and this time might take the long-awaited step of formally breaking with Great Britain—but it still awaited support from New York. Meanwhile, General Howe’s fleet was gathering in New York Harbor, preparing to unleash the dogs of war.
Yates was feeling creaky and unwell; even in the best times he was known to be a bit of a curmudgeon. But the long train of history pointed to independence, and he would be damned if New York’s waffling elites—or 32,000 British soldiers—were going to stand in the way. He boarded the sloop and sailed south. His objective was clear: push New York into the future; tip the province into open revolt. How to accomplish it was another matter.
Washington went to New York too, at the head of an army. His recruits were a ragged lot, dressed in hunting shirts or whatever else they had, forced to shamble along on foot most of the way through muddy spring roads. But, ever mindful of image, the general, before leaving Boston, had created a personal guard to accompany him, and he was meticulous about its appearance. Each officer in charge of a regiment, he ordered, was to send him four men for his guard, and he specified that they should all be “handsomely and well made . . . neat, and spruce,” and should be between five feet eight inches and five feet ten inches tall: that is to say, of relatively uniform size, but none taller than Washington himself. Washington personally chose a design for their uniforms: blue and buff, with rounded hats topped with feathers.
He designed his own uniform as well, with an eye for maximum effect, telling his tailor he wanted “a blue coat with yellow buttons and gold epaulettes (each having three stars).” Even in camp he was careful to strap a splendid sword to his side and to have boots outfitted with shining silver spurs, and he capped the appearance with a plumed hat and a purple sash. His horse was part of the spectacle: a regal beast with its tail nicked so that it bobbed upward with an attention-getting flourish as the army traveled through byways and towns.
It was all to a purpose. His lifelong preoccupation with fashion and spectacle as markers of status was reaching potentially historic significance. He was leading not only an army but a would-be nation into battle. He knew that his countrymen were a humble, pious, plainspoken lot, for whom the supernatural was mixed into the real world. For them a king was a being with one foot in another realm. If they were to lose their king, there was a gap in the foundation of their being. He understood that he needed to fill it.
At the same time, he was a practical man, who had agreed to forgo a salary but intended to have his expenses reimbursed, so he kept his receipts on the journey to New York: “ferry . . . mending carriage . . . 1 dozen of Wine.”
He traveled through Connecticut, heading from New London to Saybrook Point—once again coming close to crossing paths with Venture Smith, who was hoping to ride out the coming mayhem in his new home just to the north—then traveled the last leg by ship, reaching New York on April 14.
Washington had made only two short visits to the city before and had little appreciation for its complex geography. Once he arrived, he began studying in earnest how to defend it and quickly saw the difficulties. The city itself—with a population of 25,000—was tidily huddled at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, but the overall landscape comprised islands and coves, bays and deep harbors, exposed beaches and high palisades, stretching for miles in every direction. He had 19,000 men, many of whom were sick or hurt. He would have needed five times as many to adequately defend such an ornate locale.
He had sent Major General Charles Lee ahead to fortify the city. Lee, a British Whig who had emigrated to Virginia only three years earlier and joined the rebel cause, was equally bewildered when he reached Manhattan. Knowing the British had the finest navy in the world, he wrote to Washington, “What to do with the city, I own, puzzles me, it is so encircled with deep, navigable water that whoever commands the Sea must command the Town.” He did his best, ordering gun batteries to be installed in the city itself, along the east side of the island, which was flat and thus exposed, as well as on the Long Island shores opposite. He also had redoubts and barricades constructed along the Hudson shoreline.
So far, there was no sight of the British fleet. Washington—who had brought Martha with him—took over an elegant, tree-shrouded mansion two miles north of the city whose owner, the British paymaster of New York, had recently fled. He had brought a featherbed, pillows and other niceties, so they were able to make it into a passably comfortable home. Riding from there down to military headquarters at the foot of Broadway, he found the city a different place from the one he had first encountered twenty years earlier, when he ran up shopping bills in its stores filled with European goods. Many of the residents had fled the city.
He had given Major General Israel Putnam the task of preparing the remaining populace for the coming battle, and Putnam had instituted martial law. Sentries were posted at intersections, and residents had to obey a curfew. “We all live here like nuns shut up in a nunnery,” a resident complained in a letter.
Washington cherished order and thus detested the chaos his army was bringing to the city. The soldiers tore up fences and cut down trees for barricades; the streets filled with garbage; shopkeepers jacked up their prices. He particularly frowned on sexual waywardness, and so deplored the fact that the army spawned a corresponding army of prostitutes—“bitchfoxy jades,” one local called them, complaining about their “unparalleled conduct” in broad daylight.
The news he had been expecting for weeks arrived on June 4. He had posted Benjamin Tupper, a trusted thirty-eight-year-old veteran who had served in the French and Indian War and recently against the British in Boston, as a lookout in the harbor. A messenger thrust a hastily scribbled note from Tupper into Washington’s hand: “Eight Sail of Square wrigd Vessels and five small Craft besides the Asia & her small Tender . . .” The first British ships had arrived.
It would take time for Howe to assemble his army. Meanwhile, Washington’s problems were compounded by New York’s provisional government, which continued to drag its feet. It had gone so far as to try to block General Lee and his men from coming into the city to erect defenses. Fortunately, a new provincial congress had just been elected. Washington could only hope its leadership would show some interest in helping him save their city.
Meanwhile, the city was crawling with loyalists. Many were hiding in plain sight, biding their time, expecting Howe to deliver them. Others maneuvered secretly to undermine the revolutionaries. Rumors flew: that a ring of spies was at work, that money was being offered to American recruits to jump to the British side once the fleet arrived, that the ring included people close to Washington, that the general was in danger of having his food poisoned.
Some rumors turned out to be true. The provincial congress did one good piece of work: it uncovered a network of spies. Washington learned that a member of his personal guard named Thomas Hickey was working for the British. He ordered a court-martial.
Summer heat settled over the island, more British sails appeared, and the whole city followed Hickey’s trial. Details of an elaborate plot to undermine the American army emerged, involving the city’s mayor and William Tryon, the British governor of the colony. Hickey confessed his role. Washington knew this was a crossroads, not only for the army but for the American people. They needed a display, a testament to the seriousness of what was transpiring. He ordered the man hanged. On June 28, at eleven in the morning, the whole army as well as nearly the entire population of New York watched Hickey’s body twitch at the end of a rope and go limp.
Immediately afterward, Washington issued general orders. He observed that “the unhappy fate of Thomas Hickey” should be “a warning to every soldier,” then pivoted toward the gathering fleet in the outer harbor: “Officers are without delay to inspect the state of the Ammunition which the men have and get their Arms in good order for service and strongly to inculcate upon all Sentries especially on night duty the greatest vigilance and attention. . . .”
Washington had to know that defending such an exposed locality against the massing power of a crack army and a peerless navy was hopeless. The geography, the enemy fleet, and the yawning inexperience of his own forces together told a clear and sobering story. It might have been more expedient to pull out, give up the city and retreat to more defensible ground. But, like Germain, Washington believed the war would be brief. It might in fact end here. Then too, the Continental Congress expected him to fight. And to simply hand over the second-largest American city would have been a blow to morale not only in the army but throughout the colonies. He felt he had no choice but to build up the barricades and brace for the attack.
If George Germain set New York as the place to break the colonial rebellion, forcing George Washington (and an army) to defend it, and sending Abraham Yates there in his effort to defy both the British and recalcitrant fellow colonists, the strife also made it a riotously, kaleidoscopically intriguing place for Margaret Moncrieffe to come of age. For this city of spies, soldiers and streetwalkers, of rotting trash and mounting anxiety, of stench and sweat and signal fires and summer rain, was her home. As General Washington sent aides and messengers paddling across the rivers and galloping up and down the island, setting in motion troop shifts and artillery repositionings, Margaret, aged fourteen, flitted through the streets, eyes darting, soaking it all in. She was precocious, crackling with self-awareness and magnetically connected to her surroundings. It was thrilling.
It was also appalling and maddening and frightening. The intrigue was palpable. Next-door neighbors—revolutionaries and loyalists—plotted against one another. As the naturally combative daughter of a British officer, she was nearly insufferable in her adolescent loyalty to king and country, yet she was forced to live in the household of her late stepmother’s revolutionary brother. As far as she was concerned, she was trapped behind enemy lines.
As the city spiraled toward chaos, Frederick Jay, her protector, decided it was becoming too dangerous for children; she found herself ferried across the Hudson River to stay with friends of the Jays in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. The people who took her in, a family called the Bankers, were ardent patriots; dinnertime conversation was all about the evils of the English soldiers. Margaret was barely able to contain her fury; she felt herself “persecuted on every side” and “forced to hear my nearest and dearest relations continually traduced.” Then, in late June, she thrilled to see the sails of the British fleet on the horizon. Elizabethtown looked out directly onto Staten Island, where the ships put to anchor and began unloading men and equipment. She knew that one of the soldiers setting up camp there, just a few hundred yards away, was the man who had eluded her for most of her young life and now, through the exigency of war, seemingly continued to taunt her with his absence: her father.
Just as her father came within reach, she was pulled away from him. The Banker family decided the British army was too close, so they, and seemingly half of Elizabethtown, packed what they could and moved inland, in their case to a village 10 miles to the west. Margaret felt desperate. She wanted to send her father a signal, to make him aware of how close she was. If ever there was a time for him to play the hero and rescue her, this surely was it.
On a Sunday, while the others were at church, she acted. She took a horse and simply fled. Not knowing where else to turn or how she might get herself to the British army, she rode back to Elizabethtown and showed up breathless at the door of another family who had known her since she was a baby. Sarah De Hart, the mother, welcomed her, took her in, in spite of the fact that she had several children of her own and was six months pregnant.
She stayed with the family while General Howe’s army built to its full complement. At the same time, Washington’s recruits were also streaming into the region from all points. One especially hot and humid day, as Margaret was in the garden searching for a breeze, she found herself suddenly surrounded by a company of militiamen. They had marched eastward from Pennsylvania and were trying to figure out how to get themselves across the river to Manhattan. They accosted her with a rowdy mix of militant patriotism and sexual intimidation. When she didn’t wilt but rather confronted them, meeting their patriotism with her own and beating back their advances, some were sparked to anger. Suddenly, she was staring at bayonet points. Her heart beat furiously, giving the lie to the brave front she’d exhibited. She wondered if this was to be it, her brief life extinguished in a New Jersey garden. But one of them came to his senses and called the others off.
When the men had swept onward and her heart had calmed, she determined not to stay with the De Hart family any longer but to try to get to the British army by another means. She had learned that another relation of one of her father’s d
ead wives was the head of the New Jersey militia, based here in Elizabethtown. She managed to get to his headquarters, where she hoped he would take pity on her and find a way to ferry her across to the enemy. William Livingston—the same one who had founded the radical journal the Independent Reflector and served as Abraham Yates’s mentor in the law and who was a lawyer with no previous military experience—was, at the moment she was brought to him, overwhelmed with the task of trying to raise and equip an army on the fly even as the largest naval fleet ever in America was assembling right in front of him. He was in the midst of penning a series of increasingly frantic updates on the situation to Washington— “we are fully Confirmed in the Enemy’s having Posts along the whole Staten Island Shore. . . . It is said that last night they brought two pieces of cannon to the nearest work . . .”—and finally breaking out into a naked plea: “Your Excellency must be sensible that as the department I now act in is to me entirely new, I must be desirous of every aid that can possibly be obtained—If you Sir could spare a few experienced Officers to assist me in this important Business.”
Looking up distractedly, he found himself staring at a girl who purported to be a distant relation of some sort, who seemed to want him to set aside the business of trying to hold back the British army so as to heed her plight. What was she going on about? Everyone had a plight just now. “He behaved to me with harshness,” Margaret related, “and even added insult to his reproaches.” She was shown the door.
Back at the De Hart home, she cast about for other ideas. She could think of no one else she knew who could help her. People in the household, meanwhile, talked of nothing but soldiers and officers. In the stream of adult chatter one name stuck out: Israel Putnam. He was a prominent player in the American defense of New York—a general, in fact. She knew the name: he had been a friend of her father’s. Now they were fighting on opposite sides, but maybe he would help. She had to know he would be at least as harried and busy as William Livingston, but she wrote to him anyway. She had nowhere else to turn.
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