Revolution Song

by Russell Shorto

  Washington, meanwhile, escaped across the Hudson with the main body of his army and retreated into New Jersey. Howe’s much larger army followed. At Newark, Washington paused to scribble an update to John Hancock and the Congress: “The situation of our Affairs is truly critical & such as requires uncommon exertions on our part. From the movements of the Enemy & the information we have received, they certainly will make a push to possess themselves of this part of the Jersey.” Four days later, with icy rain pelting his men, he reported that “the enemy . . . are advancing this way.” In fact, they were upon them; he ordered a swift evacuation of Newark; the men in the rear got glimpses of the advance guard of the British entering the town as they fled. On November 30 he stopped again, at Brunswick; his scouts spotted British divisions advancing toward them along two different routes.

  The next day, with enemy troops again within sight, he wrote to Hancock that as it was “impossible to oppose them with our present force, we shall retreat to the West side of the Delaware,” and so into Pennsylvania. To make a desperate situation worse, he lost almost 2,000 of his men in one go. In its fear of military rule, Congress had refused to authorize a standing army. These New Jersey troops were under enlistment contracts that ran out on this date, December 1, and so they simply left the army and headed for their homes. Washington now had only 3,400 men, and was being chased by an army of 12,000.

  He was riding into a dead zone: gray hills, bare trees, a landscape hunkering into winter. His mind was in a fog brought on by exhaustion. He was bitterly aware that rather than defending his country he was running for his life, buying time, scrambling. And he was losing the confidence of his staff. Several of his fellow officers were openly griping about his leadership. General Lee, who had erected the fortifications on Manhattan in advance of him, wrote to General Horatio Gates, in a letter thick with sarcasm, that the “ingenious maneuver of Fort Washington has completely unhinged the goodly fabrick we had been building,” and, with bald reference to Washington, declared his belief that “a certain great man is most damnably deficient.”

  Washington pushed his remaining troops onward—they were now, he admitted, “broken and disspirited,” wearing rags, with old blankets to shield them from the elements instead of coats, their bodies covered in sores. To Princeton they marched. The weather got colder. On December 2 they arrived at Trenton—a hundred-odd houses clustered near the riverbank, all of them now deserted—and looked out across the slate-colored surface of the Delaware to the tangle of barren trees on the other bank. What with the nervous whinnying of horses and the trudging efforts of weakened men hauling heavy artillery, it took five days to cross the river.

  They made it to the western shore just as Howe’s army arrived in Trenton. Over the next few days, Washington sent letters in which he tried to arrange for the defense of Philadelphia while keeping an eye on Howe’s army, which was busy rounding up boats for a crossing. And he was agonizing over something else: the contracts of another contingent of his army were to expire on January 1. “The Enemy,” he wrote, “are most assuredly waiting for that Crisis.”

  Then, with options dwindling, his mind, instead of shutting down, hatched an idea. The enemy hadn’t advanced across the river toward them; in fact, the main body was gone. It appeared Howe would end the campaign for now, and was pulling back to winter quarters within the comfortable confines of New York City. He had left about 1,000 men, mostly Hessians, in Trenton, holding Washington’s army at bay on the Pennsylvania side.

  Washington had to do something before his army dwindled. The last thing Howe would expect from a weakened enemy in the midst of a wintertime retreat would be a counterstrike.

  On Christmas night, he gambled everything. He rushed his men back across the Delaware. He chose a spot north of the town, so that the crossing would not be detected. What had taken five days before he insisted they do in a matter of hours, under cover of darkness. A storm moved in as the night deepened; ice formed on the river and the long canoe-like boats had to cut through it. A thick mix of rain and snow fell, obscuring vision and slowing progress. Washington became anxious, as his gambit depended on darkness and surprise, and with the delay they would get there hours later than planned. But there was no turning back. Dawn arrived; a weak light illuminated the bent heads of his bedraggled men as they trudged along two roads toward the town center. At eight in the morning the division Washington was in encountered the Hessian guards posted on the outskirts. Three minutes later the sound of gunfire to the south told him the other division had likewise met the guards on that road. Both divisions pushed into the town, forcing the Hessians to run backward and return fire as they retreated.

  In the center of Trenton, Washington saw the main body of the enemy, hundreds of them, staggering into formation. He read the chaos in their movements. Some tried to rush up the Princeton Road to get out of town, but Washington sent men running across it to block them. Then came a stuttering moment of silent suspension: gray skies, bayonet points, breath visible in the cold air, eyes sweeping the scene of stone houses and snow-tipped trees. The Hessians saw the situation plainly, saw that they were surrounded. With a gentle clatter, they laid down their arms. Washington took 886 soldiers and 23 officers prisoner.

  It was a small victory, but for the commander of the Continental Army it changed everything. He had known from the beginning—in fact, ever since his days with Braddock—that creative, asymmetrical tactics were his only hope. Only now, having been forced into such a strategy after so many failed attempts at classical warfare, did he take it to heart.

  As Washington’s spirits rose, Abraham Yates suffered a setback. At the very moment the Hessians were giving themselves up in Trenton, Yates, in Fishkill with the other members of the New York Convention, the state’s de facto governing body, was struck by a fever. His gout had worsened as well, and his condition became so severe that he was forced to leave his colleagues and hobble aboard a sloop for Albany so that Anna could take care of him.

  It was an unfortunate moment to go down. The members of the Convention were working seven days a week, involved in seemingly every part of the war effort. They were sending out orders to the counties to enscript more men for military service, buying clothing for soldiers, ordering artillery to be moved into position to defend cities, debating a general pardon for “all persons who have joined the enemy, and shall return within a limited time,” processing a stream of communiqués from Washington and other generals in the field, and, perhaps of most immediate importance, ordering that a fellow named Uriah Mitchell be paid 47 pounds 8 shillings for his work. Mr. Mitchell was the Convention’s express rider, without whom they would have no news of distant events.

  On January 3, in the midst of winter and the turmoil of war, the post rider brought them a copy of the first number of Thomas Paine’s latest publication. Paine had observed firsthand Washington’s army as it trudged through defeat and freezing temperatures in New Jersey, and the experience led to him writing The American Crisis. The Convention members ordered the pamphlet read aloud in session. Its first words heartened the harried politicians, just as they had the troops in New Jersey when Washington had it read to them:

  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 their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

  The members of the Convention ordered 1,000 copies of Paine’s pamphlet to be printed and distributed.

  Somehow, in the midst of bullets flying, with enemy armies ranged to the north, west and south, and with all the pressing matters
of running a war, the Convention also managed to follow the request of the Continental Congress and had begun some weeks earlier setting up the foundations of a state government (though one of them quipped that first “it would be well to secure a state to govern”). Yates had gotten himself assigned to the committee to write a constitution, and had thrown himself into the work, for he saw it as nothing less than a chance to cement into the foundations not only of his city but of the entire state of New York the principles for which he had been fighting for years. He wanted true popular representation. He wanted state offices to be elective. He wanted to ensure that the widest number of people were entitled to vote. He pushed for voting to take place via secret ballot. And he wanted individual liberties to be specified in the constitution. The wrangling began at once, with delegates split along familiar lines: the radicals, like Yates, versus the conservative faction—the large landowners, members of wealthy families, men like Gouverneur Morris, Robert R. Livingston and John Jay—who wanted to keep the political structures of the new state as close as possible to what they had been under the English.

  Jay led the crafting of the document. He was a small, ferret-like man, careful in his habits and with piercing powers of observation. He had had a highly successful law practice in New York City before the war and was related to several of New York’s great families; with so much to lose, he had held out for reconciliation with England until the last possible moment. He was thus, in many ways, Yates’s opposite. Yet both men possessed politicians’ souls; both understood compromise, and Yates worked with Jay, giving in on several items for the sake of unity, before being felled by the fever.

  Yates stayed home recuperating from December of 1776 to April of 1777. When he returned—the Convention had moved yet again to flee the British, to Kingston, on the west bank of the Hudson—the constitution was nearly finished. He shuffled into the hall on a Tuesday morning after the session had started. While his colleagues were debating a motion regarding the makeup of the state’s court, he struggled to get himself up to date. Overall, he discovered, the constitution was much as it had been before he left, and it was a remarkable piece of work. Having nothing to guide them but English precedents, their own convictions and the Declaration of Independence (which they included in its entirety), the delegates had crafted a document that was intended to provide “such government as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular, and America in general.” It provided a structure of representation: a governor, a senate, an assembly and other officials. It provided for elections.

  But to Yates it was clear that the conservatives had won the day. In their fear of mob rule, they wanted to ensure that only the wealthiest and most educated citizens would have a voice in government. Therefore, with John Jay leading, they limited voting privileges to adult white male freeholders (i.e., those who owned or rented substantial amounts of property). They put further checks on the vagaries of the masses by decreeing that several state offices would be filled not by elections but by appointment by high officials, and that the governor and other state officers could at any time “revise all bills about to be passed into laws.” Seeing, upon his return, that there was no stipulation that voting be conducted by secret ballot, Yates tried to get his colleagues to agree to that provision, but he failed. The most glaring omission was the failure to include a bill of individual rights and liberties that would be guaranteed to all citizens of the state. Yates didn’t push it. Maybe he was too weak. Maybe he was satisfied, for the time being, with the fact that the document guaranteed freedom of religion, trial by jury, and separation of church and state. Later he would complain about those conservative colleagues on the constitution committee who worried, as he put it, “that too much would be taken out of the aristocratical reservoir.” But he voted in favor of the document.

  Then too, the delegates had reason to hurry. The British victories, and the swift capture of New York City, had emboldened loyalists in the state and sent others streaming in from elsewhere. Yates and his colleagues were suddenly dealing with insurrections in every city and town, as people they had known all their lives—friends, neighbors, family members—transmitted troop movements to the enemy, stole guns, burned houses and signed up with British regiments. As Yates would later say, “the alarming situation . . . facilitated the completion of the Constitution of New York.”

  On February 28, 1777, while Abraham Yates was convalescing at his home in Albany and George Washington was in winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey, Margaret Moncrieffe stood before the altar at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, resplendently dressed but red-faced with fury, surrounded by British military officers in formal attire, listening to the Reverend Samuel Auchmuty perform her marriage ceremony. She was not yet fifteen years old.

  It was six months since she had fainted in her father’s arms at Lord Percy’s quarters on Staten Island following her ordeal of being caught between the American and British armies. For a happy few weeks she stayed there, enjoying her father’s attention when he was not otherwise engaged. She took part in the ceremony at which he was promoted to Major of Brigade, then said goodbye as he went off as part of General Howe’s invasion of Long Island. She stayed well behind the front lines, awaiting news of the battle like everyone else. She heard of the retreat of General Washington’s forces from Long Island, received word that her father had been taken prisoner by Washington’s men, then learned that the unit that had captured him had shortly thereafter itself been forced to surrender to a party of Hessians. So eventually she was reunited with him again.

  With the taking of New York, the British army and its attendants—Margaret included—moved into the city, and she found herself once again living in her own home. The house may have been more or less the same, but the city had changed utterly. New York was now under martial law. Its patriot residents had fled or were hurrying out, while loyalists flooded in from all over the region. The streets crawled with refugees, the homeless, children orphaned by war. Street hawkers sold most everything—pigs, rum, boots, toys—but at wildly inflated prices. A third of the city was a smoking ruin. The barricades Washington’s men had thrown up at the end of every street blocked traffic and contributed to the chaos. The ditches they had dug to slow the enemy’s advance were now filled with stagnant water. An Englishman noted in his diary that the sudden inrush of loyalists resulted in “people being crowded together in so small a compass almost like herrings in a barrel.” Disease, he noted, was rampant—“the Itch, Pox, Fever, or Flux”—and the city comprised “a complication of stinks.”

  Yet this place of filth and disease was not the city Margaret experienced, at least not most of the time. The British officers quickly set up a separate zone for themselves: a surreal world of scarlet jackets and powdered wigs and fancy-dress balls, of billiards at the King’s Head Tavern, of shops selling French furniture and gilt clocks. This New York—the capital of British-occupied America—was meant to be simultaneously a reminder of the grandeur of England, a place for aristocratic officers to rest from the ravages of war, and a celebration of the coming victory over the rebels. At its head was General William Howe. When Washington was peering across the Delaware River in December of 1776, trying to fathom why Howe’s army was abandoning its pursuit of him, he could not have guessed that this was the answer. For Howe viewed war as a job, and, dedicated though he was to it, he liked to keep regular hours, and was equally devoted to his off-time.

  All armies adhered, more or less, to the concept of “winter quarters,” but Howe, who was known by his colleagues to be fond of the good life, took it especially to heart. “Toujours de la gaieté!” he supposedly cried on arriving in the city. With Washington on the run and the defeat of the colonial forces a near certainty, Howe made himself a regular presence at the balls and gaming tables of occupied New York that winter. He spent lavishly and showed himself to one and all as the epitome of a bold and smart com
manding officer.

  Margaret, however, who took part in many social activities, would have found the general less interesting than the woman who was nearly always at his side. Elizabeth Loring became the center of gossip in town not merely because she was the general’s mistress but because of the brazenness of the triangular relationship that had been arranged. Betsey, as Howe called her, was the wife of Joshua Loring, an American officer who had sided with the British. Howe and Mrs. Loring having established that they fancied one another, the general made a proposition to Loring: in exchange for the “use” of his wife, he would make Loring commissary of prisoners. It was a good job: not in the sense that it was pleasant, but it was easily exploitable. Loring took the deal, looked the other way as Betsey and the general made the New York scene, and got rich, in part by limiting rations for the unfortunate members of George Washington’s army who became his prisoners and diverting the funds into his own account.

  The image that Mrs. Loring offered to a willful girl like Margaret was almost extraterrestrial. Women always acted with propriety and within the bounds of their prescribed roles. If they did not, society knew how to punish them: they were treated as objects of shame and derision. But here was the general’s mistress defiantly transgressing social codes yet exhibiting herself with confidence and wit. She was nothing if not a model of freedom, a woman defiantly crafting her own path through the chaos of the times.

  As extraordinary a figure as Mrs. Loring was, however, there were other models of behavior for Margaret to take note of as well in the odd little netherworld of New York under British rule. They provided clues to how a young woman of conviction might move forward in life.