But Washington, shown to be somewhat inept back in New York, had turned more wily by now—perhaps more determined, too, as shown at Trenton just days before. He left his campfires brightly burning to distract the enemy while he marched his army the ten miles to Princeton in the dark of night. He was then able to encircle the two regiments of British troops under Cornwallis, surprise…and rout them! Said the British commentator Horace Walpole afterward: “His march through our lines is allowed to have been a prodigy of generalship.” Washington had broached his flanking plan in a council of war held in still another Trenton abode, that of one Alexander Douglass.
The Battle of Princeton took place on January 3, 1777, and Washington spent that night south of Princeton in the home of John van Doren. The next day he was off to Morristown, New Jersey, destined to be the first of his Continental Army’s winter quarters. He stayed at Colonel Jacob Arnold’s tavern—a “substantial frame building” on the northwest side of the town’s public square that later became the United States Hotel.
Not only George, but Martha Washington slept here as well—she joined him in March 1777. “Martha, as usual, quickly established a social order, entertaining ladies of quality in the vicinity and the officers’ wives who had come to the camp,” noted Tebbel.
With winter past and spring bursting out all over, Washington moved about the New Jersey countryside while awaiting a decisive move by the British. They might remain in the New York area, they might go north, or they might go far south. Whatever they finally might do, one of Washington’s stopping points during the summer of 1777 was the town of Pompton, just eighteen miles from Morristown. “Whenever Washington stopped at Pompton,” wrote Tebbel, “he is presumed to have stayed at a place called the Yellow House, later the Old Yellow Cottage,” and still later a tavern operated by a proprietor named Curtis. But there are those who dispute the entire story, Tebbel also noted.
Whatever the facts, the British at last surprised the awaiting Continentals by moving on Philadelphia, seat of the Continental Congress. They seized that key city, defeating Washington’s pursuing forces at Brandywine Creek and at Germantown in the process. By then, it was time to move into winter quarters again—in this case, at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
When another June rolled around (1778), Washington again was in pursuit of a moving foe, for the British were now quit of Philadelphia and on the march northward, through hapless New Jersey and in the direction of New York. After another crossing of the Delaware—this time at today’s Lambertville, New Jersey—Washington held a significant council of war on June 24 in nearby Hopewell. He slept, it seems, in the Hunt house, located “about a mile from the Baptist Meeting House.” Both structures survived into the twentieth century.
It was only four days later, on June 28, that Washington won the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse. The historical “headlines” have always seized upon the more sensational fact that Washington confronted and, in effect, sacked a truculent General Charles Lee in the midst of the fray at Monmouth. History tends to forget the cool generalship Washington displayed on the same auspicious occasion. As the Marquis de Lafayette later commented, “General Washington appeared to arrest fortune by one glance, and his presence of mind, valor, and decision of character, were never displayed to greater advantage.”
Soon after, in mid-July of 1778, came a four-day stop at Paramus, New Jersey, marked by “the hospitality of lovely Theodosia Prevost, a widow who later achieved a more dubious fame by marrying Aaron Burr.” Dubiously, too, it might be added, her late husband had been an officer in the army of His Majesty, George III.
Washington now moved on to White Plains, above the British stronghold of New York City. He stayed there for several weeks, well into September, before shifting base to Patterson, a village close to the Connecticut boundary line. Then it was on to Fishkill in the Hudson River Valley, a frequent stopping point throughout the Revolutionary War. Here he stayed at the homes, alternately, of John and Derrick Brinckerhoff, uncle and nephew. Unexciting Fishkill, wrote Baron von Steuben, was “a center of dullness” and “the last place in the world for mirth.”
Washington left Fishkill one day in October, traveled down the Hudson and briefly visited the home of his old friend—now a Loyalist—Colonel Beverley Robinson, originally from Virginia. Two years later, Benedict Arnold would be the home’s occupant…and here Washington would discover Arnold’s betrayal of the Patriot cause.
But this still was October of 1778, and by late November Washington and his army would be back in New Jersey, bedding down in new winter quarters at Middlebrook, now known as Bound Brook. Washington slept there in a home still standing and open to the public as a state historical site, the onetime John Wallace house. Located four miles out of town, the Wallace home was comfortable but small. Even so, Martha again appeared and entertained—but now, thankfully, she could count upon the wives of her husband’s generals to do a bit of entertaining, too.
With the advent of another June, Washington, his generals, and his army were off again—this time to West Point on the Hudson, from which base they kept an eye on the British in New York, and spent a rather uneventful summer.
For his next wintering period, in probably the harshest winter weather of the entire century, Washington returned to Morristown. He (and Martha) stayed in the home of Colonel Jacob Ford’s widow, Theodosia Ford—along with the four Ford children. The Washingtons took up residence on the second floor while the Fords squeezed into two downstairs rooms. Washington’s aides and the Ford servants lived in two newly built wooden outbuildings. The general’s Life Guards troop, always close by, was quartered in a barracks across the road.
Among other generals finding local quarters, Maryland’s William Smallwood wound up sharing Peter Kemble’s home with this known Tory, whose daughter was married to British General Thomas Gage, late of the Boston garrison and the Lexington-Concord foray.
Morristown was a small town of 250 persons living in sixty to eighty structures—the Continental Army’s presence, more than twelve thousand strong that winter of 1779–1780, turned this tiny village into young America’s sixth largest “city.”
By the way, the Ford Mansion is currently located at 230 Morris Avenue, and is open to the public as a National Historic Site maintained by the National Park Service.
Two of the generals’ wives joining Martha Washington here that harshest of all winters were Nathanael Greene’s spouse, Kitty, and Henry Knox’s wife, Lucy. The ladies organized two dances in February and March, as well as an April ball in honor of the visiting French minister, the Chevalier de la Luzerne. Benedict Arnold’s court-martial for alleged improprieties as military governor of Philadelphia was under way here at Peter Dickerson’s Tavern. Another “event” of this winter season was the illness and death of a Spanish diplomat, Juan de Miralles, visiting with the French minister’s party. Stricken by bilious fever, he died in a second-floor room in the Ford Mansion, across the hall from Washington’s own room. That was in late April of 1780. In May, the Marquis de Lafayette returned from a visit to France with the all-important news that France would soon be sending a second fleet to American waters and an army of six thousand troops to help fight the British.
Arnold, in the meantime, had been convicted on two of the four charges against him, resulting in a slap-on-the-wrist reprimand from Washington. The firebrand from Connecticut should have been thankful for being able to keep his military career intact, but instead he was, as always, resentful of any such slight. Unbeknownst to anyone in the American camp, he had already opened negotiations with the British. And now he passed along Lafayette’s momentous news.
It was late June when Washington and his army left Morristown to meet renewed British threat to New Jersey. He was soon settled into one of his favorite quartering places, the two-story brick home of Colonel Theunis Dey in the Preakness hills of New Jersey, close to Passaic Falls and today’s Paterson. “There were vistas in every direction,” reported Tebbel’s book, “and th
e network of roads around it linked the place, from a military standpoint, to Newark, Elizabethtown, Springfield, Middletown and southern New Jersey; on the southeast to Totowa, Acquackanoc and Hackensack; and on the northeast to Paramus, Pompton, and Ringwood.”
Here, in what was considered one of the finest homes in New Jersey, Washington established an “audience chamber” and private dining room on the first floor. He occupied four rooms in all and is said to have wallpapered the one that served as his office. He was in and out of the Dey House until late November. “The war that summer took him across the Hudson to Westchester County, and for a time to Teaneck, where his headquarters were at the Liberty Pole Tavern on Palisade Avenue in the present town of Englewood.” He also briefly stayed at the Hopper house on the Morristown road, two miles from the New York state line.
The stop that really hurt in 1780 came in late September, after Washington’s initial and historic visit with the newly arrived French commander, Comte de Rochambeau. On Washington’s return from their summit in Hartford, Connecticut, he stopped at Colonel Beverley Robinson’s home, the temporary residence of Benedict Arnold, and found Arnold mysteriously absent. The recently appointed commander of West Point had gone over to the enemy.
The evidence of his perfidy came from the arrest of British Major John André, in civilian mufti rather than military uniform.
Bearing incriminating papers, André obviously had been Arnold’s contact with the British. Now, he would be executed as a spy.
It was in the parlor of the Johannes De Wint home in Tappan, New York, built in 1700, that George Washington signed André’s death warrant and sat quietly (“almost alone among his papers,” wrote Washington biographer Douglas Southall Freeman) as the hanging took place at midday, October 2, not half a mile away.
Not long after, Washington would bed down for the mild winter ahead in William Ellison’s stone house overlooking the Hudson at New Windsor, New York. It was here, in the upper hall, that Washington and his young staff officer, Colonel Alexander Hamilton, exchanged a few heated words one February day in 1781. The commander in chief made an effort to reconcile, but Hamilton rebuffed the overture and left Washington’s staff.
And so it went, one move after another, sometimes with historic significance or drama, sometimes not, as George Washington moved about through the months, then years, of ultimately successful revolution—moved in and out of a hundred or more borrowed headquarters in all, by author Tebbel’s calculations.
As yet unmentioned here is the Jonathan Hasbrouck house in Newburgh, New York, where Washington spent a total of fifteen months and eighteen days—“the longest period he lived in any of the houses he had occupied in seven states, from Massachusetts to Virginia.” He arrived here at the end of March 1782, a somewhat more relaxing time in Washington’s life, since he had spent some critical time the previous fall in his native Virginia—not merely for a visit to his beloved Mount Vernon, but, more significantly, on his way to meet a familiar adversary from those early days in New Jersey…to meet Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781.
***
Additional notes: At the very beginning of his career as commander in chief of the Continental Army, it should also be recalled, George Washington spent time at two major stopping points: Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York.
Arriving in Cambridge, on the edge of British-occupied Boston, in July 1775, he briefly stayed in the home of Harvard President Samuel Langdon, but then moved into the stately Georgian mansion of departed Loyalist John Vassall. A short-term housemate here, oddly enough, was his future rival and rebellious subordinate, General Charles Lee. Fortunately, Lee soon found other quarters and left the large home to the commander in chief. “This fine old mansion, with its wide hall and spacious rooms, offered ample accommodation for Washington and his family,” wrote Anne Hollingsworth Wharton in an 1897 biography of Martha Washington. “To the right of the front door was his office, with his staff room opening out of it, while beyond there was another room in which they probably dined.…On the left side of the hall were spacious reception rooms.”
After a time, Martha Washington joined her husband in the John Vassall house, better known these days as the Craigie-Longfellow house—for future owners Andrew Craigie, apothecary-general of the Continental Army, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the revered American poet. “The room to the right of the front door, in which Washington wrote his dispatches, was later the favorite study and reading room of the poet,” added the Wharton account.
In April of the following year, after seeing the British evacuate Boston, the commander in chief shifted base to the city of New York, where he briefly stayed in the Broadway home of another decamped Loyalist, William Smith. When Martha again joined him, they took over the recently vacated country home of Abraham Mortier, the longtime British paymaster general, noted Tebbel in his book. “The Mortier house stood at the southeast corner of Varick and Charlton streets, now in the southwestern reaches of Greenwich Village, considered remote in those days because it was two and a half miles from the… Battery [at the foot of Manhattan Island].”
Despite well-founded expectations of British attempts to seize New York, the Washington couple furnished their temporary home with “feather bed, bolster, pillows, bed curtains, crockery and glassware.” But Washington took advantage of New York’s “more favorable prices” to purchase field equipment as well—“sleeping and dining tents, eighteen walnut camp stools and three camp tables of the same wood.”
Briefly visiting Philadelphia in May for consultation with Congress, Washington insisted that Martha take the sometimes risky smallpox inoculation (risky, but usually better than contracting the deadly disease itself) and stay behind there to recuperate. On her successful recovery, she returned to New York around June 16, but Washington wisely packed her off to Mount Vernon by month’s end. It was only a matter of weeks before the British would fill New York Harbor with their troop-laden ships, take over Staten Island, defeat Washington in the Battle of Long Island, and occupy New York on the heels of several more defeats for the Continentals.
Such were the events that, by year’s end, brought Washington to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, where he finally turned and struck back at Trenton, at Princeton—to sleep onward, you might say, here, there, and everywhere, for another six and a half years of wartime maneuvering.
POWs in America
THE LAND LAY ON A PLEASANT PLATEAU UP A STEEP HILL JUST FOUR MILES WEST of town, and well within view were the blue-shadowed mountains known as the Blue Ridge. The town itself wasn’t much, just a courthouse, a tavern, and a handful of houses. The land belonged to Colonel John Harvie, a member of the Continental Congress. It could have stood a bit of clearing, as could so much of the untrammeled countryside in the 1770s.
Not far away, some miles to the southwest and high on another hill, this one actually overlooking the town, was Thomas Jefferson’s grand home known as Monticello, or “little mountain” in Italian. This was the County of Albemarle, Virginia, and the small town was Charlottesville.
Before the winter of 1778–1779, a few Tory and Scots Highlander prisoners had been held here in this backwater of the Revolutionary War’s fighting. So relaxed were the local citizens over these visitors that most of them were allowed to wander around town on parole, although four Tories once broke the gentleman’s agreement implicit in parole and took off, escaped. Recaptured later, they then were held elsewhere. This was a minor episode in the life of Jefferson’s community, really—but a major change was about to come. Stemming from the Battle of Saratoga, the stunning Patriot victory in today’s upstate New York, it was the arrival of more prisoners—a staggering four thousand of them.
Quartered for a year in New England, they were marched south in late 1778, more than six hundred miles to the hilltop acreage volunteered by Harvie as a new home for the British and Hessian troops (and some dependents) captured at Saratoga in October of 1777. The climate in New England had been hard
on them, and food had been scarce.
Ahead, by Jefferson’s own description, they would find “the top and brow of a very high hill,” with no fog to worry them and four springs at their disposal.
What the prisoners found, like George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge a couple of years earlier, was…nothing! Like Washington’s men, however, they built a sea of huts to house the enlisted men, while many of the officers found accommodations with local homeowners.
Less than three months later, in a letter to Governor Patrick Henry, Jefferson was defending the site as more than adequate for the sudden influx of prisoners. “Of 4,000 people,” he wrote, “it would be expected according to ordinary calculations that one should die every day. Yet in the space of nearly 3 months there have been but 4 deaths among them. 2 infants under three weeks old, two others by apoplexy. The officers tell me, the troops were never so healthy since they were embodied.” Jefferson was responding to suggestions that the prisoners should be relocated once more after encountering hardships in Virginia, reports historian John Hammond Moore in Albemarle: Jefferson’s County. The Master of Monticello, unwilling to see his beloved Albemarle County lose out on the cultural and economic benefits of this European migration, “stressed the healthful atmosphere,” as well as the plentiful availability of food, says Moore.
In fact, the prisoners had created a virtual town on their hill—the “Barracks.”
“The soldiers, he [Jefferson] noted, had made their environs ‘delightful,’” wrote Moore. “The Barracks was surrounded by hundreds of separate gardens and small pens filled with poultry. Baron [Friedrich Adolph] von Riedesel, the highest-ranking German officer, had spent some [$]200 for seed, which he distributed to his troops.”
Furthermore, noted Jefferson in his argument against moving the prisoners, they had built facilities of their own in excess of those provided by Congress. By Moore’s account as well, the captive officers not only were “comfortably housed throughout the county,” but “some had leased quarters which they were improving at considerable personal expense and they were stocking their new homes with grains and provisions of all kinds.”
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 30