In the summer of 1780, plans were being made for the two to meet for the first time.
It was September 22 before they finally met in the early-morning darkness at the foot of Long Clove Mountain, on the west bank of the Hudson, just below Haverstraw. The British major had traveled upriver for the meeting aboard the armed sloop Vulture. Leaving the safety of the ship, he covered his uniform with a blue greatcoat and used the name John Anderson in place of his French Huguenot name, John André.
The meeting lasted until after dawn. In the bright light of day, André could not return to the Vulture undetected. His companion, American Major General Benedict Arnold, commander of the West Point fortress, suggested they repair to the nearby home of intermediary Joshua Hett Smith, an abode called “The White House.”
When they did, they breakfasted together and continued their discussion. But they also saw American artillery based at Fort Lafayette across the river begin to hurl cannonballs in the direction of the Vulture, which was forced to slip anchor and ease downstream.
Arnold discreetly left, but not before handing André documents showing the plan of defense for West Point. Now André had to find some way to return to British lines while bearing those highly incriminating papers. Smith talked the British officer into wearing civilian clothes under his heavy coat.
Later that day, the two crossed over to the east side of the Hudson at King’s Ferry, then proceeded south to White Plains, New York. They stayed that night in the home of a friendly Westchester County Tory.
The next day, September 23, they parted company and André continued on his way alone. He first headed south again, toward New York, but then veered westerly, toward the Hudson. As Paul J. Sanborn wrote in the encyclopedia The American Revolution, 1775–1783, André had no desire to encounter the Tory “Cowboys” or rebel “Skinners” who preyed upon the unwary in the “no man’s land” lying between the Croton River and the British lines.
Unfortunately for him, it was three American militiamen who stopped André outside of Tarrytown, searched his person, and found the incriminating papers in his boots.
Forewarned of André’s arrest, Arnold made his way to the Vulture early the morning of September 25 to complete his betrayal of America.
Events now moved very rapidly. André was moved to Washington’s headquarters at Tappan, New York. On September 29, he went before an American military court of inquiry headed by General Nathanael Greene and including Generals Lafayette, Von Steuben, Lord Stirling, Henry Knox, John Stark, and John Glover among its fourteen members.
André testified that he indeed had come behind American lines but as a British officer on a mission for his chief, Sir Henry Clinton. In effect, he admitted the circumstances but clung to his concept of a mission rather than acknowledge outright spying. The court unanimously found him guilty as a spy. Washington, on September 30, agreed. André was sentenced to be executed in short order, on October 1.
Officially informed of the inquiry results by the Americans, Clinton sent an envoy to plead for André’s life. Meeting with General Greene, Clinton’s spokesman, General James Robertson, said the British would exchange any prisoner they held for André.
But Washington’s position was unequivocal. He would exchange André for only one man—Benedict Arnold.
That, Clinton would not do. Delayed for a day by the fruitless conference, André’s execution was set in motion at noon on October 2. He asked to die before a firing squad, but was denied. His fate was to be hanging.
He approached his death calmly…and in uniform, including the red regimental coat with green facings of his Fifty-fourth Regiment. Placing the rope about his neck himself, he said, “I pray you to bear me witness that I meet my fate like a brave man.”
And he did. Buried on a Tappan hill, his body was removed in 1821 to Westminster Abbey in London, where he could join a long roster of Englishmen who bravely served their country…and often died in the act.
In André’s case, hardly anyone familiar with the details could have found pleasure or satisfactory vindication in the outcome. As Sanborn’s account recalled, even Washington once said, “He was more unfortunate than criminal.” According to some, too, Washington’s hand had trembled when he signed André’s death warrant.
***
When the word reached the Connecticut Rangers that Washington needed a volunteer to infiltrate British lines on Long Island and gather intelligence, no one stepped forward…at first.
These were men chosen, for their bravery and aggressiveness, to serve as scouts ranging in advance of the main Continental Army. But none wished to go behind British lines and act as a spy.
Lieutenant James Sprague, for one, told his commander that fighting the British was one thing, but he had “no wish to go among them, be taken and hung like a dog.”
At last, a young captain, a recent Yale graduate and schoolteacher, said he would go. Friends tried to talk him out of it, but his mind was made up. “I wish to be useful and every kind of service, necessary to the public good, becomes honorable by being necessary,” he supposedly said. As Sanborn noted, the volunteer was “an extremely poor choice” for his undercover mission. “His face had been scarred by exploding powder. He was literally a marked man.” Further, although proven as a soldier (and so marked, too), the young officer had no training in intelligence work. He had to come up with his own “cover story” and other tricks of the spy trade.
Wasting no time, he set off on his intelligence mission in mid-September 1776, not long after Washington’s defeat in the Battle of Long Island and retreat onto Manhattan Island.
The untried agent was “inserted,” as spy parlance goes, by an American sloop that carried him to Huntington on Long Island’s north shore. Dressed in civilian clothes and carrying his Yale diploma, he posed as a Dutch schoolmaster looking for a teaching job. In this guise he hastened to catch up with the British forces, which by now had made the jump onto Manhattan as well. This made the mission on Long Island “obsolete,” said Sanborn, but the unschooled American spy “somehow crossed over into New York City, following the British there sometime after September 15.”
There, he gathered valuable intelligence and sketched British troop dispositions and fortifications. But now he had to find some way of carrying his information back to General Washington. The famous fire of New York City that destroyed a quarter or more of the town on September 20 forced him to leave “probably before he could complete his plans to escape back to his own lines.” Unfortunately, that is when he was captured, his incriminating notes and sketches found hidden in his shoes.
He was taken to General Sir William Howe’s headquarters at the Beekman mansion on the East River side of Manhattan, close to today’s intersection of Fifty-first Street and First Avenue and by today’s Rockefeller Center. Infuriated by the fire, and suspecting American complicity in the conflagration, Howe issued the order to hang the prisoner the very next day, without benefit of trial.
The next morning, September 22, he was carried to a gallows set up on an estate near today’s juncture of Market Street and East Broadway. A mulatto named Richmond hooded the condemned man and placed the noose around his neck.
Blind, the young Patriot stumbled climbing the ladder before him—the “gallows” being the branch of a stout apple tree.
There would be no appeal, no delay, no other outcome…and every schoolchild in America for nearly two hundred years has been told of his shining last words, given from under the hangman’s hood while standing on a rung of a ladder leaning against an apple tree. Those last words of Nathan Hale: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
His famous utterance, incidentally, is based upon a line in Joseph Addison’s popular eighteenth-century play Cato. Oddly, Hale’s valiant end went unknown for many years. A British officer impressed and even touched by Hale’s gallantry had relayed the story to Americans in a meeting on exchanging prisoners. But Hale’s friends, thinking the fate of a spy was
nothing to be proud of, didn’t pass along the story of his brave death for another fifty years.
Cruelties of War Contemplated
SWIRLING AROUND CENTRAL NORTH CAROLINA, EACH MORE OR LESS CHASING the other’s tail, were the army of Lord Cornwallis, the southern branch of the Continental Army led by Nathanael Greene, British Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons, American Colonel Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee’s light cavalry, and various homegrown guerrilla outfits that were either Tory or Patriot. The internecine war in the Carolinas was at a bitter pitch, and the Haw River on February 23, 1781, was a dangerous place to be, as members of an errant Tory troop found to their very deep regret.
According to the story later told by Moses Hall, a native of Rowan County, North Carolina, his militia company fell in with Lee’s light horse troop shortly before encountering a group of Tories commanded by Colonel John Pyle. “Our troops and this body of Tories and Colonel Tarleton all being in the same neighborhood, our troops on the march met said body of Tories at a place called the Race Paths,” recalled Hall years later.
The Patriots, by plan or by accident, were in two columns, apparently riding abreast but some distance apart. Lee was in charge of one and Militia Major or Colonel Joseph Dixon in command of the other.
“[T]he Tories passed into this interval between our lines,” said Hall. Or perhaps the Tories had been halted, and the two Patriot columns then passed on either side of the Tory outfit. He wasn’t sure many years after the fact. In any case, the Tories thought the newcomers were allies…friends!
“They frequently uttered salutations of a friendly kind, believing us to be British.” A fatal mistake, it turned out. The Patriots realized the situation and pretended to be the friends the Tories thought them to be. Just about all the officers “kept up the deception.” All, that is, except Hall’s own company commander, a Captain Hugh Hall, who recognized the strangers as Tories, but thought that Lee, himself a stranger in these parts, would assume them to be fellow Patriots rather than the enemy. “Colonel Lee,” shouted Captain Hall, right across the Tory column in the center of things, “they are every blood of them Tories!” Why that warning failed to alarm every single Tory is unclear, but Captain Hall at least desisted when Lee gave him “a sign to proceed on with the execution of the command, which was to march on until a different command was given.”
The Tories, meanwhile, docile as before, still remained at center, between the two Patriot elements. “In a few minutes or less time, and at the instant they, the Tories, were completely covered by our lines upon both flanks, or front and rear as the case may have been, the bugle sounded to attack, and the slaughter began.” No, no, cried the completely fooled Tories, “Your own men, your own men, as good subjects of His Majesty as in America.”
According to Moses Hall, two hundred Tories were killed on the spot. Unfortunately, too, a reflection of the brutality sometimes exercised by both sides in the civil war of the Carolinas, the Patriot band later that day killed six prisoners as an act of revenge for some earlier Tory brutality. Wrote Hall as an old man in 1835: “I was invited by some of my comrades to go and see some of the prisoners. We went to where six were standing together. Some discussion taking place, I heard some of our men cry out, ‘Remember Buford,’ and the prisoners were immediately hewed to pieces with broadswords.”
Hall, then a young man of twenty-one, already was a veteran of several short enlistments in the bloody regional strife, but clearly he had never seen anything like this. “At first I bore the scene without any emotion,” he said, “but upon a moment’s reflection, I felt such horror as I never did before nor have since.” He returned to his quarters and threw himself down on his blanket, his emotions now in turmoil as he “contemplated the cruelties of war.”
The next day he still was “gripped by a distressing gloom,” but it was about to be relieved, oddly enough, by sight of yet another horror. His company the next day made its way to British dragoon Banastre Tarleton’s abandoned campsite. On the side of the road, Hall wrote, “I discovered lying upon the ground something with appearance of a man.” The “something” proved to be a boy, about sixteen, who had “come out to view the British through curiosity.” But they thought he might provide the Americans in the area information about them. So, “they had run him through with a bayonet and left him for dead.”
Although the teenager was able to speak, it was obvious he would die from his bayonet wound. Moses Hall now was furious. “The sight of this unoffending boy, butchered rather than be encumbered [sic]…on the march, I assume, relieved me of my distressful feelings for the slaughter of the Tories,” wrote Hall.
In this kind of war, one brutality brought on another, which brought on reprisal, which also brought on reprisal, and so on. His distress over the Tories the day before suddenly replaced, Hall later wrote, he now “desired nothing so much as the opportunity of participating in their destruction.”
His group pursued Tarleton’s troop of dragoons, but the Briton picked up reinforcements, then turned on his pursuers. After a brief clash driving back the Americans, they became the pursued…until darkness halted the chase for that day.
Personal Glimpse: Nathanael Greene
“WE FIGHT, GET BEAT, RISE AND FIGHT AGAIN,” HE ONCE SAID. AND QUITE SO. IN capsule form, that was the limping Quaker Nathanael Greene’s strategy that won the South for George Washington and the American Revolution.
When he arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina, in December of 1780, to replace Horatio Gates as the head of the Southern branch of the Continental Army, Greene inherited a fighting force of 2,300 in theory…but only 1,500 healthy effectives in fact. His British antagonists, on the other hand, could count on 8,000 men, based largely in Georgia and South Carolina. Worse, the dispirited Americans recently had given up an army of 5,000 with the loss of Charleston, South Carolina, and another army in their defeat at Camden, South Carolina, all in less than a year’s time.
After somehow putting together yet another army, it would be the thirty-eight-year-old General Greene’s job to stop British Lord Cornwallis from sweeping north and adding North Carolina and Virginia to the territory under British control.
Ironically, the man asked to perform such a Herculean task had entered the Revolutionary War as a militia private with no military experience; he came from a pacifist Quaker background and was an asthmatic with a permanent limp from a childhood knee injury.
In the days before hostilities broke out, Greene operated a family iron foundry in Coventry, Rhode Island. He often visited Boston—in particular, the bookstore belonging to Henry Knox. As war clearly loomed, future American Generals Greene and Knox shared a growing interest in books on military science. Back home, Greene helped to organize a militia unit, the Kentish Guards, but his bad knee kept him from becoming an officer. Meanwhile, in July of 1774, his plunge into military affairs resulted in expulsion from his antiwar Quaker congregation.
That same summer, on a happier note, he married the vivacious (non-Quaker) Catherine (“Kitty”) Littlefield of Block Island, thirteen years his junior. While they in time had five children, the cascading events of revolution and war would shatter any hopes they held of a lifetime to be spent in quiet tranquility.
The very next year, 1775, Greene was active after Lexington-Concord (and Menotomy) organizing Rhode Island’s contribution to the American troops besieging Boston—more than that, the future state’s Patriot legislature appointed him a brigadier general, rather than private. Greene then, in June of 1775, led Rhode Island’s three regiments to Washington’s side at Cambridge, Massachusetts, outside Boston.
There, the Continental Army’s new commander in chief was favorably impressed as he looked over the thirty-three-year-old neophyte before him. Within a year’s time, added historian Theodore Thayer in the book, George Washington’s Generals and Opponents: Their Exploits and Leadership, the commander in chief would become “convinced” that his own best replacement at the head of the army would be Rhode Isl
and’s Nathanael Greene.
After guarding the western sector of the American siege lines for months, Greene was Washington’s choice to take charge of Boston once the British left town in the spring of 1776. As yet another measure of Washington’s growing esteem for the inexperienced officer, Greene in the summer of 1776 was given the job of preparing the defense of Long Island across the East River from Manhattan Island, New York.
No one will ever know how Greene would have fared as Washington’s chief subordinate in facing the massive British invasion of Long Island and Sir William Howe’s surprise flank attack on the American defenders, which resulted in a sharp defeat. Greene missed the dismal show because he fell ill with a violent fever.
Recovering as Washington and company tried to regroup from one pasting after another in the struggle for control of New York, Major General Greene next took over the Continental Army’s fast-response reserve force known as the “flying camp.” But this was unfortunately the moment of the greatest mistake of his military career. Based at Fort Lee on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, he advised an all-out effort to hold Fort Washington across the Hudson on the northern end of Manhattan Island, by then overrun by the British. When General Howe mounted a major attack on the American bastion in November 1776, it fell, with nearly three thousand men and valuable supplies lost to the Continentals. Washington, about to be rowed across the river from the doomed fort, refused to let his young general stay behind. Afterward, an obviously hurting Greene wrote to old friend Henry Knox, “I feel mad, vexed, sick, and sorry; Never did I need the consoling voice of a friend more than now.”
Best Little Stories from the American Revolution Page 36