Howe remained in New York that winter, luxuriating in the company—and in the bed—of the wife of the British commissary of prisoners, pleasures from which he occasionally tore himself in order to draft ambitious plans for the coming season of campaigning. His initial notion, which he composed in November while Washington was in retreat across New Jersey, was for a threepronged attack on the northeastern states: one army would drive toward Boston, a second would ascend the Hudson toward Albany, where it would meet the third force, the Canadian army, over which he had no jurisdiction, but which he hoped would be advancing simultaneously to the south. Once things were mopped up in this sector, probably in September or October, the three forces would plunge into the southern states. All resistance, he projected, would be crushed by Christmas.
Three weeks later Howe inexplicably scrubbed that plan and postulated a different enterprise. Now he proposed to use his army to seize Philadelphia. His army, he wrote, would march from New York to the Delaware, presumably combating the Continental army en route. This plan arrived in London just as the king approved a scheme concocted by General John Burgoyne, a design that provided for the Canadian army to march on Albany, where it would rendezvous with Howe’s legions. Incredibly, even though the plans of Howe and Burgoyne hardly coincided, Lord Germain gave his enthusiastic endorsement to the notion of an attack on Philadelphia.
As if sufficient confusion did not already exist within the British high command, Howe, in mid-January, drafted still another plan for 1777. Now he asked for twenty thousand additional troops—a 100 percent augmentation of his army—so that he might make a joint naval and overland trek to Philadelphia, and so that some troops might be placed in Rhode Island, from whence they could make forays into Connecticut and Massachusetts. Why a campaign to take Philadelphia? Evidently it did not occur to anyone in a position of authority in London to ask that question, and even today no one knows exactly what logic lay behind Howe’s thinking. However, he probably believed that the terrain was more suitable for a fight in eastern Pennsylvania—less like Bunker Hill, that is—than in New Jersey or above Manhattan; then, too, he almost certainly guessed that the number of militiamen in a place like Pennsylvania would be fewer than in the New England states. Still, what gain would Howe realize by taking Philadelphia? Even a non-military man like John Adams sagaciously concluded that Howe’s “Possession of this Town . . . would be the worst Situation he could be in, because it would employ the whole Force by Sea and Land to keep it, and the Command of the [Delaware] River.” Whatever his thinking, Howe proposed this plan just after he learned of the setbacks at Trenton and Princeton, and the effects of those losses showed through. His upbeat tone had vanished, and, in fact, he now told London for the first time that he no longer believed that one more campaign would end the war.7
Whatever Howe decided to do, Washington’s most urgent need was for additional troops. For the second consecutive year he faced the task of raising a new army, then of training it from scratch. This time, however, there would be a difference. After working closely with Washington, Congress in September 1776 had resolved to reorganize the army. It called for eighty-eight regiments, including three in artillery, a three-thousand-man cavalry force, and a small corps of engineers. To eliminate the uncertainty of having to recruit a new army at the end of each year, Congress also provided lucrative bounties of cash and land for enlistees. The result was the emergence of a different army. In 1775–76 the ranks had been filled chiefly with zealous republican patriots, men who never doubted that sturdy, virtuous citizens could fight and lick professional soldiers. Howe’s campaign in New York demonstrated the folly of such a notion. At the end of the year these earliest Revolutionary soldiers went home and did not come back. In their stead came men who were lured by the promises of money and land. The new soldiers, thus, were drawn from the ranks of America’s very poorest inhabitants. The landless and the unemployed, indentured servants as well as free blacks and slaves, now flowed into Washington’s army, some serving because they had volunteered, others because they had been conscripted.8
Reorganization on paper was not quite the same as actually fleshing out an army, however. Predictably, recruiting proceeded with agonizing slowness. Two months after the process began four Connecticut regiments that should have totaled approximately three thousand men had secured only about fourteen hundred enlistees, whereas Massachusetts had garnered only about 25 percent of its quota. A month later ten states had yet to get a single new recruit to Morristown. That same month, with the campaign of 1777 presumably imminent, Connecticut and Massachusetts resorted to conscription, although both states permitted a draftee to buy an exemption—for £5, roughly a month’s wages for an unskilled laborer—and, oddly, Connecticut even paid a bounty to conscriptees. On the last day of May Washington wrote to Governor Henry to complain that his own state had not met its quota, and about the same time he lamented that for most Americans it was “almost a matter of moonshine” whether the ranks ever were filled. If some way to get men into the army was not soon discovered, he added five months after the recruiting drive commenced, it was unlikely that he could offer “any effectual opposition” to the British that summer. Of the seventy-five thousand men Congress had dreamt of, Washington had fewer than nine thousand with him at the dawn of the summer. For the second consecutive year the militia had seen him through the crisis, for as late as mid-March two of every three soldiers at Morristown were trainbandsmen.9
Obtaining adequate numbers of men was just one of Washington’s manpower problems. He continued to face a chronic problem of ineptitude within his officer corps. From the beginning the selection process had been shot through with politics, as congressmen simmered and quarreled in their efforts to name old chums and favorite sons to every vacancy, a practice also routinely followed by state officials who named those officers holding rank beneath the level of general officers. By early 1777 most congressmen probably regarded Schuyler, Putnam, Spencer, and Heath as less than competent for the posts they held, although there was nothing to do but “wish they would all resign,” as a disgusted John Adams put it that winter. These four men had plenty of company, although the incessant carping that one heard about the general officers was not entirely justified. Impatient critics wanted a well-trained, well-oiled, skilled fighting army—and they wanted it immediately. When their army all too frequently performed ineffectually, the general officers were blamed. Some of the criticism was justified. It was difficult to be a good officer. “Many qualities, independent of personal Courage, are requisite to form the good Officer,” Washington advised. The best officer, he said, would be an active, steady, diligent gentleman, one who was willing to make sacrifices, one who could inspire confidence. Few men possessed all these virtuous traits, and under the system of selection that prevailed fewer still were being appointed and promoted. Instead, a distressing number of lower grade officers were slothful and negligent. Some were drunks or thieves or somehow on the take, too many were disobedient or took a cavalier attitude toward their duties, and some seemed constitutionally unable to maintain a discreet distance between themselves and the enlisted men.10
If Washington hoped for anything better in February 1777 when Congress announced its intention of electing five additional major generals and ten more brigadiers, he soon must have been disappointed. Congress evidently hoped to accomplish two things: get better officers, and bring an end to the incessant wrangling over rank that had characterized this army. Before it acted Congress debated several criteria for promoting men from lower grades to general officers, but in the end the legislators decided to give as much weight to the number of troops raised by each state as it did to merit and the line of succession. The result was that good officers—like Benedict Arnold, who saw five junior officers promoted in his stead—were passed over, and in one instance a New Hampshire colonel even watched with incredulity as a subordinate was advanced and became his superior. Rather than solving an acute problem Congress’s shameless par
ticularistic decision only exacerbated matters. On the eve of the congressional action John Adams had remarked that the officers “Quarrel like Cats and Dogs. They worry one another like Mastiffs, scrambling for Rank and Pay like Apes for Nutts.” Nothing had changed in the aftermath of Congress’s reform. Washington endeavored to pacify the sensitive and irascible Arnold by telling him that he deserved better for his many “honest exertions,” but such a bromide provided little comfort.11
Amidst the gloom of recruitment adversities, some good news trickled into Washington’s morose headquarters that spring. The United States reaped the first real benefit of French friendship—or at least of Versailles’ anti-British sentiments—when more than two hundred artillery pieces from Gallic supply depots reached these shores; soon additional French ships arrived bearing nearly twenty-five thousand muskets and vast quantities of flints and powder. Moreover, although nothing had come of it yet, Congress, after much prodding by Washington, established a foundry at Philadelphia and laboratories at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Massachusetts, for the production of ordnance.12
Washington seldom had the opportunity to savor good news in this war. Either bad news or a fresh crisis—or both—seemed always to lurk just around the bend. Late in March distressing news from New York reached headquarters, tidings that later would seem a fitting prelude for the series of unpleasant communiqués that would reach the commander in chief during the next one hundred or so days. About March 26 Washington learned that the British had successfully assaulted the American post at Peekskill, an installation that was supposed to guard the Highlands between Albany and New York; about five hundred redcoats not only destroyed the village, they seized or torched large quantities of the Continental army’s desperately needed stores. What made the debacle even more bitter to take was that it need never have occurred; earlier Washington had pleaded with Massachusetts to send more than three thousand men to the post, yet on the day of the assault a force of only two hundred fifty was quartered there. Washington feared that this was only the first act of a new British policy, and he worried that by year’s end all the United States’ installations on the Hudson might be gone. He was wrong. The British made no more sallies into the Highlands, although the next month a raiding party organized by Governor Tryon struck at Danbury, Connecticut, killing, wounding, or capturing more than four hundred Americans. This second raid was even more disquieting because the foe had landed, then marched unopposed for a considerable distance before it reached the depot. Once alerted, a Continental force under General Wooster had fallen on the retreating redcoats, killing or wounding 154 of the raiders, a bloody skirmish in which Wooster himself perished, the third (after Montgomery and Thomas) of the original thirteen general officers to die in this war.13
In April, with New Yorkers already enjoying their spring flowers and an occasional balmy day, Howe decided to draft still another plan for the coming campaign, this one presumably necessitated by London’s refusal to provide more troops than he had possessed in 1776. Now he proposed to abandon the projected assault on New England and to withdraw all redcoats from New Jersey; his only recommendation for action was that he sail with his army for Philadelphia.
And that was it. Plan after plan had been written and accepted, then discarded. Now no time was left. The British high command had lurched from one idea to another, until finally, insensibly, it had at last arrived at a notion of what it would do in 1777. The ministry had had no hand in concocting the plan, nor had Howe made any attempt to coordinate his operations with those of the British army in Canada. In a separate missive to Quebec, Sir William merely suggested that the goal of the northern army should be to seize Fort Ticonderoga and Albany. Ultimately, London more or less accepted Howe’s final plan, although Germain did advise him to send a diversionary force against the coasts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire while he was invading Pennsylvania, and the secretary additionally reported that the king expected that he would cooperate with the army coming from Canada. Howe chose to ignore both recommendations.14
Not only Washington but many within the British army in New York had expected Howe to open the campaign of 1777 early in the year, perhaps even in March. But it was mid-June before he left New York, and then, contrary to every plan he had submitted, Howe marched into New Jersey. Later he insisted that his aim had been to lure Washington into an engagement. It was as good an explanation as any other for what rapidly was becoming an addled campaign.15
By early May Washington still did not know what Howe might do that year. Until about the time of his victories at Trenton and Princeton he had presumed that Howe would strike at Philadelphia, but during the winter and early spring he seems to have leaned toward the view that his adversary would drive north from New York. In the middle of the month Washington’s ideas changed again; his intelligence network reported that Howe planned to evacuate New Jersey and Rhode Island, then to assail Pennsylvania. Washington immediately developed plans for occupying any Jersey post that Britain might relinquish, and by the end of the month he had broken winter quarters. The American commander assembled his force at Middlebrook, a relatively safe, protected site about seven miles from the British post at New Brunswick, while he stationed another force under Sullivan near the Delaware. His plan was to keep an eye on Howe, shadowing and harassing his army as it marched toward Philadelphia. Day after day Washington waited, all the while perplexed by contradictory surveillance reports, some of which indicated that Howe was about to embark by sea while others advised of land operations.16
On June 14 Washington had his answer. Howe had plunged into New Jersey, heading for Somerset Court House, a tiny village on the road from Middlebrook to Princeton, thence to Trenton and the Delaware. At first glance Washington believed the British would turn left and bolt for Philadelphia, but in time he deduced that Howe had no intention of crossing into Pennsylvania; he was traveling without the boats and portable bridges needed to ford the Delaware. What he must have in mind, Washington conjectured, was one of three ends: either he hoped to draw the American forces from the Highlands passes so that another redcoat army might strike there; or he sought to entice Washington from his lair and onto terrain more favorable for a general battle; or he planned to slice between Middlebrook and Trenton, dividing the American forces so that he could fall upon Sullivan’s weaker, isolated army, pinioning it against the Delaware and repaying the colonists in kind for the mortifying defeat of the Hessians on Christmas night. Fearing the latter Washington moved Sullivan to safety, then he sat tight. Now it was Howe’s move. The British commander in chief did nothing for five days, then he retreated to New Brunswick.17
Furious firefights developed along the line of retreat as Washington ordered Greene’s division, together with Anthony Wayne’s brigade and Daniel Morgan’s riflemen, to attack the rear of the British army. Although he “got a pretty good peppering,” Howe fought his way to safety on the east side of the Raritan, from which, still bothered but not endangered, he fell back to Amboy. To that point it appeared as though Washington had made Howe look foolish; he had been in the field for eleven days, and he had absolutely nothing to show for it. A blunder by Washington, however, nearly made a masterstroke of Howe’s meanderings.18
On June 25, thinking that Howe was about to sail from Amboy to New York, Washington descended from his hilly refuge. His intention, he told Congress, was to be “nearer the Enemy [in order to] act according to circumstances.” It was a dangerous, perhaps useless, foray, for Washington’s presence was unlikely to produce any beneficial results. After months of witnessing Howe’s chronic lethargy and excessive caution, Washington apparently misjudged his foe; or, possibly, Howe for once acted out of character. Seizing the opportunity the British general cast aside his thoughts of sailing and, in the dead of night, sallied out of the Jersey port town. His extemporaneous plan was well conceived. Two columns plunged west from the coast, moving parallel to one another. Their goals: simultaneously envelop Lord Stirling’s two brigad
es at Metuchen and close off Washington’s lane of retreat toward Middlebrook. Washington at last would be made to stand and fight—and Howe possessed better than a two-to-one numerical superiority.19
But little came of Howe’s suddenly venturesome behavior. His right wing, a column led by Cornwallis, did assault Stirling, inflicting moderate losses (about a dozen Americans killed and perhaps sixty wounded, in addition to the capture of several valuable field pieces). Had Stirling pulled back quickly his casualties might have been lighter; instead, his men stood and fought, and they fought well, delaying Cornwallis’s advance long enough for Washington to learn what was afoot—he originally seemed to think that Howe was a “little disgrac’d” and merely “wanted to flourish off a little”—and to fall back to Middlebrook, seven miles to the west. That was it. With Washington once again safe in the rolling hills, Howe pulled back to Amboy, this time to return to New York. His trek across New Jersey had been next to pointless, a fact that Washington believed must have caused him “much chagreen.” If Howe was not mortified, he should have been. Many of his officers were dispirited at the recent useless roving, and their disappointment eddied into the ranks of the Tories. After all, two months or more of the summer were gone with nothing to show for it. Even more, after two years of war the British could hardly point to a single gain south of Canada, save the occupation of Manhattan and Long Island, and that was counterbalanced by the loss first of Boston and now New Jersey. “All men appear dissatisfied,” Howe’s usually cheerful secretary noted a day or two after the redcoats had departed New Jersey. All were “full of Regret that the Cause of our King & Country does not proceed so quick as our Desires”; “much dejected,” “very melancholy,” “pensive,” he added on succeeding days.20
First of Men Page 32