George Washington

by Stephen Brumwell

  A shame-faced Reed promptly sent his resignation to Congress, but Washington persuaded him to stay on; given such an ill-timed display of disloyalty, it was long before the old rapport between them was reestablished. For Washington, Reed’s underhandedness was just one among many dispiriting circumstances. While his poorly clothed, ill-supplied, and shrinking army was continuing its forced march across the depressing and featureless New Jersey landscape to Brunswick, the weather had turned suddenly wintry and grim. Far from rallying to Washington’s army as militiamen, the state’s inhabitants were flocking to safeguard themselves and their property from the triumphant British by pledging allegiance to King George: true to their tradition of alternating the velvet glove with the mailed fist, the Howes had capitalized upon the captures of Forts Washington and Lee to declare an amnesty for all who took an oath of loyalty within sixty days. Thousands seized the opportunity.76

  By early evening of December 1, the redcoats and Hessians were once again snapping at Washington’s heels. As artillery batteries dueled across the Raritan, his dejected troops abandoned Brunswick and pushed on for Trenton, where boats would be held ready to ferry them across the Delaware River.77 Before quitting Brunswick, Washington fired off yet another appeal to Lee: “I must entreat you to hasten your march as much as possible or your arrival may be too late to answer any valuable purpose,” he pleaded. Even now Lee remained on the New York side of the Hudson. Writing from Peekskill the day before, he expected to enter New Jersey with 4,000 “firm and willing troops” on December 2. Lee would then be pleased to receive Washington’s instructions, although he hoped they would not prove too binding, “not from any opinion, I do assure you, of my own parts—but from a persuasion that detached generals cannot have too great latitude—unless they are very incompetent indeed.”78

  Falling back via Princeton, Washington reached Trenton on December 2; Lord Stirling and Adam Stephen were left behind at the little college town with two brigades to keep watch for the enemy, still believed to be at Brunswick. This intelligence was correct: to the consternation of many British and Hessian officers, who’d been confident of catching and destroying the rebels before they reached the Delaware, the army had halted there on December 1. As William Howe explained to Lord George Germain, his “first design extending no further than to get and keep possession of East Jersey,” Lord Cornwallis had orders to stop at the Raritan River. Captain Johann Ewald of the Hessian jägers, who had already been puzzled by the sluggishness of the march from Fort Lee, concluded that General Howe hoped to end “the war amicably, without shedding the blood of the King’s subjects in a needless way.” But Howe’s advance had gone better than expected, and he was now alive to “the advantages that might be gained by pushing on to the Delaware and the possibility of getting to Philadelphia.” After a leisurely journey from New York City, he arrived at Brunswick on December 6 with General Grant and the British 4th Brigade, and the next day Cornwallis’s crack corps resumed its stalled pursuit. The earl’s troops reached Princeton that evening, only to find the rebels already gone.79

  Tired of running and itching to shed his Fabian mantle, Washington had hoped to take a stand at Princeton. As he informed Hancock on December 5, duty and inclination alike impelled him to fight back “as soon as there shall be the least probability of doing it with propriety.” With most of his baggage and stores now safely across the Delaware, he had intended to double his rear guard at Princeton and await developments. Washington was on his way there to take command when an express messenger had brought warning of Cornwallis’s advance, and that one of his columns aimed to encircle the town. Faced with these heavy odds, the rear guard retreated to Trenton. By the morning of December 8, all of Washington’s men had been ferried across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, the last of them embarking just as the enemy’s advance troops arrived. To prevent pursuit, Washington had issued urgent orders for all craft on the river to be either secured or destroyed. But as intelligence suggested that the enemy were bringing up boats of their own, and his army was too small to cover a wide enough front to foil a crossing, Washington now feared for “the security of Philadelphia.”80

  By the time Washington quit New Jersey, Lee had at last entered the state. He now headed about 2,700 men, exclusive of militia. Assured that Washington was “very strong,” instead of marching to join him, Lee imagined that he could “make a better impression” by keeping behind the enemy. Even when he learned the true situation and that Washington’s “inadequate” force had been hustled back across the Delaware, Lee kept his distance. Given the difficulty of linking up, he wrote on December 8, might it not be better for him to attack the enemy’s rear?81 If Lee had been acting independently, this would have been a permissible strategy; it is also significant that he wrote from Morristown, a secure highland region that would become a preferred base for Washington’s own army. But Lee was expected to join Washington, not fight his own campaign, and his stubborn disregard of his commander in chief’s repeated appeals for help amounted to blind disobedience.

  Increasingly anxious for Philadelphia, Washington continued to urge Lee to join him “with all possible expedition.” Some 2,000 local reinforcements now came into camp: they consisted of a Continental regiment recruited from Germans settled in Pennsylvania and Maryland and a brigade of well-equipped and disciplined Pennsylvania militiamen, the Philadelphia Associators, under the feisty Colonel John Cadwalader; among them was Charles Willson Peale, who’d painted Washington’s portrait at Mount Vernon in 1772 and who would make many more likenesses of “His Excellency” in coming years. These reinforcements increased Washington’s force to more than 5,500. It would be stronger still if Lee’s command joined, too. Yet still he did not come. Within the week Washington learned why. The American cause “had received a severe blow in the captivity of General Lee,” he reported to his cousin Lund. Lee’s misfortune was blamed on his own “imprudence” in venturing several miles from camp when the enemy was just twenty miles off. When a “rascally Tory” informed the British, Lee was quickly snapped up by a patrol of the 16th Light Dragoons—the same cavalry regiment in which he had served with distinction in Portugal in 1762—and unceremoniously bundled off, still wearing his slippers, and without his hat or overcoat.82

  To many British officers, Lee—their fellow countryman and professional, and the victor at Charleston—was the rebels’ most impressive general, not Washington, the amateur who had been soundly drubbed at New York and since driven before them across New Jersey. Led by Lieutenant Colonel William Harcourt and a fiery red-haired young cornet named Banastre Tarleton, the troopers who captured Lee were so delighted with their exploit that they celebrated by making his horse drunk before following suit themselves.83

  Disaster though it seemed to many Americans, Major General Lee’s ignominious capture was, on balance and with hindsight, a blessing to the patriot cause, removing a fickle and unstable character. Just minutes before being taken prisoner, Lee had finished a letter to his old friend General Horatio Gates, blaming his own “choice of difficulties” in New Jersey upon Washington’s glaring incompetence. “There never was so damned a stroke” as the loss of Fort Washington, Lee opined. “Entre nous, a certain great man is most damnably deficient.”84

  Washington could only watch helplessly as enthusiasm for the revolution reached a low ebb. On December 12, Congress abandoned Philadelphia, withdrawing far southward to the security of Baltimore in Maryland; before doing so, it passed hasty legislation giving Washington “full power to order and direct all things relative to the department, and to the operations of war,” until further notice.85 This was an act of desperation, but Washington immediately seized upon it to enhance his army’s fighting strength. At the urging of Colonel Henry Knox, he issued orders for the corps of artillery to be strengthened by three more battalions. Explaining this action to Hancock, Washington emphasized that the “present exigency of our affairs will not admit of delay either in council or the field.” Referring �
��self evident” matters to Congress, “at a distance of 130 or 40 miles,” would only cost crucial time, he argued. Besides the gunners he had already authorized, Washington also wanted to recruit more Continental regiments—110 instead of the eighty-eight approved by Congress. Given the long-standing patriot suspicion of standing armies, all this had an ominous resonance, suggesting that Washington aspired to a military dictatorship like Cromwell’s, founded upon his own New Model Army of devoted shock troops. Washington had anticipated that suspicion and sought to allay it. He pledged: “I can only add, that desperate diseases, require desperate remedies, and with truth declare, that I have no lust after power but wish with as much fervency as any man upon this wide extended continent for an opportunity of turning the sword into a ploughshare.” In a supporting letter, Nathanael Greene assured Hancock that there was “no evil nor danger to the states in delegating such powers to the General.” Indeed, Greene added: “There never was a man who might be more safely trusted nor a time when there was louder call.”86

  Writing to his brother Jack on December 18, Washington confided that the struggle now seemed all but over. The disaffection of New York, Pennsylvania, and most especially New Jersey, which had prevented Washington’s army from turning at bay at Hackensack or Brunswick, was worrying enough, but the greatest bane was the old one: “the accursed policy of short enlistments, and placing too great a dependence on the militia the evil consequences of which were foretold 15 months ago with a spirit almost prophetic.” Many Continentals would be entitled to go home within a fortnight, and unless every nerve was strained to “recruit the new army with all possible expedition,” the game would be “pretty near up.”87

  But the recruiting prognosis was bleak indeed. Benjamin Rush believed that “the four eastern states” of New England would struggle to raise their quotas, “owing to that excessive rage for privateering that now prevails among them.” Serving Continental troops were impatient “for the extirpation of their enlistments” so that they, too, could “partake of the spoils of the West Indies.” Rush believed that at least 10,000 New Englanders were manning privateers, men who by rights should be enlisting in the army destined to decide the fate of America. That force “must consist of seventy or eighty thousand men, and they must all be fit for the field before the first day of May next,” he warned. The gossipy Rush, who accompanied the Pennsylvanian militia, also voiced grave doubts about the army’s leadership. He was not alone. “Since the captivity of General Lee,” he observed, “a distrust has crept in among the troops of the abilities of some of our general officers high in command. They expect nothing now from heaven-taught and book-taught generals.” Although Rush didn’t mention names, Washington and his henchmen Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox were the obvious targets.88

  Congress had fled, the British and Hessians were scouring the east bank of the Delaware for a way across, and by New Year’s Day Washington expected to have little more to stop them than the raw Philadelphia militia and a handful of Virginian and Maryland Continentals. Even now he did not despair. After reporting these dire developments to Lund, his thoughts suddenly turned to a topic of no less interest and importance: the stables at Mount Vernon. He had sent Lund “a very pretty mare” and also “a very likely, as well as a very good horse to match the bay you have for Mrs. Washington.” Having suffered a cut, he was “troublesome” and “vicious,” but also amorous—“as much so I think after mares, as any stallion I ever met with,” Washington believed.89

  Happy thoughts of horseflesh offered Washington a brief respite from the daily grind of the grueling war to preserve the Revolution. The stark reality of the situation was laid bare on December 19, 1776, with the publication of the first part of Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis. Paine, who had earlier rallied public opinion behind American independence with his phenomenally popular pamphlet Common Sense, and who’d shared the army’s dispiriting withdrawal across New Jersey as an aide to Nathanael Greene, opened with a blunt and uncompromising statement: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Many in Washington’s army, not least its commander, would have agreed, watching helplessly as those Paine stigmatized as the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” slunk off. Yet, reading on, they might have found consolation and hope in Paine’s prediction that those who now stood firm would merit “the love and thanks of man and woman.” After all, “the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” Within a week, those words would reverberate in one of the most remarkable turnarounds in military history.

  * In 1776 Congress created four administrative “Departments” for the Continental Army, designated “Southern,” “Northern,” “Eastern” (New England), and “Middle.” a “Western Department,” covering the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania, was added In 1777. from spring 1776, the main field army under Washington’s personal command was associated with the “Middle Department,” embracing New York up to the Hudson Highlands, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. Although commander-in-chief, Washington allowed the leaders of regional armies considerable autonomy.

  8

  Victory or Death

  Lacking the boats he needed to ferry his troops across the Delaware River and continue hounding Washington’s army, on December 14, 1776, William Howe called a halt to the victorious campaign that had begun on Long Island four months earlier, quartering his redcoats and Hessians in a great swathe across New Jersey. The general himself retired to New York, keen to enjoy its pleasures. He no doubt felt that he’d earned them: with Charles Lee captured, Congress fled to Baltimore, and Washington chivvied into Pennsylvania, the revolutionaries’ cause appeared to be teetering on the very brink of collapse. To cap his triumph, Howe had just received the coveted red ribbon of the Order of the Bath from King George III as a reward for trouncing the rebels.

  The temptation to push future operations into Pennsylvania and capture Philadelphia now prompted Sir William to drastically revise his projected strategy for 1777. At the end of November, he had envisaged that no fewer than 10,000 of his men would strike north up the Hudson when the new campaign opened, cooperating with a fresh expedition down the river by British forces in Canada. An equal number would attack Boston; that force would advance from a new base at Newport, Rhode Island—which a detachment under Clinton captured on December 8. Allowing 7,000 men to garrison that port and New York, Howe’s plan allocated 8,000 troops to cover New Jersey and pin down Washington by menacing Philadelphia. This scheme involved 35,000 men in all, and Howe had requested a hefty reinforcement of 15,000 to implement it. However, the unexpectedly rapid recovery of New Jersey convinced him to reshuffle his priorities: under a fresh plan, sent to Lord George Germain on December 20, the main offensive was now to be directed against Washington in Pennsylvania. In consequence, the projected drive against New England from Rhode Island was postponed until the reinforcements arrived, while a mere 3,000 men would hover on the Lower Hudson, to screen New Jersey and “facilitate in some degree the approach” of the northern army from Canada.1

  To ensure that his army could push swiftly forward across the Delaware River as soon as it froze thick enough to support his men and guns and give the maximum protection to New Jersey’s Loyalists, Howe’s army was spread along a very extensive line of cantonments, stretching from Paulus Hook on the Hudson to the banks of the Delaware River. The chain’s southern end, on the Delaware itself, was tethered to outposts at Bordentown, Burlington, and Trenton. Each settlement was held by brigade-strength detachments of three battalions; save for the Highlanders of the 42nd, all were Hessians. Some twelve miles farther back at Princeton was a strong supporting force of redcoats: five battalions of infantry plus three troops of light dragoons. Farther back still, on the Raritan River, sizable detachments held Hillsborough and Brunswick. Smaller bodies of troops were distributed between another twelve posts running north. Overall command of the occupying forces in New Jersey rested with Howe’s crony, Major General James Grant, who made his headquar
ters at Brunswick, more than thirty miles from the Delaware.

  By any usual rule of military procedure, Grant’s three advanced posts would have been deemed dangerously isolated and exposed. But as intelligence suggested that patriot morale was in a tailspin and Washington’s performance during the summer and autumn had scarcely suggested audacity, there seemed little reason to fear for them. This was certainly the view of Grant, whose recent experiences on Long Island and Manhattan had done nothing to alter the opinions of the rebels he’d notoriously voiced in the House of Commons. Grant’s perspective was shared by the commander at Trenton—the most vulnerable post of all—Colonel Johann Rall. Although advised to construct a redoubt for his artillery, Rall neglected to do so. Trusting to their bayonets alone, his men had already routed the American rebels at White Plains and Fort Washington; should they have the temerity to attack him at Trenton, they would meet the same response.2

  Far from dissolving, as Howe and his commanders believed, Washington’s army on the Pennsylvanian side of the Delaware was slowly regaining strength. The indefatigable Major General Sullivan had joined on December 20 with 2,000 of the troops recently commanded by the unfortunate Charles Lee. Another 500 Continentals under Horatio Gates arrived from Ticonderoga, salvaged from Philip Schuyler’s shattered northern army; Gates soon left for Philadelphia, but his men stayed. Among them was a sixteen-year-old fifer, John Greenwood of Boston, later to become Washington’s dentist. As Christmas approached, Washington commanded a respectable force of about 6,000 men fit for duty. With many Continental enlistments due to expire at midnight on December 31, Washington was determined to preempt Howe’s advance on Philadelphia and land a blow of his own while he still had an army to command. Indeed, Washington had been contemplating an “important stroke” against the enemy as early as December 14; a week later, on December 21, Pennsylvania congressman Robert Morris wrote to him hoping that the rumors he had heard of his plans to “cross into the Jerseys” were true.3