American Crisis

by William M. Fowler Jr.

  27 Diary of William Smith, April 13, 1782, NYPL.

  28 Thomas Jones, History of New York During the Revolutionary War (New York: New York Historical Society, 1879), 1:24–25.

  29 Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Knopf, 1980), pp. 69–72.

  30 JCC, 19:332.

  31 Roger J. Champagne, Alexander McDougall and the American Revolution in New York (Schenectady: New York State American Revolution Bicentennial Commission in conjunction with Union College Press, 1975), pp.174–75.

  32 Ibid., p. 175.

  33 Ibid., p. 177.

  34 Lincoln to Nathanael Greene, August 16, 1782, BLP, reel 6A.

  35 GW to Heath, August 25, 1782, GWLC.

  36 James C. Neagles, Summer Soldiers: A Survey and Index of Revolutionary War Courts Martial (Salt Lake City: Ancestry, 1986), p. 53.

  37 GW to McDougall, August 25, 1782, GWLC.

  38 Katherine Mayo, General Washington’s Dilemma (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938).

  39 Henry Clinton to Welbore Ellis, May 3, 1782, DAR, 19:290.

  40 In the eighteenth century prisoners of value were not calculated by a simple comparison of numbers. Each rank had an equivalent. In June 1782 the British headquarters in New York made the following calculation:

  41 Commissioners Dalymaple and Elliot to Henry Clinton, April 8, 1782, and Andrew Elliot to Henry Clinton, April 8, 1782, both CPNAC. Not mentioned, but understood, was the fact that most of the Americans held by the British were under short-term enlistment. Even if they should be released, it was likely that they would simply go home, whereas the British soldiers exchanged would return to the ranks.

  42 GW to Henry Clinton, December 31, 1781, FW, 23:418; Albert G. Overton and J. W. W. Loose, “Prisoner of War Barracks in Lancaster Used During the Revolutionary War,” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society 84 (1980), pp. 131–34. German prisoners were distributed at other locations in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

  43 Benjamin Shield to Lincoln, December 10, 1781, BLP, reel 6.

  44 For an overview of exchange and parole, see Betsy Knight, “Prisoner Exchange and Parole in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 48 (April 1991), pp. 201–22.

  45 GW to President of Congress, December 27, 1781, FW, 23:408.

  46 Arthur B. Tourtellot, “Rebels Turn Out Your Dead,” American Heritage Magazine 21 (August 1970), p. 15.

  47 In 1837 Martha Piatt, the only surviving daughter of Joshua Huddy, petitioned the United States Congress for payment in money and land in recognition of the services and tragic death of her father. As part of that petition, Piatt gathered a large collection of contemporary evidence supporting her claim. These documents are contained in “Representatives of Captain Joshua Huddy” (to accompany bill H.R. No. 935), House of Representatives, 24th Congress, Second Session (Report No. 227), Louis Masur, Rites of Execution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 56–58.

  48 William Franklin to Joseph Galloway, May 11, 1782, DAR, 19:298.

  49 “Representatives of Captain Joshua Huddy,” p. 35.

  50 There are several secondary accounts: see Mayo, General Washington’s Dilemma and David Fowler, “ ‘Loyalty Is Now Bleeding in New Jersey,’ Motivations and Mentalities of the Disaffected,” in The Other Loyalists: Ordinary People, Royalism, and the Revolution of the Middle Colonies, ed. Joseph S. Tiedemann, Eugene R. Fingerhut, and Robert W. Venables (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2009), pp. 45–77.

  51 “Representatives of Captain Joshua Huddy,” p. 23.

  52 Heath, Memoirs, pp. 309–10.

  53 Ibid., p. 310.

  54 GW to Clinton, April 21, 1782, FW, 24:146–47.

  55 William Willcox, ed., The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775–1782 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 359.

  56 Sheila Skemp, William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 261; Willcox, The American Rebellion, p. 360.

  57 Clinton to Welbore Ellis, May 11, 1782, DAR, 21:72.

  58 Willcox, The American Rebellion, pp. 359–61.

  59 Franklin to Clinton, May 2, 1782, DAR, 21:62.

  60 GW to Brigadier General Moses Hazen, May 18, 1782, FW, 24:263–64.

  61 The surrender at Yorktown had not been “unconditional.” Cornwallis’s officers either had been paroled or had remained with their regiments (the Articles of Capitulation called for one officer to every fifty enlisted men) to be kept under the same conditions as those who departed on parole. Articles of Capitulation. Burgoyne’s army had laid down its arms under a “Convention.”

  62 Capitulation, article 10.

  63 Moses Hazen to GW, May 27, 1782, GWLC.

  64 Ibid. Asgill was in fact nineteen.

  65 Ibid.

  66 James Gordon to Lincoln, May 27, 1782, BLP, reel 6.

  67 GW to Moses Hazen, June 4, 1782, FW, 24:306.

  68 JCC, 22:218.

  69 GW to Brigadier General Elias Dayton, FW, 24:307.

  70 Hamilton to Knox, June 7, 1782, PAH, 3:91–93.

  71 Ibid.

  Chapter Five

  1 Clinton’s had only recently received word that his resignation had been accepted. Welbore Ellis to Clinton, March 6, 1782, CPNAC.

  2 Barnet Schecter, The Battle for New York (New York: Walker Books, 2002), pp. 204–18; Judith Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 21–43.

  3 Rivington’s Royal Gazette, May 8, 1782; Pennsylvania Packet or the General Advertiser, May 11, 1782.

  4 Clinton to Major General Charles O’Hara, April 14, 1782, CPNAC.

  5 Shelburne to Haldimand, April 22, 1782, DAR, 19:285; Haldimand to Clinton, April 28, 1782, in ibid., 19:317; John O. Dendy, “Frederick Haldimand and the Defence of Canada, 1778–1784” (Ph.D diss, Duke University, 1972), p. 230.

  6 New York Gazette and Mercury, May 13, 1782.

  7 L. F. S. Upton, The Loyal Whig: William Smith of New York and Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 136.

  8 William Willcox, Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1964), p. 463; Historical Memoir from 26 August 1778 to November 1783 of William Smith, ed. W. H. W. Sabine (New York: Arno Press, 1971), p. 506.

  9 Upton, The Loyal Whig, p. 118.

  10 Ibid., p.120.

  11 K. G. Davies, “The Restoration of Civil Government by the British in the War of Independence,” in Red, White and True Blue: The Loyalists in the Revolution, ed. Esmond Wright (New York: AMS Press, 1976), pp. 111–34.

  12 Smith to Germain, March 23, 1781, DAR, 19:275.

  13 See Thomas Jones, History of New York During the Revolutionary War (New York: New York Historical Society, 1879), 2:126; L. F. S. Upton, “William Smith,” DCB online; Smith fled New York with Carleton and eventually became chief justice of Quebec (Lower Canada).

  14 Robertson to Jeffrey Amherst, December 8, 1781, in The Twilight of British Rule in Revolutionary America: The New York Letter Book of General James Robertson, ed. Milton Klein and Ronald W. Howard (Cooperstown: New York State Historical Association, 1983), pp. 231–33.

  15 Shelburne to Carleton, April 4, 1781, DAR, 21:52–54.

  16 Carleton to Washington, May 7, 1782, GWLC.

  17 “stained the reputation of Britons” was deleted from the final letter Washington sent to Carleton, May 10, 1782, FW, 24:241n.

  18 JCC, 22:263.

  19 Paul H. Smith, “Sir Guy Carleton:, Peace Negotiations and the Evacuation of New York, Canadian Historical Review, 50 (1969), p. 254.

  20 Sheila Skemp, William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 262; GW to William Livingston, May 6, 1782, FW, 24:226–27.

  21 Franklin to Joseph Galloway, May 11, 1782, DAR, 21:73.

  22 Morgann to Shelbu
rne, June 12, 1782, Shelburne Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan.

  23 For an analysis of attempts by the British to restore civil government during the Revolution, see Davies, “The Restoration of Civil Government by the British in the War of Independence,” pp. 111–34.

  24 William Willcox, ed., The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775–1782 (New Haven: Yale University Press,1954), p. 353; Germain to Clinton, January 23, 1779, in ibid., p. 398; extract of the minutes of a council of war held at New York, January 23, 1782, in ibid., pp. 593–94; Klein and Howard, The Twilight of British Rule in Revolutionary America, pp. 52–53.

  25 Upton, The Loyal Whig, p. 138.

  26 Skemp, William Franklin, p. 262.

  27 Ibid., p. 261.

  28 A transcript of the trial is printed in “Representatives of Captain Joshua Huddy” (to accompany bill H.R. No. 935), House of Representatives, 24th Congress, Second Session (Report No. 227).

  29 Robertson to Carleton, June 18, 1782, CPNAC.

  30 Transcript of the trial, p. 23.

  31 Ibid., p. 37.

  32 Carleton to GW, July 7, 1782, GWLC.

  33 GW to Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, July 10, 1782, FW, 24:422.

  34 Carleton to GW, July 25, 1782, GWLC. In the letter Carleton refers to Chief Justice Frederick Smith—a likely clerical error.

  35 GW to Carleton, July 30, 1782, FW, 24:441.

  36 Instructions to Major General William Heath, August 3, 1782, in ibid., 24:456.

  37 Carleton to GW, August 1, 1782, GWLC.

  38 GW to Heath, August 3, 1782, FW, 24:458.

  39 Carleton to GW, August 13, 1782, GWLC.

  40 GW to President of Congress, August 19, 1782, FW, 25:40.

  41 Ibid., p. 41.

  42 Katherine Mayo, General Washington’s Dilemma (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), p. 212.

  43 Lady Asgill to Comte de Vergennes, July 18, 1782, in ibid., p. 229.

  44 Ibid.

  45 Cornwallis to Carleton, August 4, 1782, CPNAC.

  46 Vergennes to GW, July 29, 1782, in Mayo, George Washington’s Dilemma, p. 231.

  47 The Life, Public Services, Addresses and Letters of Elias Boudinot, ed. J. J. Boudinot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 1:248–51.

  48 JCC, 23:715.

  49 GW to Asgill, November 13, 1782, FW, 25:337. Some years later Asgill was quoted as accusing the Americans of holding him in terrorem by constructing a gallows outside his room so that he could preview his fate. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1954), 6:64.

  50 Carleton to Shelburne, June 18, 1782, DAR, 21:87.

  51 Morgann to Shelburne, June 12, 1782, SPCL.

  52 Ibid.

  53 Ibid.

  54 Morgann to Shelburne, May 10, 1782, Shelburne Papers.

  55 Morgann to Shelburne, June 12, 1782, in ibid.

  56 Franklin to Shelburne, March 22, 1782, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Ellen Cohn et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 37:386; Shelburne to Commissioners, June 5, 1782, DAR, 21:77.

  57 David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 77–82; Charles R. Ritcheson, “To an Astonishing Degree Unfit for the Task: Britain’s Peacemakers, 1782–1783,” in Peace and the Peacemakers: The Treaty of 1783, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter Alberts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), pp. 70–100.

  58 JCC, 20:617, 651, 652; Richard B. Morris, The Peacemakers: The Great Powers and American Independence (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 214–15.

  59 Laurens was sailing aboard the packet Mercury, which was also carrying secret dispatches, among them a draft treaty between the United States and the Netherlands. When the British read the treaty, it gave them an excuse to declare war on the Netherlands, sparking the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War. Laurens was released from parole in exchange for Cornwallis. Papers of Henry Laurens, ed. Philip Hamer et al. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968–2003). 15: passim.

  60 Morris, Peacemakers, pp. 260–64.

  61 Shelburne to Commissioners for Restoring Peace, June 5, 1782, DAR, 21:79

  62 Ibid., p. 80.

  63 “Guy Carleton,” DCB online.

  64 Smith Diary, August 2, 1782, NYPL; Upton, The Loyal Whig, p. 139.

  65 New York Times, June 11, 1904, quotes a letter of Sir Walter Scott to Robert Southey giving credence to the story. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (New York: Knopf, 1991), pp. 17–18.

  66 Upton, The Loyal Whig, p.139.

  67 Ibid.

  68 Captain William Feilding to Earl of Denbigh, August 10, 1782, in The Lost War: Letters from British Officers During the American Revolution, ed. Marion Balderston and David Syrett (New York: Horizon Press, 1975), p. 219.

  69 William Heath to John Hancock, August 14, 1782, BPL, ms. 1182.

  70 Carleton to Shelburne, August 14, 1782, DAR, 21:111.

  71 Jonathan Williams to (?), September 28, 1782, BPL, ms. 1188.

  72 Townshend to Carleton, October 27, 1782, DAR, 21:155.

  Chapter Six

  1 Clagdon to Gates, March 10, 1782, HGP, reel 13.

  2 Lincoln to Knox, August 7, 1782, BLP, reel 9.

  3 Quoted in David B. Mattern, Benjamin Lincoln and the American Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), p. 129; E. Wayne Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1984), p. 209. Morris to Lincoln, May 7, 1782, PRM, 5:121.

  4 GW to Morris, May 17, 1782, GWLC.

  5 GW to Secretary of Foreign Affairs (Robert R. Livingston), May 22, 1782, FW, 24:271.

  6 For a strategic view of the Revolution, see Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), particularly part 3, pp. 237–97. At France’s urging, Spain declared war on Great Britain in 1779, while refusing to enter into a formal alliance with the United States. For its trouble France promised the return of Gibraltar, lost through the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

  7 David Hannay, Rodney (reprint, Boston: Gregg Press, 1972), pp. 164–67; Mackesy, War for America, pp. 446–59.

  8 GW to McHenry, September 12, 1782, FW, 25:150–52; Washington to Clinton, May 7, 1782, in ibid., 24:228.

  9 GW to Livingston, June 5, 1782, in ibid., 24:315.

  10 Charles M. Thompson, Independent Vermont (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), pp. 45–46.

  11 Ibid., p. 105; Jere Daniell, Colonial New Hampshire (Millwood, VT: KTO Press, 1981), p. 137; Paul Wilderson, Governor John Wentworth and the American Revolution (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 187–200.

  12 GW to Philip Schuyler, October 26, 1775, FW, 4:46n.

  13 GW to President of Congress, May 12, 1778, in ibid., 11:381.

  14 Frank Smallwood, Thomas Chittenden: Vermont’s First Statesman (Shelburne, VT: New England Press, 1997), p. 70.

  15 Diary of William Smith, October 24, 1781, NYPL.

  16 Haldimand to Clinton, April 28, 1782, DAR, 21:61.

  17 Haldimand to Clinton, September 27, 1782, in ibid., 19:225; John O. Dendy, “Frederick Haldimand and the Defense of Canada, 1778–1784” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1972), p. 241.

  18 GW to Heath, December 15, 1781, GWLC.

  19 GW to Joseph Jones, July 10, 1781, FW, 22:354.

  20 GW to Chittenden, January 1, 1782, in ibid., 23:420–23.

  21 GW to Joseph Jones, February 11, 1783, in ibid., 26:123.

  22 The Sinews of Independence: Monthly Strength Reports of the Continental Army, ed. Charles H. Lesser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 224. The total army including those not fit for service numbered 10,500.

  23 GW to Heath, May 8, 1782, FW, 24:232.

  24 Heman Swift to Washington, May 4, 1782, GWLC; Washington to Swift, May 6, 1782, FW, 24:22
7–28; General Orders, May 12, 1782, in ibid., 24:249; James C. Neagles, Summer Soldiers: A Survey and Index of Revolutionary War Courts Martial (Salt Lake City: Ancestry, 1986), pp. 93, 143, 217; John A Nagy, Rebellion in the Ranks: Mutinies in the American Revolution (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2008), p. 299.

  25 Congress approved the first set of Articles of War on June 30, 1775. A second revised set was approved on September 20, 1776. Subsequent amendments were added. JCC, 2:111–22; JCC, 5:788–807; Charles P. Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 134–135; Robert H. Berlin, “The Administration of Military Justice in the Continental Army During the American Revolution, 1775–1783” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1976), pp. 22–27.

  26 Thacher’s Journal, January 1, 1780, http://www.americanrevolution.org/thacher.html, accessed September 15, 2009.

  27 GW to Colonel John Lamb, September 18, 1782 FW, 25:175.

  28 JCC, 7:265–66.

  29 James H. Edmondson, “Desertion in the American Army During the Revolutionary War” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1971), pp. 242, 250.

  30 Neagles, Summer Soldiers, p. 34. Neagles’s estimate comes from a sampling of surviving orderly books. While this methodology is hardly flawless, there is no reason to believe that his estimates are not within reason.

  31 For examples of Washington’s intercession to lessen punishment, see: GW to General Elias Dayton, May 18, 1782, FW, 24:264; GW to Colonel John Lamb, September 18, 1782, in ibid., 25:175; Berlin, “The Administration of Military Justice,” p. 86.

  32 Nagy, Rebellion in the Ranks, pp. 297–99. Nagy, pp. 299–301, also identifies twenty-six American naval mutinies.

  33 Richard Miller, In Words and Deeds: Battle Speeches in History (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2008), p. 1; Allen Bowman, The Morale of the American Revolutionary Army (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1964), pp. 29–30; Neagles, Summer Soldiers, p. 37.

  34 At the time, Washington had three aides assisting him: Jonathan Trumbull, Benjamin Walker, and David Humphreys. These three officers divided duties, but on this day Trumbull seems to have borne the lion’s share of drafting letters. See FW, 24:271–80.

  35 GW to Secretary of Foreign Affairs, May 22, 1782, in ibid., 24:271, 274; GW to Mathews, May 22, 1782, in ibid., 24:274–75.