by Ron Carter
At age seventeen William purchased a cornet’s commission in the light dragoons under the command of the Duke of Cumberland. Less than a year later he was a lieutenant leading a headlong charge of regulars against the French Marshal Saxe, at Flanders. Following the War of the Austrian Succession, he served in the British Twentieth Foot, under the watchful and approving eye of the legendary General James Wolfe. With the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War between the French and the English for sole claim to America, William and George came to the great, sprawling North American wilderness—William under command of General James Wolfe, George under General James Abercrombie.
At the critical second siege of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, just off the northern coast of Nova Scotia, William was ordered to command a regiment in an amphibious landing. With drawn sword, he led his men ashore, then stormed into the muskets and bayonets of Frenchmen crouched in trenches and behind breastworks. In fierce hand-to-hand fighting the British forces overran the French, and with his sword high over his head, William swung his command in behind the center of the French army to flank them, engage them, and pound them into surrender.
General Wolfe was effusive in his praise of young William, whose stock had risen like a meteor in the British military. It was amidst laurels and with honors ringing in his ears that William learned of the heartbreaking battle for Fort Ticonderoga. General Ambercrombie, who had no cannon, had attempted to storm the sixteen-foot-thick walls of the five-sided fort using nothing but his infantry. With the need for the missing cannon so painfully obvious, he had thrown his regulars against the north and west walls again and again, while the French slaughtered them with grapeshot and musketball. Three decades later occupants of the fort would use the unburied skulls of Abercrombie’s decimated regulars for drinking cups and their shinbones for tent pegs.
Tragically, among the fallen was Viscount George Augustus Howe, respected and beloved by his troops and by the Americans as well. For a time William deeply mourned the death of his brother, one of the brightest and finest in the British military. Those nearest to William often wondered if he ever fully recovered from the loss.
Wars do not wait on those who mourn. The following year it was Colonel William Howe who led his regiment into battle, fighting its way up the steep path to take the high ground at the battle of Quebec. In a spectacular attack he pounced on the flank of General Montcalm, turned it, and fought on to victory in the decisive battle of the Seven Years’ War. In 1760, as a brigadier general famous on both continents, he once again led his troops in the taking of Montreal. Two years later, as adjutant general, he was with the army that wrested Havana from Spain.
Thoughtfully he considered a phenomenon he had observed among the Americans, and the Indians, in the vast, sprawling forests. With only their weapons and a small pouch of cheese and bread, they could move eighty miles through impenetrable forests in one day, strike with deadly efficiency the next, and return the next. There was not a single military command in all Europe that could match it. Thus it was that in 1762 he introduced to the British army the startling new innovation of elite troops trained to travel light and fast, strike hard, and disappear. Within months such military units sprang up wherever the British army was found.
With the surrender of the French in 1763, the now famous Brigadier General William Howe was rewarded with the nominal title of governor of the Island of Wight, located just off the English coast, southwest of London. The title was honorary, his responsibilities almost nonexistent, and he let neither interfere with his weakness for a cup, a deck of cards, and a woman on his arm. His elegant coach was constantly on the winding road to London, where he indulged himself in his chosen pleasures. The rather good-natured, tall, dark-complexioned brigadier with the prominent nose and large, black, brooding eyes, who spoke little, soon became prominent in London’s high social circles.
He had never lost his fascination with and admiration of colonial America and the Americans. Never had he known the raw power he felt in the forests and mountains and rivers of that vast, primeval land. He sensed in her people a passion for freedom that moved him profoundly, and he saw in them a backbone of steel, a hardheaded practicality, and a rough wit and humor that carried them through the worst of times. He felt a bond, a kinship, with these Americans, and they reciprocated his friendship. When General Howe’s brother George Augustus fell at the battle of Fort Ticonderoga, the Americans mourned the loss. The grieving Massachusetts Assembly caused a monument honoring the beloved Viscount George Augustus to be erected in Westminster Abby in London. Neither William nor his illustrious brother, Richard, who had risen to the office of viscount and admiral in the Royal British Navy, ever forgot the honor the sympathetic Americans had bestowed on George Augustus.
In troubled silence Howe watched the storm gathering over the American colonies. He chaffed at the imposition of the tax stamp act, by which the British intended to bring the colonials to heel, but held his silence as a member of the British House of Commons, where he represented the Nottingham District. It was no surprise to the general when the Americans burned the tax stamps and hung the British tax collectors in effigy. Nor was it a surprise when on December 16, 1773, the colonials disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians, boarded the British cargo ships Dartmouth, Beaver, and Eleanor as they lay at anchor in Boston Harbor, and dumped three hundred forty-two chests of British Ceylon tea into the sea rather than pay the tea tax imposed by His Majesty’s government. General Howe murmured, but held his peace. It was only when King George issued orders to close down Boston Harbor until the hotbed of rebels was brought into obedience that General Howe broke his silence. He was no politician, but with his understanding of the Americans, and America, and the battle-experienced eye of one of the finest brigadiers in Europe, he saw what the politicians did not.
The colonies would fight for their declared rights if pushed to it.
General William Howe took his stand. In the winter of 1774 he openly informed his constituents in the Nottingham District that if war erupted, he would not accept a command against the Americans, if the King should offer it.
If King George knew of Howe’s sympathy for the Americans, it was not apparent in his decision on how to crush the rebellion that was taking shape in the colonies. In naming three generals to send as advisers to Governor Thomas Gage in his efforts to subdue the rebellious patriots in Boston, the King selected William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton. Howe, the taciturn warrior; Burgoyne, the bon vivant dandy; and Clinton, the obstinate planner. Gage was to remain in command but rely heavily on their advice. In the King’s reckoning, Howe’s seniority and prior experience in the colonies during the Seven Years’ War made him the premier and obvious choice to lead this mismatched triumvirate of British military authority.
Howe startled his Nottingham constituents, who held strong sympathies with the struggling colonies, when he suddenly reversed his prior declarations by stating, “A man’s private feelings ought to give way to the service at all times.” Having inexplicably reversed himself, Howe, with Burgoyne and Clinton, boarded the Cerberus, and on May 25, 1775, thirty-six days after the Americans had stunned the world with their catastrophic defeat of the British at Concord, walked down the gangplank onto the docks of Boston Harbor.
The orders King George III had given General Howe all rested on one fundamental: destroy the American army.
The American militiamen dug in on Breed’s Hill, Bunker Hill, and Dorchester Heights, at Charlestown, just across the bay from peninsular Boston. Gage fretted, then ordered Howe to kill or capture them all. After British ships in the harbor had pounded the American positions with cannon, Howe set his teeth and led 2,500 of Britain’s best up Breed’s Hill. From behind their breastworks, American marksmen cut them down in rows. Howe licked dry lips and led his men up the hill a second time. They never reached the breastworks. With dead and dying regulars scattered all over the hill, Howe took a deep breath and led what was left of his men up the hill a third t
ime. This time, with ammunition and gunpowder running out, the Americans backed off the hill and gave it to the British. Howe shook his head in disbelief. Nearly half his command lay behind him, dead or dying.
Never had he paid such a price for one hill.
Gage blockaded Boston Harbor to starve out the rebels. The rebels blockaded the same harbor to starve out the British. In March 1776 the King, Gage, and Howe had had enough. Gage was relieved of command and ordered to return to London. Howe was given full authority over all British troops in the colonies. He immediately ordered them to prepare to evacuate Boston, and on March 17, 1776, led them out as they marched to the critically important colonial seaport of New York to prepare for the battle that was sure to come.
General Washington, newly appointed commander in chief of the fledgling Continental Army, followed. On the morning of August 27, 1776, General Howe trapped the unwary Americans on Long Island and crushed them. Within days Washington’s army had been defeated again at White Plains, Fort Washington, and Fort Lee and was in panic-driven flight across New Jersey to save anything they could of their decimated force. In December, beaten, huddled, and starving on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, Washington led the remains of his army in one last desperate attempt for redemption. On the night of December 25, 1776, he crossed the Delaware in a blizzard and stormed the town of Trenton on the morning of December 26. The entire Hessian garrison of nearly 1,400 men was killed or captured. Infuriated, Howe ordered General Charles Cornwallis to take 8,000 men to Trenton with but one objective: get rid of Washington and what was left of his army. January 3, 1777, overnight, Washington marched around Cornwallis, then continued twelve miles north to take Princeton, then moved on to winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey, a geographic enclave protected by the Thimble Mountains.
Cornwallis was apoplectic. Howe was in a towering rage. He paced, grinding his teeth, knowing he dared not launch a winter attack on Washington in his mountain stronghold. He could only remain in his command headquarters in New York City, lay his plan, and wait.
He cooled. No matter. Washington would be nearby when the greening of spring provided enough forage in the hills and valleys for Howe’s 3,000 horses. In the meantime he would enjoy his cup, his gaming table and, with the beautiful, blue-eyed Mrs. Betsy Loring on his arm, becoming the darling of the New York social swirl. Employed as the very well-paid British commissary of prisoners, Betsy’s husband, Joshua Loring, was content to travel about, take care of business, and look the other way while Howe and Betsy blatantly flaunted their affair.
* * * * *
Those who had lived on the New York islands knew what was coming. Briefly stirring the early morning July heat, an onshore breeze had blown in from the Atlantic, moved west the length of Long Island, then across the East River and New York Harbor to Staten and Manhattan Islands, on past the mighty North, or Hudson, River, and over the sheer, towering Palisades—the three-hundred-foot-high granite cliffs on the New Jersey side. By ten o’clock the air had turned sultry, muggy. By noon all movement of air had stopped, and New York was locked in a dead, stifling vacuum. A breathless hush settled over the lush forests and woods, the farms, and the villages and hamlets.
For a hundred miles in all directions, people cast nervous eyes southwest, searching for the first signs of a gray-purple line to come creeping over the horizon, listening for the deep rumble of distant thunder and watching for lightning flashing in the bowels of billowing storm clouds. Nervous farmers herded their sheep and cows out of the fields and into barns or pens, confident that Ben Franklin’s lightning rod would reach into the heavens and magically draw lightning away from their buildings and livestock.
On Manhattan Island people glanced nervously south toward the waterfront, where unnumbered commercial ships were tied to the wharves and piers. Beyond the docks, out in the harbor, a forest of masts marked more than four hundred British warships and transports lying dead at anchor under the command of Lord Admiral Richard Howe. Eight thousand anxious British seamen scrambled in the ropes in the rigging high above the decks, checking the lashings that bound the gathered sails to the yards, adding to them where howling wind might find loose canvas and shred a sail.
On the southern end of the island, where the great fire of September 21, 1776, had turned half the buildings on the waterfront into blackened skeletons as far north as the Trinity Church, thieves and beggars and castoff human flotsam crawled sweating from their makeshift hovels into the vacant streets. These were the dregs of society, and they had infiltrated the waterfront wreckage while it was yet smoldering, to turn scorched planks and rotting canvas into a camp now called Canvastown. They emerged from the squalor of their dark world to test the dead air and shade their eyes as they squinted into the heavens, judging how long before the storm would come thundering. A New York summer lightning and thunderstorm could rip a ship from its anchor or moorings and drive it smashing into the wharves. Frantic shipowners and salvage crews would then come swarming. Behind them would come insurance agents to reckon the insurance claims. And behind them would come constables. The prospects made the inhabitants of the squalid camp nervous. Far too many of those living in the filth of Canvastown were wanted for crimes ranging from assault to murder. They studied the southwest horizon and peered at the glassy harbor surface, then disappeared back into the charred blackness of the gutted buildings.
Across New York Bay, on Staten Island, two British sentries stood at rigid attention on either side of the huge doorway leading into the mansion that General William Howe had appropriated to serve as his command headquarters. In the strange quiet, they held their Brown Bess muskets at their sides, sweltering in their heavy red coats and long white stockings and casting furtive eyes toward a clear, blue sky—waiting, wondering.
Inside the mansion, General William Howe closed the French doors into the huge library and walked to a great, ornately carved and upholstered chair at one end of a black, two-ton, imported ironwood table. He laid a rolled map down before he glanced around at his staff of officers, who were standing at attention. To his right was his brother, Lord Admiral Richard Howe, face passive, nearly apathetic. General Sir Henry Clinton stood beside him, short, thin-lipped, corpulent, combative. Lord General Charles Cornwallis, with his round, fleshy face, peered past Clinton, watching General Howe. Beyond Cornwallis was Colonel Charles Stuart, known for his accuracy in grasping harsh realities. Across the polished expanse of the table, General Philip de Heister stood at attention. Next to him the Earl of Percy waited patiently, and beyond him stood Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Vaughn. The last man was General James Grant, who had his mouth set in disgust. It was Grant who had made it contemptuously clear that if he had command of five thousand British regulars he could march from one end of the United States to the other and bring every adult male to heel. Four engraved silver trays were spaced down the center of the table, each bearing a decanter of red wine and an array of crystal goblets.
The wall behind Howe was a huge stone fireplace with a thick, twelve-foot-wide oak mantel. Murals and paintings from the finest European artists of the day graced the other three walls. Above the table a two-hundred candle, cut-crystal chandelier caught the light and turned it into a thousand tiny prisms. The carpet was thick, plush, with an intricate hand-design from a master carpet weaver in Bombay, India. The windows were all partially open for circulation, but an hour earlier the dead calm outside had turned the room into a sweltering oven.
General Howe gave a hand gesture. “Be seated.”
He pursed his mouth and waited while each man pulled his upholstered chair back from the table and sat. Howe’s forehead was furrowed as he struggled in his straightforward mind to force the nonstraightforward pieces of a gigantic, jumbled puzzle to come together. He reached to unbutton the top three buttons of his tunic.
“Loosen your tunics or take them off, if you like.”
Half the officers loosened the top buttons while the others slipped theirs off and hung them o
n the backs of their chairs. Each drew a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at the perspiration that had formed on his forehead and had begun to trickle down his cheeks and nose.
Richard Howe raised his eyes to his brother. He’d rather be leading a charge with a broken back than conducting this staff meeting. He began inspecting his hands, working with his fingernails.
“I think a little history is in order,” General Howe began.
The men settled back in their chairs and wiped again at the sweat on their faces.
“The King’s orders were to bring the rebels into submission. To do that Lord Germain sent the biggest armada in history. Over four hundred forty ships and thirty thousand troops. We hurt General Washington’s army here in New York last year, and at White Plains, and they retreated clear to Pennsylvania. They came back across the Delaware and surprised the Hessians at Trenton and then took Princeton.”
Cornwallis’s face reddened at the word Princeton.
Howe continued. “Then they went into winter quarters at Morristown, where we couldn’t make a winter attack.”
He paused to order his thoughts and pick his words. The men continued wiping at their faces while they attempted to keep their minds focused. Not one word of what Howe had said thus far had given them anything they did not already know.
Howe wiped at his own face, then unrolled the map and anchored the four corners with small leather pouches filled with sand. “Last month General Washington brought his army out of the Thimble Mountains and camped them here.” He dropped a long, slender finger on a place marked “Middlebrook,” just south of the Raritan River. “That camp is surrounded by the Watchung Mountains, and it gives him a strong advantage if we should try to attack him there. The price would be too high, and he has too many places to retreat.”