Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

by Joseph J. Ellis

  This in turn meant that the political agenda should proceed apace, undistracted by unwelcome news from New York. On September 9, for example, the delegates finally got around to revising the style manual for all official correspondence, so that it replaced “United Colonies” with “United States.” On September 17, they adopted the final draft of Adams’s Plan of Treaties, designed to forge a diplomatic alliance with France, subsequently choosing Jefferson to join Silas Deane in Paris to negotiate the treaty. (Jefferson declined for personal reasons, chiefly the fragile health of his wife.) On September 20, they approved another Adams draft, the Articles of War, which standardized regulations for promotions, procedures, and punishments within the Continental Army and which Adams freely acknowledged “were copied from the British Articles of War, Totidem Verbia.”17

  The underlying presumption remained that regardless of what happened on the battlegrounds of New York, the American Revolution was going forward. If Adams needed any boost to his revolutionary confidence—and he did not—he received it from his indomitable Abigail. If all the men in Washington’s army were killed or captured, she declared, the Howe brothers would have to contend with “a race of Amazons in America.”18

  While the British had convinced themselves that the war was all but over, the leaders in the congress wanted to make a clear statement that it had barely begun. For months, Washington had been warning that an American army of short-termers supplemented with militia could not compete on an equal basis against British regulars. Now the fiasco on Long Island and the demoralized and deteriorating condition of the troops on Manhattan had proven his point. “We are now, as it were, upon the eve of another dissolution of our Army,” he warned Hancock, meaning that desertions were increasing and enlistments were about to expire, “and unless some speedy and effectual measures are adopted by Congress, our cause will be lost.”19

  Greene chimed in with a rant against the illusory prowess of militia, now deserting in droves. “The policy of Congress has been the most absurd and ridiculous imaginable,” he wrote his brother, “pouring in militia who come and go every month. A military force established on such principles defeats itself.” Washington seconded the verdict, observing that if the battle of Long Island taught anything, it was that “to place any dependence on Militia is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff.”20

  Unknown to Washington and Greene, the Continental Congress had already voted to give them everything they were asking for and more. On September 16, the delegates ordered the creation of 88 new battalions, another 60,000 men. Enlistments would be encouraged by signing bonuses of $20, and enlistments “for the duration” by the promise of 100 acres of western land at the end of the war.21

  In order to implement this order, troop quotas were established for each state according to population. (Interestingly, although the delegates could not agree on whether representation in the new government should be by state or proportional according to population, they easily agreed that big states like Virginia and Massachusetts should bear a larger burden militarily.) Hancock wrote to the governors of all the states, urging them to “bend all your Attention to raise your Quota of the American Army.”22

  This new initiative reflected the recognition that events in New York had dashed all hopes for a short war. As Washington put it, the winning of independence “is not likely to be the Work of a day.” Moreover, in the kind of prolonged struggle they now faced, reliance on patriotic zeal, much like reliance on militia, would no longer suffice. “When men are irritated & the Passions inflamed, they fly hastily and cheerfully to Arms,” Washington intoned in his most realistic mode. But those heady days were now over, and the war was entering a new phase in which discipline and endurance replaced patriotic virtue as the ingredients essential for victory. “To expect among such People as compose the bulk of the Army that they are influenced by any other Principles than those of Interest,” Washington warned, “is to look for what never did, & I fear never will happen.”23

  The decision by the Continental Congress represented a collective commitment to provide Washington with the kind of permanent standing army he believed necessary to win the war. It also represented a symbolic statement of political resolve that, no matter what happened to Washington’s army on Manhattan, the pool of manpower available to the American cause was virtually inexhaustible, a message calculated to generate tremors in the corridors of Whitehall.

  But the decision was also symbolic in another sense, for its implementation depended upon compliance by all the state legislatures, which were predisposed to fund militias within their own borders rather than recruits for the Continental Army. And since a mandatory draft defied the republican principles that they were all purportedly fighting for, the order was really a request, and compliance was wholly voluntary, which meant that a new 60,000-man army was never going to happen. Washington might well have argued that republican principles were meaningless if America lost the war, and the leadership of the Continental Congress obviously agreed. But the political reality was that the delegates in Philadelphia were making a promise they could not keep.

  To be sure, all the state governments remained resolute on the question of American independence. (The Howes had expected some defections after Long Island.) But when it came to providing money and men for the Continental Army, each state government made the protection of its own citizenry the highest priority. They were no more willing to cede authority to the Continental Congress than they were to recognize the sovereign authority of Parliament. They were united on the question of independence, but only as long as each state was permitted to pursue that goal as it saw fit.

  IT IS DIFFICULT to generalize about the bulk of the American citizenry. No question, these were the most important hearts and minds of all and therefore the ultimate target of the Howe strategy, which intended the humiliation of the Continental Army to serve as a demonstration of British military superiority. Something akin to a referendum on independence had occurred in May and June, with decisive results. Would the results be equally decisive or dangerously divisive if a referendum occurred in September?

  No such referendum occurred, of course, but even if it had, no major change would have been likely, because most of the population remained ignorant that the Continental Army had suffered any kind of defeat at all. And the simple reason for the widespread ignorance was that American newspapers did not report it. Abigail Adams was reading the newspapers as intensively as anyone, and she complained about the lack of coverage: “We seem to be kept in a total Ignorance of affairs at [New] York.… Who fell, who [were] wounded, who made prisoner or their Numbers is as undetermined as it was the day after the Battle. If our army is in ever so critical a state, I wish to know it, and the worst of it.”24

  In fact, one of the Boston newspapers Abigail was reading, The New England Chronicle, reported a glorious American victory on Long Island.

  The ministerial army attacked our lines on Long Island at three different places, with their utmost force; but the intrepidity of the soldiers of the United States, joined with that vigor becoming to a free people, repulsed them; that they were obliged to retreat precipitously, with great loss, the particulars of which we have not yet been able to learn.

  The Chronicle also reported, prominently but inaccurately, the death of General James Grant, the British officer who had previously predicted that he could subdue the American rebellion in a matter of weeks with 5,000 British regulars. Several other newspapers picked up this story, which had great patriotic appeal given Grant’s disdain for the fighting prowess of American troops.25

  The Connecticut Courant accurately described the size of the British and Hessian invasion force and the encirclement of American troops on Gowanus Heights, but then reported that the beleaguered Americans “bravely fought their way through the enemy, killing great numbers of them and brought off many prisoners.” The Pennsylvania Packet repeated this version of the battle almost word-for-word, but then added the firsthand descri
ption, wholly fabricated, of “the glorious death of General Stirling from a witness who was close to him when he fell.”

  The Newport Mercury printed an account by a Rhode Island soldier that accurately described the heavy American losses and Stirling’s bravery as well as his capture but emphasized the steadfast courage and eventual victory of the American troops, despite being outnumbered. The Virginia Gazette emphasized the “high spirits” of the Continental Army on the eve of the battle, but then offered no coverage of the battle itself. A later story erroneously reported that “General Howe had his leg dangerously shattered by a ball” and that an epidemic had broken out among the Hessian troops, who were purportedly on the verge of mutiny.26

  Virtually all of the newspapers provided extensive and accurate coverage of the meeting with Lord Howe on Staten Island and the subsequent rejection of his peace initiative by the Continental Congress, a decision that received editorial accolades from all quarters as the proper statement of American defiance. Only a few papers mentioned the charmed and desperate escape at night over the East River to Manhattan, presumably because it did not square with earlier accounts of American victory on Long Island.27

  The press, in short, did not provide an unbiased version of the Battle of Long Island or the glaring problems within the Continental Army. In this highly charged and vulnerable moment, loyalty to “The Cause” trumped all conventional definitions of the truth so completely that journalistic integrity became almost treasonable. As a result, there was little discernible wavering in the commitment to American independence in any province beyond the New York theater, where loyalists were volunteering in droves to join the British Army. The partisan American press had concealed the full extent of the demoralized condition of the Continental Army. Few Americans knew they were losing the war.

  ON SEPTEMBER 12, General Howe learned that his brother’s efforts at negotiation had failed. This was the same day that the council of war decided to abandon the defense of Manhattan. From Howe’s perspective, this meant that the city and port of New York had to be taken. The irascible Clinton questioned this decision, proposing a diversion toward lower Manhattan, followed by the main attack at King’s Bridge, thereby “corking the bottle” and sealing the entire Continental Army on the island. “Had this been done without loss of time,” Clinton later claimed in his Memoirs, “while the rebel army lay broken in separate corps … each part of it [must have] fallen into our power one after the other.”28

  Hindsight is not required to recognize the strategic wisdom of Clinton’s proposal. All of Washington’s general officers realized that the Howe brothers had it in their power to entrap them on Manhattan, which Reed described as “this tongue of land, where we ought never have been.” Indeed, this was precisely the reason why they voted to move the entire army to the northern end of Manhattan, where they would then try to fight their way off the island.29

  The only dissenters happened to be the two commanders in chief. Washington reluctantly accepted that the city and port of New York could not be defended once the British occupied Brooklyn Heights, but he was still searching for a way to engage the British Army on Manhattan before escaping to the mainland. The Long Island humiliation had to be redeemed, the officers and men of the Continental Army needed to have their confidence restored, and “The Cause” needed a victory of some sort, no matter how token.

  Both of the Howe brothers detested Clinton and would have rejected his strategic advice even if it had come with endorsements from the gods. But more significantly, it was now abundantly clear that they did not want to trap and destroy the Continental Army on Manhattan. Despite the disappointing results of Lord Howe’s conference on Staten Island, they retained the conviction that support for the rebellion was skin-deep, and they regarded their role as peace commissioners as more important than their role as military commanders. They wanted to limit the carnage on both sides until the Americans came to their senses. Intriguingly, both Washington and the Howes were subordinating military strategy to the larger battle for hearts and minds.

  AFTER EXPLORING SEVERAL options on the east side of Manhattan for their attack, the Howes chose Kip’s Bay, between what is now Thirty-second and Thirty-eighth streets. On the morning of September 15, 4,000 British and Hessian troops were transported across the East River, preceded by five warships that had anchored in the bay that night, poised to lay down an artillery barrage before the invasion. Ironically, the American evacuation of Manhattan was already under way, so if the British had waited another day, they would have landed unopposed.30

  Instead, the shoreline at Kip’s Bay was defended by about 800 Connecticut militiamen and recent recruits to the Continental Army, including Joseph Plumb Martin. These were the most inexperienced troops under Washington’s command. Their defensive position consisted of a shallow trench topped off by mounds of dirt. Many had only spears for weapons. No orders had been issued about how to respond to an attack, except to hold their position. At daylight, Martin remembered looking out at the British warships and the upward of eighty cannons leveled at his ditch, wondering what he was supposed to do.

  The answer to that question became obvious as soon as the naval barrage began. All five ships let loose at once, producing a display of firepower that several British naval officers described as more intense than any they had ever witnessed. Within minutes the American defensive line was blown away, and Martin, as he put it, “began to consider which part of my carcass was to go first.” The bombardment lasted for a full hour, during which time one British ship, the Orpheus, expended over 5,000 pounds of gunpowder. By that time Martin and his fellow soldiers, quite understandably, had long since decided to flee the killing zone as quickly as possible. The British and Hessian troops landed unopposed, without a single casualty. The few American soldiers who remained in the trench were summarily executed when they tried to surrender. It was Long Island all over again.31

  Clinton led the invasion force, and he was under orders to seize the beachhead, then await the arrival of the second wave of 9,000 British troops led by Howe. Since he was unopposed, Clinton could have moved across Manhattan and thereby cut off the 5,000 American troops under Putnam coming up from the south. But Clinton obeyed his orders, against his own better judgment, which allowed “Old Put” to squeeze past the British and Hessian force on what is now Riverside Drive. His precocious young aide, Aaron Burr, had identified the escape route.

  What happened next was one of the low points for the American side in the war. The panic that seized the troops fleeing the bombardment at Kip’s Bay was a plausible response to the overwhelming firepower of the British navy. But as they fled north, their fear proved contagious, creating an epidemic of shock that caused whole regiments of Connecticut militia and levies to toss aside their muskets and knapsacks when confronted by only token British opposition. “The demons of fear and disorder seemed to take full possession of all and everything that day,” Martin remembered. The retreat became a rout.32

  Washington encountered the frantic troops in full flight while riding south from his headquarters to the sound of gunfire. He made a futile effort to establish order by instructing officers to make a stand behind a stone wall, but the men just ran past him. One witness reported that “he struck several officers [with his riding crop] in their flight, three times dashed his hatt to the ground, and at last exclaimed, ‘Good God, have I got such Troops as these?’ ” The approaching British infantry came within fifty yards, but his staff could not persuade their commander to leave the field. Eventually Joseph Reed grabbed the reins of his horse and led Washington to safety, cursing all the way. The next day, Greene recalled the scene, claiming that Washington was “so vext that he sought Death rather than life.”33

  The man of almost preternatural control lost it all in that terrifying moment and was fortunate to escape death or capture. For Washington, it was the nadir, the conclusive demonstration that all his hopes for the fighting prowess of the Continental Army had been delusiona
l. And since he regarded the army as a projection of himself, the events of the day spread a stain over his own reputation that he found intolerable, in his honor-driven world worse than death itself. When word of the debacle reached Adams two days later, he too was stunned, though he did not take the humiliation personally. “I am so outraged by the infamous cowardice of the New England troops,” he observed, “that I am ashamed of my Country.”34

  But even cowardice had an upside, since the headlong flight of the troops meant that most of them made it safely to the American lines at Harlem Heights. The number of killed, wounded, or captured was only a fraction of the losses on Long Island, even though the sting of the defeat was more painful for Washington.

  Meanwhile, the Howe brothers could be excused for basking in the reflected glow of their triumph. With only negligible casualties, they had captured their primary objective, the city and port of New York, and had delivered another devastating blow to the military pretensions of the Continental Army along the way. All was going according to plan.

  Lord Howe sensed that this second thrashing might have cracked the will of the rebels, much as the naval barrage at Kip’s Bay had broken the spirit of the helpless defenders in their pitiful ditch. On September 19, he issued a proclamation to “the American people,” thereby bypassing the delegates in the Continental Congress, who had shown themselves to be beyond redemption or rational recognition of their predicament, and appealed to the populace at large.