Patriots

by A. J. Langguth

  The Sons’ riotous spirit in destroying the statue troubled General Washington. He knew the war had entered a new stage. The colonials were no longer a rebel force, free to harass the ruling powers. The Declaration had transferred those powers to the Americans, and he soon had the opportunity to impress that fact on the British.

  On July 12, Admiral Howe sent two junior officers ashore with a letter. An American colonel realized when he saw the way it was addressed that Washington would refuse to accept it because it didn’t recognize his military rank. The American adjutant general, Joseph Reed, went to deal with the messengers.

  One of them, a Lieutenant Brown, rose, took off his hat and bowed. “I have a letter, sir, from Lord Howe to Mr. Washington.”

  Reed said, “Sir, we have no person here in our Army with that address.”

  Lieutenant Brown persisted. “Sir, will you look at that address.”

  The cover read, “George Washington, Esq.”

  “No, sir,” said Colonel Reed, “I cannot receive that letter.”

  Brown seemed dismayed. Admiral Howe, he said, was only sorry he hadn’t arrived a few days sooner, suggesting that the presence of his fleet might have forestalled the Declaration of Independence.

  Brown withdrew. Four days later, Admiral Howe sent the letter back under a flag of truce. Now it was addressed to “George Washington, Esq., etc.” This time Washington himself sent it back. The next day the admiral asked whether the American commander in chief would receive a visit from Howe’s adjutant general. Washington agreed, and a meeting was set for July 20.

  That conversation lasted almost half an hour, and the adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel James Patterson, was careful to address Washington by the title “Excellency.” Surely, Patterson argued, the letter’s salutation was proper. It was the same style of address used for ambassadors or plenipotentiaries whenever disputes arose over rank. Neither Admiral Howe nor his brother, the general, had meant to denigrate the rank of General Washington, whose character they held in the highest esteem.

  Colonel Patterson then took out the letter. He did not presume to hand it to Washington directly. Instead, he laid it on the table between them and pointed out that although it was the earlier letter, it now had two additional “et ceteras.”

  Washington agreed that yes, the “et ceteras” could imply everything about his rank, but they could also imply anything. From its address, this could be a private letter. He must decline to accept it.

  Colonel Patterson had anticipated that reply and proceeded to tell Washington what the letter said. The king had empowered the Howe brothers to settle the differences in America. Admiral Howe hoped this meeting would be the first of many. Washington suspected that the British had no desire for peace and were only marking time until they were ready to attack. He told Patterson that if Lord Howe had come to America with great powers to pardon, he had come to the wrong place. Not having been the ones to give offense, the Americans needed no pardon.

  Patterson seemed confused by the dry jest. As he was leaving, he thanked Washington for not making him wear the customary blindfold during his trip to the American headquarters. Washington urged him to stay on for a light meal, but Patterson was eager to return to his commander and declined so much as a glass of water. Taking back the unopened letter, Colonel Patterson returned to the fleet. To America, George Washington was the patriotic commander of the nation’s army. To the British, he was still a rebellious civilian planter from Virginia.

  —

  Every day that General Howe did not act allowed Washington to improve his fortifications and send for more arms and ammunition. By early August, the Americans were still bracing for an attack that did not come. Washington had always written candidly to his distant cousin Lund Washington, the caretaker at Mount Vernon, and by August 19 he was confessing that the delay was incomprehensible to him. Howe was apparently expecting another five thousand troops—German soldiers hired by George III. But even without them, Howe’s troops already outnumbered the Americans. “There is,” Washington confided, “something exceedingly mysterious in the conduct of the enemy.”

  Howe’s delay may have been less mysterious than humane. Washington was prepared to make the British pay a steep price for New York. But William Howe had been present on Breed’s Hill, as Washington had not, and had come away with a higher opinion than Washington’s of American fighting spirit. Howe was not prepared to lose a thousand or fifteen hundred British troops. He had been schooled in his country’s accepted military thinking, which made preserving his forces a commander’s first obligation. Any other action would be, in Howe’s word, “criminal.”

  Washington was making good use of the hiatus, but he faced a new crisis when his commander on Long Island came down with malaria. Washington tended to like men until they gave him reason to change his mind, and he had warmed to Nathanael Greene from the moment they met in Cambridge. Washington had decided that Greene would be his replacement should he be killed or captured. Greene had come to the war a thirty-three-year-old Quaker with no military experience. But from the time of the Boston Tea Party he had been preparing himself for the coming struggle, studying military manuals and reading the lives of history’s great generals. He had also started to drill his neighborhood guard in Coventry, Rhode Island, so that by the time he presented himself to Washington he was already in charge of his colony’s three Continental regiments. Greene had barely taken over his New York command when fever confined him to bed. Washington was forced to turn to a belligerent Irishman named John Sullivan.

  New Hampshire had sent Sullivan to the First Continental Congress, where serving as a delegate had become a way for men with military ambitions to advance themselves. In 1775 Sullivan left the Congress with the rank of brigadier general. After the British evacuated Boston, Washington had sent him to lead reinforcements to Canada. When the Canadian campaign became a shambles, the Congress had considered replacing Sullivan. Washington signed an understated letter that praised Sullivan’s spirit and dedication but noted that the general “has his foibles,” which showed themselves “in a little tincture of vanity” and too great a desire to be popular. Congress took the hint and gave Horatio Gates the Northern command. The price Washington paid for his candor was finding Sullivan back at his side, convinced he had been ill-treated and burning to prove himself as Nathanael Greene’s replacement on Long Island.

  Sullivan knew nothing about the terrain he was supposed to defend. On August 20 he went to Long Island. The next day British ships began to move, but by nightfall Washington still couldn’t be sure of their destination. A thunderstorm that night stopped the British advance. In the morning, Sullivan reported that British soldiers, including Henry Clinton’s grenadiers back from Charleston, had landed on Long Island. The Americans estimated that eight thousand British soldiers had come ashore and were marching to Flatbush, only three miles from the outlying American positions.

  General Washington sent immediate reinforcements to Sullivan. He couldn’t be sure, however, that Howe wouldn’t simultaneously attack New York. Throughout the morning of August 23, Washington stayed at his headquarters, assuring New Yorkers that he wouldn’t burn the town to the ground and surrender it. When flood tide at 11 A.M. didn’t bring British boats, Washington crossed to Long Island, checked Sullivan’s deployment of his men and returned to New York. Later that day, Sullivan announced that the Americans had driven the British back by half a mile. But Sullivan was known to exaggerate.

  The next day, still uncertain about where the British would strike, Washington again went to Long Island to inspect the defenses. He had named Israel Putnam as overall commander of the island’s forces, and Sullivan remained in charge of the outer defenses. Riding along the front lines, Washington saw much that displeased him. American soldiers were shooting off their weapons aimlessly as they waited for the British attack. The stray bullets not only were a waste of ammunition but could defeat a propaganda tactic. Washington had ordered messages written in
German for the Hessian mercenaries, urging them to defect. The leaflets were wrapped around plugs of tobacco and strewn where the German troops would be sure to find them. The idea had come from Benjamin Franklin, who recommended offering the Germans good pay and free farmland. Washington didn’t want useless fire from the American lines to prevent any Hessian from deserting.

  His years of overseeing an estate had made Washington attentive to detail, but one eluded him during his inspection of the defenses. Because American strategy was based upon holding Brooklyn Heights, the soldiers had built a string of forts over a distance of one mile. Between them and the British camp lay a five-mile stretch of heavily wooded hills that provided a natural defense. Over the years, farmers had beaten three main roads through the dense woods—the Gowanus road to the west, the Flatbush road running through them, and the Bedford road a mile to the east. There was a minor road even farther east, the road from the town of Jamaica, but John Sullivan wasn’t concerned about it, nor was George Washington. Sullivan put his senior commander, Lord Stirling, in charge of the Gowanus road; it was nearest to the beaches and the British landing sites. General Sullivan took the command of the other two roads for himself.

  His American colleagues had come to accept William Alexander’s use of the title “Lord Stirling” as a harmless pretension. During a trip to England seventeen years earlier, Alexander had claimed the earldom of Stirling, disregarding the fact that it was extinct. The House of Lords ruled against him, but back home in New Jersey Alexander had begun to use his new name.

  His lordship was no fool, and the unguarded road from Jamaica preyed on his mind. He learned that a Pennsylvania regiment was riding out along the road each day but withdrawing at night. Stirling came up with fifty dollars of his own money to pay five young officers to patrol the Jamaica road by night. There had been four hundred volunteer cavalrymen from Connecticut who could have performed that surveillance, but when the horsemen refused to dismount and fight on foot General Washington had ruled that cavalry were useless around these islands and sent them home.

  His fellow generals regarded Lord Stirling’s private guard as a waste of money. As they inspected American defenses on August 26, Israel Putnam and John Sullivan saw no cause for concern, and the Pennsylvania regiment returned at nightfall to say that there had been no movement among the British on the plain below. Secure in the sanctuary of the hills, the American Army went to sleep for the night.

  —

  As the battle for Long Island drew near, Henry Clinton, like John Sullivan, needed to vindicate himself for a previous failure. Clinton was back in New York fresh from his fiasco in Charleston, where he had expected troops to wade across a river seven feet deep. He was once again subordinate to William Howe, but Clinton was more familiar with the terrain around New York. His father had been governor of the colony, and young Henry had lived there until the age of nineteen. Now, riding out with other officers to scout a landscape he still remembered, Clinton saw where John Sullivan had positioned his troops. He returned to camp with a plan he was sure could destroy the American Army with one stroke.

  William Howe rejected the plan out of hand. Clinton was not popular around the headquarters, and the other officers agreed that his tactic somehow smacked too much of the German school. By the next morning, that vague objection had faded, and General Howe announced that he would execute Clinton’s plan after all. He would attack the Americans from the Jamaica road.

  Throughout the day of August 26, 1776, Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis moved his British troops near the beaches. But he left behind hundreds of pitched white tents to persuade American scouts that his men were still in camp. About 8 P.M., a British regiment went quietly through Jamaica Pass, taking prisoner any New Yorkers who might alert the American troops. Behind them came a thousand dragoons in red coats and helmets covered with black feathers. Leading the attack were Lord Cornwallis and Henry Clinton. Another two thousand grenadiers and infantrymen followed, dragging fourteen cannon. After midnight Howe planned to bring another seven thousand men. Despite his initial resistance, Howe was now committing two thirds of his total force on Long Island to the surprise attack. The rest would make diversions—one British unit along the Gowanus road, the Hessians at the American center.

  At about 3 A.M., Clinton and Cornwallis seized the five mounted guards on the Jamaica road that Lord Stirling had posted with his own money. The march so far had been accomplished in complete secrecy. Clinton had insisted that his men saw down underbrush to make way for the cannon they were pulling rather than hack through it with axes that might ring out on the night air.

  William Howe arrived with his men before dawn. He was still uneasy about the coming battle and demanded that Clinton prepare his troops to attack. Clinton refused. Since the Americans didn’t stop us at the pass, Clinton explained, they can’t take up a position here. The battle is over.

  For Howe, that seemed far too easy, and he protested. “They’ll open fire on us as soon as we reach Bedford.”

  “But we’re here,” Clinton told him. “We’re in Bedford.”

  —

  The British feint along the Gowanus road was turning out just as successfully. When John Sullivan was notified after midnight that the long-awaited British attack had begun there, he sent another battalion to support Lord Stirling. At the center stood a line of Germans, led by General Leopold von Heister, who weren’t advancing but whose cannon could cover the two central passes. Neither General Sullivan nor Israel Putnam foresaw the calamity that awaited them. Putnam didn’t order Stirling to draw back, and he sent no emergency message to George Washington.

  About 8:30 A.M., Washington was rowed once again to Long Island to oversee his first battle. The bright sun promised a hot day after a chilly August night. To Washington, the situation looked serious but not hopeless. The British certainly wouldn’t have launched so furious an attack against Lord Stirling unless they intended to make the Gowanus road their main arena, and Stirling seemed to be holding fast. The Hessians still weren’t moving, and from their positions they seemed likely to stay in place for at least another hour. If the Americans showed any mettle, they would be slow in giving up the wooded hillside and could reach Brooklyn Heights with a minimum of losses.

  Walking the lines, Washington was at his most imposing. He told his colonels that he had two loaded pistols and would shoot any man who turned his back this day. He reminded them that everything worth living for was at stake at this place. “I will not ask any man to go further than I do,” Washington said. “I will fight as long as I have a leg or an arm.”

  At about nine o’clock, troops under John Sullivan and Lord Stirling saw soldiers coming down the road behind them. They assumed they were Americans sent as reinforcements. Then, from a mere fifty yards away, the British opened fire. Colonel Samuel Miles, whose Pennsylvania regiment had been patrolling the Jamaica road each day, found himself cut off from the American lines. He tried to fight, but when he saw the odds he released his men to run for their lives. Those familiar with the woods managed to reach the American base at Brooklyn. But by midafternoon, Hessian soldiers had found Miles and a few others hiding among the trees. A hundred and fifty-nine of his men were taken prisoner.

  Once the Germans got their orders to join the battle, they were fearsome. British commanders told them that the Americans had vowed to be especially rough with any mercenary. As the Americans tried to reload their muskets, German soldiers rushed at them, caught them between the trees and stabbed bayonets through their chests. When John Sullivan’s men tried to retreat to the fortress on Brooklyn Heights, the British cavalry barred their way and trapped them between Cornwallis’ men and the roaring, charging Germans.

  George Washington had reached Brooklyn before the battle began. Noticeably shaken, he watched the slaughter below him. One soldier overheard him murmur, “Good God! What brave fellows I must lose this day!”

  Along the wooded defenses, Lord Stirling had no choice but to fight
on, even as the British trap was tightening around him. For nearly four hours, Stirling’s men fought in close ranks. The British remained content to shell his position while their allies hurried around to cut off his retreat. After one last desperate charge, Stirling sent his men retreating through the deep marshes around Gowanus Creek. Many were shot as they slogged through the pond, and a dozen weak swimmers drowned in its depths. Stirling himself took two hundred and seventy Maryland soldiers and turned to confront Cornwallis. Men said afterward that he had fought like a wolf. But Stirling was as rigid about the rules of war as the British had been a year before. Instead of letting his men break ranks and take advantage of the woods and fences—the way the British and Germans had begun to do—he held them in a tight formation on exposed ground. Five times his band of Americans tried to cut through the British to safety in Brooklyn. Ten of them succeeded. The rest were killed or taken prisoner by the Germans closing in on them. Lord Stirling was reported missing. Then a dispatch reached George Washington that John Sullivan was lost as well.

  Throughout the remainder of the afternoon, Washington waited at the Brooklyn fort while the few survivors of the frontline defense straggled back to safety. The British had been ordered not to storm the Heights. General Howe intended to take the hills in good time with an orderly strategy that would hold British casualties to what he termed “a very cheap rate.” But Henry Clinton was delighted that his tactic had succeeded beyond his expectations. When he saw the Americans fleeing in panic, he couldn’t bring himself to stop his men. Some of Clinton’s assault columns chased the Americans right to their own trenches on the Heights.

  Behind their earthworks, the Americans milled about. Their officers were missing, many in their ranks were dead or held prisoner in the woods below. George Washington tried to restore their spirit, shouting to them to remember what they were fighting for. Some troops obeyed and strengthened their defenses, particularly toward the Jamaica road. But when the British regrouped and charged, as they would, the American Army would be broken and the rebellion over.