—
The British scheduled their attack for 4 A.M. on September 15. Henry Clinton argued to the last for a flanking movement rather than a frontal assault. He responded to William Howe’s reasons for overriding him, “You may make every argument you wish. I will oppose you with all my might until four o’clock. But from that moment on, I will lead the attack as if I had planned it myself.”
Howe ordered Clinton to land his men at Kips Bay, north of the town of New York, at the center where Washington’s line was weakest. But as the British moved toward the riverbank in flat-bottomed boats, they confronted formidable-looking American defenses. Clinton thought the landing would be the most dangerous he had ever witnessed. The German troops in their open boats were singing hymns to keep up their spirits.
Their prayers were answered. The thunder from the eighty big guns of the British ships along the East River terrified the American soldiers waiting on the shore. Men thought that the sound alone would blow their heads off, and they leaped from their ditches to avoid being buried under sand and sods of earth. American officers saw that their lines could not hold. Without orders from General Washington, who was expecting the assault on Harlem Heights, they told their men to flee. The troops needed no urging. They broke and ran.
Waiting at the wrong place for the attack, George Washington heard guns, mounted his horse and galloped the four miles from the Heights to the riverbank where the British and the Germans had landed. Masses of terrified American soldiers poured toward him up the Post Road. Washington rode into their midst and cried out to them, “Take the walls!” as he pointed to fences where they could still mount a defense. Then, because they were clogging the road and blocking an orderly retreat, he shouted, “Take the cornfield!”
Some men ran off the road to do as Washington directed. Most surged forward blindly. At an orchard to their right, a few Americans moved toward the Germans with their arms raised in surrender. On Long Island, some of Howe’s soldiers had pretended to give up, waited until the Americans drew close and then raised muskets and fired into their faces. This day the Germans were taking no chances. Despite the Americans’ upraised hands, they shot them down and stabbed them with bayonets.
Washington was lashing out with his cane at the backs of the fleeing soldiers. He cursed them as “dastardly sons of cowardice” and threatened to run his sword through the next man who deserted. At one point he shamed a few hundred of the men into making a stand. But when a small unit of British soldiers appeared—no more than sixty or seventy—the Americans again turned and ran, leaving Washington and his aides unprotected. Nathanael Greene thought Washington was so angry over his men’s conduct that he seemed more willing to die than to live. Other men said he threw down his hat in despair and cried, “Good God, have I got such troops as those?” But Washington’s luck held, and he rode away unscathed.
New York was lost. With it went much of the American Army’s baggage and tents and fifty or sixty cannon. Only three British soldiers had been killed, another eighteen wounded. As Washington retreated with his faltering troops to Harlem Heights, Israel Putnam was leading his men in the same direction. The British troops marched down Broadway in New York at 4 P.M., twelve hours after their landing, while Putnam’s soldiers escaped along a parallel route next to the Hudson River. General Howe might have cut Putnam off with a rapid pursuit, but instead he was looking around town for rooms where he could be comfortable during the coming winter. When one of his officers pressed him to hurry after the retreating Americans, the general swore and said he would not be rushed. A conclusive victory was again within his reach, but Howe had decided that he could not crush George Washington this year.
The American Army was safe behind its ramparts on Harlem Heights, a rise four miles long and beyond the range of Admiral Howe’s naval guns. The Americans now numbered about ten thousand. Their losses included a few dead, and twenty officers and three hundred men taken prisoner. In New York, Tory civilians came out of hiding to cheer loudly and carry British officers through the streets on their shoulders. The women were as wild with joy as the men, and one hoisted Britain’s banner on a flagpole. Other loyalists guided the British soldiers from door to door as they placed a large “R” for “Rebel” on every patriot house.
During the night, one last skirmish was fought on the plains below Harlem Heights. A band of British infantrymen had tracked the Americans back to their redoubt, and in the gloom before dawn a British bugler blew “Gone to Earth.” It was the hunter’s call when the fox had found his hole. Joseph Reed, the American adjutant general, thought he had never felt such a sensation of shame. The jeering notes seemed to crown America’s disgrace.
British soldiers inspected the elaborate trenches Washington’s men had dug throughout New York and laughed over how quickly the Americans had deserted them. One officer noted that the rebel defenses “appear calculated more to amuse than for use.” The morning after the battle, Washington was forced to report to the Congress from Harlem Heights on another disastrous rout. Given his position, he could hold the Heights, Washington said, if his troops would behave with a little resolution. But, he added, experience had taught him that he might wish for such behavior but could not expect it.
As if to prove him wrong, a sharp engagement broke out below the Heights before his letter was finished. American soldiers stood their ground, and for the first time in the war the British ran and the Americans chased after them. Washington feared a trap and recalled his men behind their defenses. But the brief exchange—in which the Americans suffered sixty casualties and the British lost a hundred more—cheered the American troops and even gave their commander a flicker of hope. Joseph Reed wrote to his wife, “You can hardly conceive the change it has made in our Army. The men have recovered their spirits and feel a confidence which before they had quite lost.”
But during that invigorating exchange, Washington’s orders had often been reversed or ignored, and although morale had risen briefly, he knew how wretched his prospects were. The two defeats had cut to the quick of Washington’s pride. He even considered resigning his command, but his few confidants convinced him that the resulting confusion would doom the cause. His personal bravery had never been in doubt. From his time as a youthful commander, he had dared bullets and survived them so often that he may have believed he was indestructible. Washington’s reputation as a strategist, however, was far more vulnerable, and every day it was assaulted. To Lund Washington he poured out his heart: He had never been so unhappy from the day he was born. If he wanted to wish the bitterest curse on an enemy this side of the grave, he would put the man in his place, with his feelings. He cautioned his cousin not to pass along any of this despair unless Washington fell in battle after all. Then the public should hear about militiamen who drew their provisions but never rendered an hour’s service, about officers not worth the bread they ate.
—
Near midnight on September 20, 1776, General Washington was called from his quarters to watch the smoke from a fire as it spread over the southern tip of the island below him. Patriots who had hidden in New York after the British invasion had set three fires along the waterfront. From there they could trust the wind to spread the flames on flakes of burning shingle. The British could not ring the customary alarm, because the Americans had carted off the church bells to melt down for ammunition. Or so they had claimed. New York’s fire engines also were out of commission, which led the British to conclude that the fires had been planned before the evacuation. William Howe suspected that the blaze meant a night attack and refused to let most of his men fight the fire until daylight. But a few British soldiers did patrol the streets, and when they found men in one house with firebrands the soldiers killed them and threw their bodies into the fire. The old and the sick, women and children, ran from house to house, thinking they were safe, and running out again, shrieking, as the fire spread. The tower of Trinity Church made a pyramid of flame, each timber burning separately until the whol
e spire came crashing down. At 2 A.M. the wind shifted and the fire stopped a little east of Broadway. By then, five hundred houses had been destroyed. Washington would neither take credit for the blaze nor deplore it. “Providence,” he said, “or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”
—
The next night the town was still in shock when British soldiers marched into General Howe’s headquarters with a young man wearing the round broad-brimmed hat of a Dutch schoolmaster. His only identification was a Yale diploma, but the papers he was carrying proved what his mission had been. Nathan Hale had almost finished his drawings of British troop positions when a relative of his from New Hampshire recognized him at a tavern. Samuel Hale, a Tory, reported that Nathan was probably a spy, and the British made the arrest.
In the morning, Nathan Hale confessed frankly that he had been spying for General Washington. William Howe ordered him to be hanged without a trial, and the execution was set for 11 A.M. in front of the artillery park. A British officer who led Hale to his own tent to wait found the American calm and behaving with a gentle dignity. Asking for pen and paper, he wrote to his mother and to a fellow officer. Hale also asked to see a clergyman, but that request was denied.
When the hour came, Hale was taken to the gallows and the noose thrust around his neck. He addressed the spectators with great composure. It was the duty of every good soldier, Hale said, to obey any order from his commander in chief. He urged the British soldiers gathered around him to be ready to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.
Afterward, those who had heard him praised the way Nathan Hale had met his own death.
Trenton
1776
ON DECEMBER 11, 1776, the Congress in Philadelphia recommended that each of the United States set a day of solemn fasting and humiliation. They were instructed to implore the Almighty God to assist in the war against Britain. For George Washington and his men, the three months since the loss of New York had already provided humiliation enough. William Howe had allowed the Americans to dig in further on Harlem Heights until mid-October. Then, with four thousand troops, he had outflanked them and driven Washington and his army on a day-long march north to White Plains. After another delay of ten days, Howe attacked the extreme right of the American line, and Washington pulled the army back to North Castle. William Howe waited ten more days and surrounded Fort Washington on the east side of the Hudson. Nathanael Greene, who commanded the three thousand Americans stationed there, thought they could hold out, even though the British outnumbered them at least three to one. Washington was less sure, but he didn’t overrule Greene.
On November 16 General Howe demanded that the fort surrender. An American colonel refused, reminding Howe that the Americans had joined “the most glorious cause that mankind ever fought in.” The next day, British and German troops crushed the fort’s defenses on three sides. They lost three hundred men but took the fort and 2,858 American prisoners of war. Four days later, Lord Cornwallis led four thousand men across the Hudson to New Jersey and tried to trap Washington and Greene between the Hudson and Hackensack Rivers. The Americans barely escaped. On November 30, two thousand militiamen from New Jersey and Maryland had come to the end of their enlistments and quit Washington’s ranks as he was rushing his army away from the British advance through a cold rain. There was no question that Cornwallis had the Americans on the run, but Howe ordered him to pause, which gave Washington time to reach Trenton on December 3. When the British arrived five days later, Howe was with them. That same day in Rhode Island, Henry Clinton’s men took possession of Newport unopposed.
George Washington had thrown out several false hints that he was preparing to turn and take a stand. That prospect had made the British cautious in their pursuit across New Jersey, and they had taken nineteen days to travel seventy-four miles. “They will neither fight nor totally run away,” one of Howe’s officers complained about the Americans. “But they keep at such a distance that we are always above a day’s march from them. We seem to be playing at Bo-Peep.”
By the time General Howe finally entered Trenton, the Americans once again had eluded him. Washington had collected every boat along the Delaware River for seventy miles and had rowed his shattered army across to Pennsylvania. The last of them had been shoving off from the riverbank as Howe and his army arrived on the scene.
For the moment, Washington had saved his troops, although their number had dwindled to five thousand. At any moment he expected another attack by twice that many British soldiers. Washington believed that if the residents of New Jersey had offered him any support he could have made a stand at Hackensack or Brunswick. But the militia had either disbanded officially or simply slunk away, leaving Washington with no choice but flight. Now Howe would certainly move against Philadelphia. Washington sent Israel Putnam there to fortify the town.
Members of the Congress were aghast that they might be forced to move their deliberations. Indignantly they called upon Washington to guarantee that they would be able to stay in Philadelphia. Until that moment, the Congress had tried not to admit how badly the war was going, but Washington could no longer encourage their optimism. He declined to predict the future, but said the Congress might have to leave. On December 12, 1776, members adjourned in Philadelphia and agreed to convene eight days later in Baltimore, Maryland. Samuel Adams was convinced the move was premature.
—
During those past three months, Thomas Paine had served in Nathanael Greene’s command as a volunteer aide, amusing his commander by his willingness to debate any subject, even mathematics. But when General Horatio Gates probed tactlessly into Paine’s marriage problems, Paine took his questions as an impertinence and broke off their friendship. After the British had taken the forts on the Hudson, Paine marched with the army on its retreat to Newark. He watched as enlistments expired and half the army deserted George Washington, but he never blamed the commander in chief for the dismal state of affairs. He considered Washington another Fabius, Hannibal’s Roman opponent, who had been called the Delayer because of his tactics of waiting and patience. Paine predicted that one day, when the overwhelming odds against the Americans were fully understood, history would regard Washington’s retreat through New Jersey as a glorious military maneuver.
During the day, Paine was consumed by his army work. But by the light of the campfire he began to write another pamphlet, which he called The Crisis. When it was done, Washington ordered bands of his downcast soldiers called together, and Paine’s essay was read aloud to them.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine began. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: ‘Tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.”
When the essay was published, it shamed some militiamen and made others bolder. Numbers of them returned to the fight. American morale badly needed a military victory, but for the moment The Crisis was all General Washington had.
—
Charles Lee was finding it impossible not to contrast his success at Charleston with his commander in chief’s blunders and retreats. On his way to rejoin headquarters in October 1776, General Lee ignored the dire events at Harlem Heights and White Plains and stopped instead in Philadelphia. Before he had accepted his commission, Lee had informed the Congress that it must make good the large sums of money he was owed in England. Now, on the crest of his victory, Lee insisted on eleven thousand pounds sterling.
When he arrived finally in New York, Lee was received as something of a savior. His gritty assur
ance and his enthusiasm for the Continental Army gave the men confidence in their own capacity. For all of his eccentricities—men said he smelled more of the kennel than his hounds did—Lee had been right about George Washington’s strategy on the Hudson. He had written to Joseph Reed, Washington’s adjutant general, that he couldn’t understand why Fort Washington wasn’t evacuated when it clearly could not be held, no matter what Nathanael Greene had said.
But when the British overran the post, Lee was not smug. Instead, he lost all control, railing and shouting that had the wretched place been named for him and not for Washington, it would have been given up long ago. Reed had watched as Washington hesitated and debated with himself over the fort. Then, while Washington rushed through New Jersey, Reed had sent Lee a letter, suggesting that now was the time for a change in the high command. “I do not mean to flatter nor praise you at the expense of any other,” Reed wrote, “but I confess I do think that it is entirely owing to you that this army, and the liberties of America so far as they are depending on it, are not totally cut off.” Reed added that Lee could be decisive, a quality often lacking in minds that were otherwise valuable.
Lee had remained on the east side of the Hudson with about seven thousand troops from New York and New England when General Washington crossed the river with all of the Southern troops. As his situation worsened throughout November 1776, Washington had called upon Lee to join him, but Lee was reluctant to obey. If he went, he would be second in command. If he waited, the Congress might see Washington’s obvious failures and do what it should have done in the first place—name an experienced British officer to replace an indecisive Virginia planter as commander in chief. Lee stalled and delayed as Washington grew more desperate. But Washington never became peremptory, even though he knew Lee’s low opinion of him. Once, when Joseph Reed was away from headquarters, Washington opened one of Lee’s letters addressed to the adjutant. He returned it to Lee with a mild note of apology for his mistake.
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