18

I’m up to the part where my man Nate takes two steps forward:

I SEE IT IN MY MIND’S EYE: A MORNING fog saturated with sunlight would have dampened the sound of reveille. Nate would probably not have heard it in any case. Sitting Indian-style on a deer skin inside his tent, he was deeply engrossed in M. de Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus, Prince of Persia (given to him, on his graduation from Yale, by his younger brother Richard, who was the great-grandfather of my great-grandfather). Nate loved reading about the heroes of antiquity. He often daydreamed about them, imagining what life had been like back in the time of the Iliad; imagining, too, how he would have conducted himself had he lived then. He liked to think he had the makings of a hero. But he wasn’t absolutely sure.

It was Lieutenant Colonel T. Knowlton’s sixteen-year-old son, Frederick, who roused Nate from his reading and summoned him to the meeting. The Colonel, his father, wanted his four captains (Nate among them), his lieutenants, his ensigns to muster in a field outside the camp immediately. Nate’s tent mate, W. Hull, rolled over in his blanket and opened an eye and asked what time it was. “Time to move your ass,” I can hear Nate replying in a voice full of playfulness. “Time to beat the lobsters and win the war and get on with the business of constructing a country.”

Hull might have snorted in derision. “Spare me,” he said, or words to that effect.

Laughing, Nate would have marked his page in Travels of Cyrus with a slip of paper—I don’t see him turning back the corners of pages the way some who have less respect for books do—and headed for the muster field.

The fog would have burned off early that September day, revealing the officers of Knowlton’s Rangers drawn up in a casual line on a field in Westchester. Two or three wore breeches and braces but no shirts. One still had the traces of shaving lather on his chin. Hull arrived at muster barefoot. A homemade pennant with a coiled snake and the words Don’t tread on me hung limply from a pole planted in the middle of the field. Knowlton, impeccably dressed, paced impatiently in front of his officers. Nate noticed a pistol with a silver hilt and an ivory grip jutting from the colonel’s waistband. In the early days of the rebellion Knowlton had held the stone-and-rail fence at the base of Breed’s Hill (during what became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, even though it took place on Breed’s Hill) against General Howe’s flanking movement. The colonel was a soldier’s soldier. His Rangers, all volunteers, all handpicked, idolized him. Certainly Nate did, judging from the letters he wrote to his father. In one of them he swore he would walk through fire for Knowlton. The sun, rising above a distant treeline, angled over the colonel’s shoulder into Nate’s eyes. Squinting, he heard the colonel’s booming voice coming from the silhouette in front of the sun. “Men,” Knowlton was saying, “Long Island has been lost. Howe went and ferried fifteen thousand lobsters to Graves End Bay and quick-marched them through the unguarded Jamaica Pass to fall on us from the flank. Our boys, them that could, retreated onto the Brookland Heights and escaped, thanks to the Marbleheaders and their longboats, across the East River to Manhattan Island. The Commander-in-Chief has gone and ordered me to send someone to reconnoiter behind the lobster lines in Brookland. He has got to know where the next blow will fall.”

Here Knowlton stopped pacing and, facing his officers, placed his hands on his hips. When he spoke again he didn’t beat around the bush. “What I want,” he said, “what I need, is a volunteer for a dirty, dangerous mission.”

What he wants, Nate thought to himself, is someone who is willing to walk through fire.

Nate was suddenly aware of the total lack of movement around him; his comrades seemed to have turned into statues. The colonel, observing this, grimaced in embarrassment. “Must I return to the Commander-in-Chief and report that none of his officers, not a one, had the courage to take a few steps forward? Surely the rebellion is destined to go down to defeat if this represents the general attitude.”

I have imagined the scene a thousand times; imagined Knowlton furiously challenging his officers with his feverish eyes; imagined them avoiding his gaze; imagined what must have been going through Nate’s head. He would have been remembering Hickey tiptoeing along the floorboards of the dray until there was no more dray to tiptoe along. He would have been picturing the executed man dancing at the end of the rope until a tough cookie of a shirtman extinguished his hiccuping and his life. He would have felt his heart sinking under the weight of pure fear—spies, when caught, were hanged by the neck until they were stone dead. If I know my man Nate, he would have tested himself against that fear.

Do you see it? I do. On that muggy September morning, with a faint breeze from Long Island Sound stirring the crabgrass and the sun lolling lazily over Knowlton’s shoulder, Nate found himself taking two steps forward.

Back in their tent, Hull and Stephen Hempstead both tried to talk Nate out of his decision. “It’s one thing to stand up to the lobsters in battle,” Hull—who happened to be a Yale classmate of Nate’s—declared. “It’s another to be asked to undertake something that is unmanly, even dishonorable. Who in his right mind respects the character of a spy?”

“No one,” Hempstead offered.

“As soldiers,” Hull continued ardently, “we are bound to do our duty in the field. But we are not obliged to stain our honor by the sacrifice of integrity.”

“For God’s sake, listen to him,” Hempstead begged. “Don’t play the hero.”

“People who want to be heroes are raving mad,” Hull said.

“People who want to be spies,” Hempstead agreed, “are raving mad.”

But Nate, once fixed on a course of action, was not easily dissuaded. “You talk of dishonor,” he told his two friends. “I wish to be useful, and every kind of service to the cause becomes honorable by being useful.”

Stephen Hempstead tried another approach. “You are making a big mistake if you think spying is useful. In the end it might even hurt the cause.”

“Explain yourself,” Nate ordered.

Hempstead looked at Hull, who nodded encouragement. “The way I figure it,” Hempstead said, “a spy can never know for sure whether what he finds out he was meant to find out. Not knowing, it’s just as likely he will pass on what the enemy wants passed on, as opposed to useful information.”

Nate shook his head. “A spy ought to be able to discover the enemy’s capabilities,” he insisted, “and then divine his intentions from his capabilities.”

“Just because the enemy has a capability don’t mean he’s going to use it,” Hull argued.

“Why would he go to the trouble and expense of having a capability if he’s not going to make use of it?” Nate asked. He thought he had his friends there.

Hull shrugged. “You will wind up having your neck stretched on a gibbet.”

Nate only said, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

“It is sweeter to live for your country,” Hull shot back.

Nate didn’t appear convinced.

Here’s Nate reporting to the Commander-in-Chief’s headquarters that same afternoon:

FROM THE PORTICO OF THE ROGER Morris house on the lip of Coogan’s Bluff, Nate stared out at the small Dutch settlement of Haarlem visible on the flats next to the Haarlem River. Wiping sweat from his brow, the Commander-in-Chief came around from behind the house accompanied by a twenty-year-old major named A. Burr, who was an aide-de-camp to Old Put. Along with a handful of other staff officers, they had been exercising in the garden behind the house, seeing who could throw a heavy iron bar the farthest; as usual the Virginian had won the contest. (Behind his back it was whispered that he seemed to be able to win everything except the war.)

The Commander-in-Chiefs features, Nate noticed immediately, looked more drawn than the last time he had seen him. It turned out that Congress had just sent word refusing permission to burn New York City to the ground. Burr had been dispatched by Old Put to headquarters to see if the Virginian considered that the final word on the subject. “What if we made out we never got the order?” Bun-asked. “What if we burned New York to the ground by accident?”

The Virginian crankily swatted a fly that had landed on his breeches, then flicked the dead insect to the ground with a fingernail. “Rightly or wrongly, Congress rules and we are its servants,” he told Burr. “If we reverse these roles we will have lost even if we win.”

Nate heard Burr say something about how the army might have a chance of defending the city. “Which army?” the Virginian, clearly in a black mood, sneered. “Sometimes I am not sure whether ours is one army or thirteen.”

A. Hamilton, one of the Virginian’s bright young aides, offered the Commander-in-Chief his wig but was waved away. “I told Mr. Henry in Philadelphia, and I repeat it to you, Major Burr,” the Virginian said, “I date the ruin of my reputation from the day I took command of the American Armies.” The Commander-in-Chief glanced curiously at Nate, who was standing outside the front door. Hamilton whispered something in the general’s ear. “Just the man I’ve been waiting on,” the Virginian said. Gesturing for Nate to follow, he set off down the hallway, his riding boots pounding on Mr. Morris’s imported teak floorboards.

The Virginian sank dejectedly onto a straight-backed chair behind a desk in the middle of the octagonal drawing room. Hamilton came in behind Nate and pulled the sliding doors closed. Nate looked out through the mullioned windows—some of the general’s aides were still tossing the iron bar behind the house and he could hear their cries as they egged one another on. He glanced at the Virginian and noticed him picking with a fingernail at a tooth brown with decay; several of the Virginian’s teeth seemed to be false and made of wood. Nate spotted two books on the desk and angled his head to read their titles. One was a worn copy of Frederick’s Instructions to His Generals, with tongues of paper jutting where someone had marked off pages. The other book was a leather-bound edition of Addison’s tragedy, Cato, easily the most popular English play of the day because of its talk of liberty.

“State your name,” the general instructed Nate.

Nate replied in a firm voice.

“The mission is dangerous. Why are you volunteering?”

“To use a very old-fashioned word, I consider myself a patriot. I want to be useful.”

“You think risking your neck behind enemy lines will be useful?”

“Excellency, I see myself as a small cog in a large machine that is America’s first line of defense.”

“You believe in this army of ours?”

“I believe in this country of ours, Excellency. To the extent that the army protects the country, I believe in the army.”

“Well answered, in effect,” the Virginian said. He had caught Nate eyeing his copy of Cato, and asked, “Have you by chance read the Addison play?”

“Several times, Excellency. I own a copy but left it with my other books at my father’s house in Connecticut.”

“So you are a Connecticut man,” the Virginian said dryly. “I regret to tell you that that is not much of a recommendation these days. Hamilton here has been counting noses since the debacle on Long Island. It appears that six of the eight thousand men in the thirteen Connecticut militia regiments have vanished.”

“Gone home to Connecticut, no doubt,” Hamilton said. “Did the same thing before the battle of Breed’s Hill. Their enlistments were up and nothing any of us said could convince them to stay.”

“I will tell you frankly,” the Virginian burst out, “there is such a dearth of public spirit, such a want of virtue, such stockjobbing to obtain advantages …”

(Stockjobbing: colloq v. buying and selling, usually stocks, but in the Virginian’s sense, anything, to profit from price fluctuations. A curious accusation, coming as it did from the man who introduced the mule into America and was trying to get Congress to purchase, at a handsome price, some of his mules for use as army pack animals.)

“—such a mercenary spirit pervading the whole army that I should not be surprised at any disaster that may happen.”

Nate glanced at Colonel Hamilton, but he was sucking on the inside of a cheek and studying his boots. The Virginian reached into his mouth again with two fingers, gripped one of his wooden teeth and gingerly worked it back and forth in his gums. “Damn glue’s come loose,” he muttered under his breath. “You would think a world that could come up with Watt’s steam engine and Arkwright’s spinning frame could invent a glue that can hold a tooth in place for more than a week.”

The Commander-in-Chief treated himself to a deep breath; the storm seemed to have blown itself out. He fetched a rolled-up map of Manhattan Island from a spruce document box and spread it on the desk, weighing down the ends with two large cut glass cellars, an inkwell and his silver pocket watch. “I take it you are no stranger to Manhattan,” the Virginian said. “But are you familiar with Long Island?”

“I spent three weeks there with Colonel Webb’s Nineteenth Connecticut right after coming down from Boston in late April,” Nate replied.

The Virginian, Nate and Colonel Hamilton bent over the map. The Commander-in-Chief’s finger began to stab at it. “Our main body is here,” he said, “on the Haarlem Heights. General Putnam has five thousand men down here in the city, but he’s going to start pulling them back toward the heights. I figure it’ll take him the better part of a week to get his cannon out—he lacks horses, wagons. I loaned Put one of my own riding horses, that’s how bad things are. A mare. Hope to God I get her back in one piece.”

The Virginian’s index finger traced a line along the Brookland coast running up to the western reaches of Long Island Sound. “Howe’s regiments are stretched out here, looking down our throats from across the river. No telling when they’ll come over or where. I’ve posted militia units at the likely landing sites—that cove under the Kipp house, below the Murray Hill at Inclenberg, on the flats near the Dover Tavern. But I don’t have high hopes of stopping them on the beaches. Our troops are green as grasshoppers—my guess is they’ll cut and run as soon as the lobsters bring up some of their line ships and start to cannonade them.”

Hamilton caught the expression on Nate’s face. “Things aren’t as bleak as they appear,” he remarked. “As long as the lobsters strike below the Haarlem Heights, the general feels confident we can pull most of our troops back to the heights. And the general wins as long as he doesn’t lose.”

“The heights form a natural defensive line,” the Virginian added, talking to himself now, it seemed to Nate; it seems also to me. “After what happened to Howe at Breed’s Hill, back in Boston, I don’t reckon he’ll risk sending his thin red lines straight up the hill at us. We might be able to hold on to the heights for weeks. Months even. Long enough for me to put some starch back into my thirteen armies. Long enough for Congress to vote bonuses so I can enlist new regiments. Long enough to train the ones I already have. With luck the rebellion could have a breathing spell. Unless—”

“Unless?” Nate asked.

“Unless Howe decides to ferry troops up the East River, risk the currents at Hell Gate, and land them in Westchester. From there it’s nine miles as the crow flies to the North River and King’s Bridge connecting Manhattan to Westchester. If Howe brought up enough troops he could fortify those nine miles, cutting us off on Manhattan. His brother’s ships could patrol the two rivers, keeping us pinned here on the heights until we ran out of food. My army—my thirteen armies—would disintegrate. That would be the end of the rebellion and our dream of independence.”

Nate couldn’t keep from asking, “If that’s a possibility, why don’t you pull back to Westchester right away instead of fortifying the Haarlem Heights?”

The Virginian slipped the pocket watch into his waistcoat pocket and lifted one of the cellars. The map snapped back into a roll. “There is nothing more difficult in warfare than organizing the retreat of a defeated army,” the Commander-in-Chief said. “I need a victory under my belt—I need to lift morale and hopes—before I can risk a retreat into Westchester. If I attempted it now the armies I have the honor to command would melt away. Inside of a week I would be retreating with Hamilton here and nary a soul in sight.”

Someone could be heard galloping up to the house. There were shouts from the portico. The Virginian started for the sliding doors. “What I need to purchase,” he called over his shoulder to Nate, “is time. I must know what the lobsters are up to over there in Brookland—I must know if Howe is going to give me time to pull the army together for a retreat.”

What transpired after the Virginian left the room I gleaned from reading between the lines of a letter A. Hamilton sent to a Connecticut journalist years later. Hamilton wrote out a laisser-passer so that Nate could get across Long Island Sound from one of the Westchester ports. And he gave Nate the name of a patriot in Brookland, the widow of one of the Minutemen killed at Concord, who could put him up while he was scouting the lobster positions. Hamilton even suggested a cover story: If accosted, Nate would claim to be whipping the cat.

“Whipping the cat?” Nate must have asked. (I don’t think he would have been familiar with the expression, which came from the Middle States and the South.)

“Whipping the cat,” Hamilton would have explained, “is what itinerant shoemakers call it when they board with a client for as long as it takes to repair his shoes and boots.”

Hamilton noted that the lobsters might have occupied New York City by the time Nate reached Long Island; in which case Nate was to nose around the city too and see what he could pick up there. He gave Nate the name of a patriot he could contact in the city, an Israelite recently arrived from Poland, a banker who had loaned sums of money to the rebellion.

It must have occurred to Hamilton (it certainly would have occurred to me) to ask Nate if he had any acquaintances or relatives on Long Island or in New York City who knew he held a captaincy in the Continental Army and might betray him if they spotted him. “There is one such,” Nate admitted. He had a cousin, Samuel by name, a lawyer from Providence, nine years older and an ardent Tory. Samuel, who was a Harvard man, had gone over to the enemy in Boston and had sailed away with them when they abandoned the city. Nate had heard on the family grapevine that this same Samuel was serving as Howe’s Deputy Commissary of Prisoners in New York.

“I don’t need to tell you,” Hamilton said, “that you must avoid him at all cost.”

“The chances of us running into each other are one in a million,” Nate said.

“Which brings us to the matter of codes,” Hamilton said.

“I thought I was to bring my report back myself,” Nate said.

“You are. But it is prudent to prepare for all eventualities. If you are taken prisoner by the lobsters, the usage and custom of war is such that you will be permitted to write to your family. Your letters will pass through my hands. So I propose we establish code phrases that you can employ in your letters to indicate what you have discovered. Since you are familiar with Addison’s Cato, and we have a copy at hand, why don’t we select phrases from it for you to memorize?”

“No need to memorize,” Nate said. “I know most of the play by heart from having read it so often.”

“So much the better. You select the phrases.” Hamilton handed Nate the Virginian’s leather-bound copy.

Nate thumbed through it. “Here is the line that inspired Mr. Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ “ he said. And he passed the book to Hamilton and quoted it from memory. “ ‘Chains, or conquest; liberty, or death.’ “

Hamilton copied the phrase into an orderly book. (It was this same orderly book that I discovered four years ago in the Beinecke Library stacks. A handwriting expert has compared the unsigned notations in the orderly book with samples of Hamilton’s handwriting and concluded they were written by the same person.) And he told Nate, “Let this phrase stand to mean that the lobsters are going to land behind us, in Westchester, in an effort to trap us on Manhattan island.”

Nate flipped through the pages of Cato until he came to another patriotic phrase. Again Hamilton copied it off into his orderly book. “Let the second phrase mean the lobsters will give the general the time he needs to prepare the army for retreat,” he said.

Hamilton made Nate repeat the phrases and their meanings several times. Then he escorted Nate to the portico of the Morris house. The Virginian was standing with a messenger on the lip of Coogan’s Bluff studying the East River through a long glass. In the distance an enemy cutter could be seen tacking from bank to bank as it beat upriver against the wind. A. Hamilton noticed the speck of sail. “It looks as if Howe’s testing the currents at Hell Gate,” he told Nate. He offered him his hand. “Good luck,” he said, “and Godspeed.”