CHAPTER 2
Propaganda Meets Reality in 1776
In reporting their version of Lexington and Concord to the world, Massachusetts’s political leaders strove to give the impression that their stance had not been in the least warlike or hostile before General Thomas Gage launched his men on their midnight march. The Yankees were keenly aware that they needed to use the blood spilled on April 19 to win the support of other Americans—especially those living outside New England.
The Massachusetts version of the day denounced “barbarous murders committed on our innocent brethren” and accused the British troops of “driving into the streets women in childbed, killing old men in their houses.” The Lexington men comprised “a small party of the inhabitants… some with and some without firearms.” At other times they were described as “peaceable spectators.” In Concord, where attacking Americans inflicted heavy casualties on a British company guarding an important bridge, the armed and angry Americans became “inhabitants… collected at the bridge.” At no point was there any mention of minutemen or militia. The Americans were simply “provincials, roused with zeal for the liberties of their country,” who “assumed their native valor” and fought so well that “the loss on the part of the British troops far exceeded” that of the patriots.
As political propaganda, the report was a masterpiece. It aroused an enormous explosion of sympathy and anger throughout America. Some 20,000 men from western Massachusetts and the other three New England colonies rushed to join the minutemen and militia who had pursued Lord Hugh Percy to Charlestown on April 19. They began building fortifications and organizing themselves into an army that effectively blockaded the British inside Boston. “In the course of two days,” wrote one glum British officer, “from a plentiful town we were reduced to the disagreeable necessity of living on salt provisions.”
In the southern and central states, long-neglected militia began choosing new officers and drilling regularly. In Virginia, the state’s best-known soldier, Colonel George Washington, was among those now ready to fight. “Unhappily, it is to reflect,” he wrote, “that a Brother’s sword has been sheathed in a Brother’s Brest, and that, the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?” A Philadelphia woman, writing to a British officer in Boston, told him, “Nothing is heard now in our streets but the trumpet and the drum; and the universal cry is ‘Americans, to arms!’”
This same woman also revealed the cost of this propaganda victory to the Americans. Mockingly, she asked her British correspondent why “the regulars, vastly superior in numbers, were obliged to retreat with [such] rapidity?” By January 1, 1776, the facts about British and American numbers had become so obscured that the editor of the Pennsylvania Packet could look back on April 19 and boast, “Two thousand veteran British soldiers were attacked and defeated by 300 peasants, and were saved from total destruction by running 40 miles in a single day.” April 19, 1775, had convinced America’s political leaders that a rapid gathering of patriot militia could defeat the British army wherever and whenever it dared to invade the continent.1
George Washington confronted this strategy when John Adams proposed him as commander in chief of the American army and Congress voted its collective approval. Adams was thinking politically. New England’s leaders badly needed a man from the embryo nation’s largest state to create at least the illusion of unity. Colonel Washington, as he was generally known, had spent four eventful years commanding Virginia’s troops on the western frontier in the French and Indian War.
When Colonel Washington took command of the impromptu army besieging the British inside Boston, he swiftly demonstrated that he could think like a general. He urged Congress to authorize a regular, or “Continental,” army of at least 60,000 men and enlist them for the duration of the war. The lawmakers pooh-poohed the figure, cutting it by two-thirds, and all but frothed at the mouth at the idea of enlisting men for more than a year.
Congressman John Adams maintained that only the “meanest, idlest, most intemperate and worthless” men would sign such a contract. Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, who exceeded Adams and almost everyone else as a village idiot on military matters, declared, “I should despair of our Cause if our country contained sixty thousand men abandoned enough to enlist for three years or more.” Militia would supply Washington with any additional soldiers he needed, the solons grandly declared. It was Congress’s first venture—but by no means its last—into eviscerating America’s military strength.2
Meanwhile the politicians had embarked on a military undertaking that soon prompted them to demand 10,000 of Washington’s 20,000 regulars. They invaded Canada on the assumptions that the British had very few troops in this recently acquired “fourteenth colony” and that the descendants of the original French colonizers would be eager to revolt against their new royal masters. British reinforcements and the deep aversion of the French Canadians to the outspoken American Protestants soon turned this experiment into a military fiasco.
General Washington was obliged to accept these decisions. Congress had no intention of letting a general tell it what to do. That idea carried with it the menace of a military dictatorship. In the English Civil War of the previous century, Oliver Cromwell had grown weary of taking orders from Parliament and sent its members home. He had reigned as lord high protector, an experience that convinced most Britons that rule by a king and a parliament was far preferable.
On June 17, 1775, another battle had further convinced Congress that American militia could defeat British regulars with the help of a secret weapon: entrenching tools. On Breed’s Hill outside Boston, the amateur Yankee soldiers had inflicted fearful casualties on the king’s men as they assaulted the makeshift fort the Americans had constructed in a single night. The battle of Bunker Hill—so called for geographical reasons understood only by Bostonians—taught both the Americans and the British a lesson. The Americans learned the wrong one, the British, the right one.
Bunker Hillism became a key idea in the strategy of the American army, when the New England rebellion became a continental war in 1776. For most of that pivotal year, the Americans expended enormous amounts of time, energy, and money constructing forts on hills and landing sites, hoping to repeat Bunker Hill’s bloodletting on a larger scale and to force the British to quit the fight. As Connecticut general Israel Putnam, an architect of the Bunker Hill battle, put it, “Cover [the Americans’] legs and they will fight till doomsday.” These seemingly silly words had roots in eighteenth-century fact: soldiers dreaded leg wounds. The primitive medicine of the era knew nothing about infections. The doctor’s usual solution was to amputate the damaged limb.
America’s politicians—and to some extent their military leaders—were also beguiled by the pronouncements of their chief propagandist, the English radical Thomas Paine, who assured them in his popular pamphlet Common Sense that the British army was a collection of hirelings who would not risk wounds and death for their king. The 1754–1761 global war with France (called the Seven Years War in Europe and the French and Indian War in America) had left the British government groaning under a burden of debt so enormous that it could neither finance a large army in America nor pay for its subsistence. This looming debt had equally reduced the Royal Navy. Only 10 percent of the ships on its list could sail more than a mile from a dock. Without debt, sweat, blood, or tears, according to Paine, the Americans could win their independence merely by declaring it.3
FOR HIS first six months as commander of the largely New England army, George Washington concentrated on shaping his men into a coherent fighting force. This was not a simple matter. Washington found the New Englanders almost impossible to discipline; they disliked taking orders from anyone who was not a member of their regiment, often of their company. The idea of obeying someone from Virginia was beyond their contrarian imaginations.
In private, Washington became equally hostile to the Yankees. He was dismayed to learn that the men elected their own officers, many of whom did not qualify in Washington’s eyes as gentlemen. He was even more appalled to discover that the officers frequently sat down and ate with their men. One man, who in peacetime worked as a barber, had no compunction about shaving his men and cutting their hair—and charging them for the service.
Washington told his presumed friend Virginia congressman Richard Henry Lee that there was “an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these [New England] people which believe me prevails too generally among the officers.” Lee showed these letters to John Adams, who did not find them even slightly amusing. Lee had become a friend and admirer of Adams; both were early advocates of independence. Adams was soon sarcastically asking a Massachusetts officer if his “amiable general” thought that “every man from the south of the Hudson River was a hero and every man to the northward a poltroon.”4
Learning from another friend what Lee was doing, Washington instantly vowed never to say another word about the origins of anyone in his army—a resolution he rarely violated. The experience was Washington’s first lesson in understanding the intricacies of Congress, where ideology and friendship played large, invisible roles.
From the start of his career as commander in chief, Washington struggled to create an aura of national unity in his army. He even suggested that regiments should mingle men from different states. Congress—and various state legislatures—vetoed the idea. Washington had to content himself with telling his men that “all distinctions of colonies would be laid aside.” Everyone was now a member of “the Army of the United Provinces of North America.”5
Washington was heartened when six hundred Virginians under backwoodsman Daniel Morgan appeared in camp armed with long-barreled rifles, which were far more accurate than the crude muskets that the rest of the army carried into battle. Morgan’s men were forerunners of more non–New England troops to come. Congress had asked Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania to send newly formed regiments.
As commander in chief, Washington had one large advantage: he looked the part. His height, reserved demeanor, and careful attention to his appearance—he always wore polished boots and a crisply pressed blue-and-white uniform, a gleaming smallsword strapped to his waist—impressed everyone. “His personal appearance is truly majestic,” wrote James Thacher, a doctor serving with the army. Henry Knox, a Boston bookseller with a passion for the military life, praised his “vast ease and dignity.”
THE GENERAL’S composure had to survive not a few harrowing hours. As 1776 began, his 14,000-man army shrank alarmingly. New Englanders viewed a contract as unbreakable, and the men who had rushed to Boston after Lexington and Concord began departing in droves as the terms of their enlistment expired. Recruiting a new army proved an unnervingly slow process. Not until spring began to green the land did Washington have enough men to think about taking the offensive.
Congress had ordered him to consult his fellow generals, and he soon presented them with a daring plan for an all-out assault on British-held Boston. It called for a frontal attack on the enemy’s chief defenses around Boston Neck, while whaleboats landed hundreds of men elsewhere in the city. He hoped to achieve a victory that would force the British to negotiate peace and possibly independence. To Washington’s dismay, his subordinate generals voted the plan down. They did not think their largely untrained troops could pull it off—and warned him that a crushing repulse might sink the Glorious Cause.
The admiring Boston bookseller Henry Knox came to the commander in chief’s rescue. He led several hundred men on a winter march to Fort Ticonderoga, the British bastion on Lake Champlain in New York State captured a few weeks after the fighting at Lexington and Concord. Using sleds and wagons, Knox and his men dragged several dozen cannons over icy roads and snowy hills to Boston. Washington planted these heavy guns on Dorchester Heights, an elevation south of Boston, where they could fire directly into the city.
Washington hoped for an all-out British attack, which would have enabled him to reenact Bunker Hill on a larger, more decisive scale. Instead the British evacuated Boston, having long since realized that they stood to gain little from occupying the city. Washington wisely decided to let them go without further bloodshed.
Congress and the American people were hugely impressed by the bloodless liberation of Boston. One Virginian declared it would make Washington’s name immortal in the annals of America. Congress struck a gold medal in Washington’s honor, and Harvard awarded him a Doctor of Laws degree. The easy victory obviously confirmed the widespread opinion of Common Sense readers that winning independence would be a simple matter.
General Washington graciously accepted the unrealistic praise showered on him. Privately he admitted his personal disappointment that the British had not attacked the American positions on Dorchester Heights. He was still hoping for the decisive victory that would end the war. At this point he was completely committed to Congress’s strategy of victory in one big battle—what military men called “a general action.”
ANOTHER CITY had far more strategic value—New York. It was at the center of the thirteen colonies and stood at the mouth of the Hudson River—a waterway that offered a potential avenue for invasion into the American interior. Washington had no doubt that the British intended to transfer their army to New York. “Should they get that town and the command of the North River,” he wrote, “they can stop the intercourse between the northern and southern colonies upon which depends the safety of America.”6
Learning that the British army and navy had retreated to distant Halifax, Washington led his army south to New York in easy marches. He had ordered his second in command, Major General Charles Lee, to proceed to the city several weeks earlier. The defense of New York flummoxed Lee, a veteran professional soldier in the British and other armies. An enemy with a powerful fleet could easily invade the city, surrounded as it was by water, from a dozen different directions. Lee decided the best solution was to erect a series of forts that would exact from the British a serious toll when they attacked. The British-born general had become a convinced Bunker Hillist. Washington still shared this illusion and, on arriving in New York, told Lee he was very pleased with his fortifications.7
Washington and his men spent the late spring and summer adding additional redoubts in and around New York. Other bastions rose on Brooklyn Heights across the East River from the city. One New York fort was named Bunker Hill—a graphic illustration of American thinking. Meanwhile Congress was making good on its side of the one-big-battle strategy. It summoned militia from New England, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, swelling Washington’s army to a theoretical 23,000 men. But the commander in chief seldom had an adequate grasp of how many men were available for a battle. Militia came and went as they pleased.
ON JUNE 25, the new British commander in chief, General William Howe, appeared off Sandy Hook, near the entrance to New York Harbor, with 9,000 men and 130 ships. There had been talk of erecting cannons along the Narrows, the appropriately named waterway that led to the inner harbor. But the heavy guns had never materialized. On July 2, Howe and his ships and men dropped anchor off Staten Island. As the army swarmed ashore, the small American garrison fled, and Staten Island’s militia switched sides. It was an ominous glimpse of how many New Yorkers were loyalists at heart.
Also on July 2, Congress declared the thirteen colonies independent. Two days later (July 4), the Declaration of Independence was adopted. The momentous news reached New York six days later. The following day, July 9, Washington ordered the Declaration of Independence read aloud to his troops. He thoroughly approved the message it sent to America and the world and felt new confidence when he looked at the numerous forts his troops had built in New York and Brooklyn. The British, he said, would have to “wade through much blood and slaughter” before they could carry even a small part of these defenses. The statement was pure Bunker Hillism.
On July 12, another large British fleet arrived in New York Harbor. Leading it, aboard his huge man-of-war, HMS Eagle, was Admiral Lord Richard Howe, older brother of the army’s commander. He brought with him another army, swelling the British ranks to 25,000 men. Before the summer ended, additional troops would raise the total to 32,000. It was the biggest army that Britain had ever sent beyond her shores. Among other things, it totally refuted Thomas Paine’s claim that the British were too bankrupt to send significant numbers of soldiers overseas. Counting men-of-war and transports, the British fleet in New York Harbor now numbered over four hundred ships—additional proof that former British tax collector Paine did not know what he was talking about.
FOR THE rest of the summer the Howes played peacemaker with Washington. They had commissions from George III to negotiate a reconciliation. It soon became apparent that they had no power to deal with an independent nation. General Howe, having by this time spent eighteen months in America (including a nightmarish day on Bunker Hill) repeatedly told his brother that he was wasting precious weeks of the summer campaigning season. A serious defeat inflicted on Washington’s army would alone quell the rebellion. Only then would the rebels talk peace. The admiral finally agreed and listened to the general’s plan for their assault.
On August 22, dozens of small flatboats pulled away from Staten Island and from many of the ships in the harbor. The Howes were utilizing Britain’s long experience in amphibious warfare. The flatboats had planked-up sides to protect their passengers from enemy bullets. In the course of the hot, sunny day, 15,000 troops—some of them German mercenaries hired by George III—landed on the shore of Long Island’s Gravesend Bay. Washington and his fellow generals were baffled. They had assumed that the British would make New York their first target.
Except for the forts on Brooklyn Heights, built to defend New York City, Long Island’s defenses were virtually nonexistent. Washington had stationed only about 4,000 men on its hundred miles of farms and fields. Worse, a brand-new general was in command: Israel Putnam. The hero of Bunker Hill had replaced Washington’s first choice, Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene, who had taken ill with one of the numerous fevers then debilitating hundreds of men in Washington’s army. Much of this problem came from New York City’s polluted water supply.
A healthy General Greene could not likely have made much difference. He knew little about Long Island’s geography or people. On August 15, he had complained to Washington that most of his men were in the same state of ignorance. Connecticut-born General Putnam knew even less about the region. The same could be said of his two subordinate generals, John Sullivan of New Hampshire and William Alexander, better known as Lord Stirling, of New Jersey. (The title derived from a claim to a Scottish dukedom.) Even after the British invasion of Long Island, the generals and Washington suspected it was only a feint to lure men from New York’s forts before the main attack began there.
When this attack failed to materialize, Washington began to realize the decisive battle would take place on Long Island. On August 22, he journeyed to the forts on Brooklyn Heights and conferred with General Putnam. They invited General John Sullivan to join them and explored the terrain they would have to defend. To the southeast stood a heavily forested ridge known as the Hills of Guan. Washington decided to make this their first line of defense and ordered Putnam to assign his best troops to its summit, with orders to inflict maximum damage if the enemy attempted an assault.
On the night of August 26, heavy skirmishing on the approaches to the Hills of Guan convinced General Putnam that the battle was about to begin. He awoke his two fellow generals, Sullivan and Lord Stirling, and ordered them to prepare their men for a fight to the finish. He also lit signal lights to warn Washington, who had returned to Manhattan. Except for the skirmishing, the night passed with no sign of a major assault. Much too late the Americans would learn the reason for this puzzling restraint.
MANY MILES south of the Americans on the Hills of Guan, a 10,000-man British column trudged silently through the darkness. At its head was Captain William Glanville Evelyn, commander of an infantry company in the King’s Own Regiment. It was a chilly night, but Evelyn barely gave a thought to his shivering men. The handsome thirty-four-year-old officer was hoping that before the end of the next day, his name would be wreathed in honor. Evelyn also knew that he and his men might head the list of dead and wounded if this march ended in disaster. Fourteen months earlier, Evelyn had led thirty-three men against Americans entrenched on Bunker Hill—and come back with five. A hunger for revenge burned within him and other officers in his regiment.
The eventual targets of this midnight maneuver were the American forts on Brooklyn Heights and the forward regiments on the Hills of Guan. Three passes ran through these hills, and the Americans on the high ground were confident they could inflict prohibitive casualties on any British or German column that attempted to penetrate them. But Americans loyal to George III had told General Howe about a fourth pass on the Jamaica Road, far out on the American left flank. The heights overlooking it were unfortified, and the pass was seldom patrolled. Howe’s second in command, General Henry Clinton, saw that a column could use this pass to outflank the entire American position on the Hills of Guan and cut off a retreat to the forts.
As midnight turned into the early hours of August 27, the loyalists guiding Captain Evelyn’s men abruptly abandoned the road and led them across farmlands, where they squashed vegetables beneath their boots and cut swaths through fields of corn. They emerged only a half mile from the Jamaica Pass.
A moment later, hoofbeats triggered panic. Had the secret march been discovered? Were Americans in fact crawling all over the area? Dragoons surged forward and captured five frightened American lieutenants—the only guard posted at the pass. With sabers held high, the cavalrymen demanded to know who else was on the road. No one, the terrified captors answered. Though finding this hard to believe, the British soon confirmed that the winding, steep-sided pass, which a few hundred soldiers with cannons could have defended for hours, was empty. His confidence soaring, General Clinton ordered the men forward, convinced they were closing in on a victory that would end this rebellion and teach Americans a lesson that would sting for a century.
By the time a glaring red sun rose, the British were striding briskly down the road toward the American forts at Brooklyn, well behind the rebel regiments on the Hills of Guan. As they marched, Clinton ordered two cannons fired—a signal to other British and German regiments to launch a frontal assault on the fortified hills.
As the British and Germans forged ahead, Clinton attacked the Americans from behind with 4,000 screaming light infantry. Trapped and panicked, the troops commanded by General John Sullivan surrendered or fled into the woods, where the British and Germans hunted them down like animals. The Germans were especially brutal because their British employers had told them the Americans would give captured mercenaries no quarter. In dozens of nasty encounters, young Americans pleaded with the Germans for mercy, only to be bayoneted with a ferocity that shocked not a few British officers.
Sullivan and his men had taken flight without giving the slightest warning to 2,000 Americans on their right, commanded by Lord Stirling. His men had been more than holding their own. Early in the fighting, they had charged and routed a British regiment on a nearby hill, killing the commander. But panic demoralized the winners of this mini-victory when the Germans who had routed Sullivan’s men attacked from the left. At the same time thousands of British infantry from the Jamaica Pass column hit them from behind.
Stirling realized there was only one escape to the American forts—across Gowanus Creek in the rear. But the creek was eighty yards wide and running strong; unless slowed, the British would slaughter his men as they tried to ford it. Stirling turned to the best-trained men in his command, some 250 Marylanders under Major Mordecai Gist. Drawing his sword, the general shouted, “Fix bayonets!” and led a frontal assault on the approximately 10,000 British and Germans attacking them.
Astonished, the king’s men recoiled, then began flinging bullets and grapeshot at the advancing rebels from two field pieces. Five times the Americans wavered and broke, but Stirling and Gist rallied them. Washington, watching from one of the Brooklyn Heights forts, gasped, “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose.”8
Marylanders toppled by the dozen in the hail of bullets, and the gallant remnant broke and fled. Stirling, miraculously unwounded, surrendered his sword to Lieutenant General Leopold von Heister, the German commander. At about the same time, another German regiment flushed General Sullivan out of his hiding place in a cornfield. Only nine of the Marylanders and Gist reached the Brooklyn forts. A Connecticut militiaman, Joseph Plumb Martin, later remembered that the terrified survivors who crawled out of Gowanus Creek looked like “water rats.… A truly pitiful sight.”9
Suddenly General Washington recognized a fatal flaw in his forts, the product of a summer of immense labor. Trenches connecting the structures now lay open and undefended. If the British seized them, they could surround and destroy the forts one by one. Washington ordered hundreds of men to pile brush in front of these vital links. On the American left, three New York militia regiments frantically shoveled dirt to erect defenses facing the Jamaica Pass.
General Clinton asked General Howe for permission to order Captain Evelyn and other light infantrymen to assault the New York militia. He was sure he could drive them all the way to the ferry in Brooklyn, cutting off the American retreat across the East River to Manhattan. Other requests to attack poured into General Howe’s field headquarters from regimental commanders. One British general wanted to hurl his grenadiers at Fort Putnam, the main bastion on the American left. He was confident he could capture it in minutes.
General Howe said no—again, and again, and again—despite the oaths and pleas of his subordinates. Howe’s concern was not British casualties, which had been unbelievably light—only five officers and 56 men killed and thirteen officers and 275 men wounded. Nor was it fear of repeating Bunker Hill’s slaughter, though the memory may have quickened his refusal. The general and his brother, Admiral Howe, were pursuing a strategy that sought to preserve rather than destroy Washington’s army. The Howes appreciated the Americans’ grievances against the British government. Both were political opponents of George III. They feared the growing power of the crown and its hardline supporters in Parliament.
The Howes hoped to force the Americans to ask for peace terms, which the British commanders would make as generous as possible. They worried that the total destruction of Washington’s army would give George III free rein to execute the rebel leaders and ruthlessly confiscate lands as previous kings had done in rebellious Ireland and Scotland. When his soldiers brought General Howe the captured American generals, Stirling and Sullivan, General Howe tried to enlist them as peace emissaries to the Continental Congress. Stirling refused; his family had seen the savage way the British had stamped out Scottish revolts. Sullivan, much more naive, agreed to become the Howes’ advocate.
THE FIGHTING on the Hills of Guan was over by the afternoon of August 27. For the rest of that day and the next, the Americans in the Brooklyn forts waited for a British attack. Washington brandished two pistols and vowed to shoot the first man who ran. With a characteristic bellow, Putnam repeated his Bunker Hill rallying cry: fire only when you see the whites of their eyes. But the day and night passed quietly.
Still convinced that an all-out attack was inevitable, Washington ordered three more regiments from Manhattan to bolster everyone’s courage. The walls of the forts now held the commander in chief, his staff, and almost every available general, plus at least 9,000 men, most of them irreplaceable regulars.
Aboard the frigate HMS Rainbow in the harbor, Captain George Collier wrote in his diary, “If we become masters of this body of rebels (which I think is inevitable) the war is at end.” Throughout the day, Collier wondered why Admiral Howe had not ordered the Rainbow and three other frigates into the East River, where they could cut off a rebel retreat from the Brooklyn Heights forts to Manhattan.
A bone-chilling rain began to fall on the battlefield. Water filled some of the forts’ connecting trenches until it reached waist level. At twilight, a brief skirmish broke out as a swarm of British light infantry drove the outlying American pickets inside the forts. At dawn the next day, August 29, the Americans saw what the enemy had gained from this action: a sturdy British redoubt now stood about six hundred yards from the forts; behind it lay a network of trenches. General Howe had taken the first step in the siege technique known as “regular approaches.” In a day or two these trenches would be close enough for the British to launch an overwhelming assault.
American morale plummeted. “You must fight or retreat,” Quartermaster General Thomas Mifflin told Washington. The American commander resisted the idea. He was still anxious to fulfill Congress’s strategy of victory in one general action. A council of war with his other generals revealed that they unanimously favored a retreat. Washington decided they were right. He rushed orders to Manhattan to collect every boat on the East and Hudson Rivers.
At nightfall, amid continuing rain, the retreat began. Fearing a deserter would betray their scheme to the British, Washington told his men that he was repositioning the army. Not until the soldiers marched to the waiting small boats on the East River shore did they realize what was happening.
The best troops, Continentals from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, remained in the forts. For two hours, the exodus went smoothly. Then a strong northeast wind began to blow. The small sailboats that made up the bulk of the evacuation fleet struggled against it. Disaster loomed. Brigadier General Alexander McDougall, who commanded the embarkation process, told Washington that there was no hope of getting everyone across to Manhattan before dawn.
At 11:00 P.M. the wind suddenly swung around to the southwest—the best direction to send the boats swiftly across the river. The water became as smooth as the surface of a pond. Boatmen began to pile soldiers and equipment into the vessels until only two or three inches of freeboard remained. A single British cutter with a swivel gun in its bow could have wreaked havoc on these defenseless craft. Plenty of cutters plied the nearby harbor, but none appeared in the East River.
As dawn’s first light turned the sky grey, the regulars left behind in the forts grew edgy. An attack was certain the moment the British saw that no one had replaced the men in the connecting trenches. “We became very anxious for our own safety,” Major Benjamin Tallmadge of Connecticut said.
Then came another change in the weather that proved even more providential for the Americans. A dense fog engulfed the river and the lines. “I could scarcely discern a man at 6 yards distance,” Tallmadge recalled. Even after the sun rose, the fog hung low, enabling every regular to escape undetected. Stepping into one of the last boats was the tall, cloaked figure of General Washington. He had not slept for forty-eight hours.
With the troops now safe in Manhattan, Tallmadge asked Washington if he could return to Brooklyn to rescue his horse. Washington, a fellow horse lover, assented. Tallmadge recrossed the river, and as his oarsmen pulled hard for Manhattan with the steed aboard, they heard angry voices in the fog. British infantry appeared on the East River shore and fired a wild volley that hit no one. They were too late.
IN MANHATTAN this escape from disaster heartened few civilians. Several thought Washington’s men looked “sickly” and “cast down.” Over the next few days, a half dozen regiments of militia voted to end the war and go home. Connecticut’s part-time soldiers, almost totally demoralized, shrank from 8,000 to 2,000 men within a week.10
Meanwhile General Sullivan headed to Philadelphia to fulfill his promise to Lord Howe and delivered to Congress the plea for peace. The politicians delegated Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge to meet with the admiral on Staten Island. Lord Howe earnestly tried to persuade these congressmen to trust in George III’s forgiveness, insisting that Britain did not require unconditional surrender. But the admiral refused to transmit Franklin’s proposal to let the Americans negotiate as spokesmen for an independent nation. Franklin and the others came away convinced that their best hope was to fight. We continue to rely “on your wisdom and fortitude, and that of your forces,” Rutledge wrote to Washington in his report of the meeting.11
On September 2, Washington wrote to John Hancock, president of Congress. He was almost as unhappy with his troops as the troubled civilian spectators who greeted them on their retreat from Brooklyn Heights. He judged especially severely the conduct of the militiamen, who had displayed no enthusiasm whatsoever for fighting the British. He also admitted that “apprehension and despair” gripped the whole army.12
Washington was by no means alone in this perception. Behind it lay a much larger question: Should they continue to defend New York? “Till of late,” Washington wrote, he was sure the American army would make the city the next and possibly decisive battleground. Now he was no longer confident the army was equal to the task. He asked Congress, if they evacuated New York, whether they should permit the place “to stand as winter quarters for the enemy.” He was personally inclined to burn it.
A few days later, Washington received a letter from a revived General Nathanael Greene, who confirmed Washington’s growing doubts about relying on Bunker Hillism in a battle for New York. They should execute a “speedy retreat” from the island. New York was worthless compared with “the general interests of America.” The country was already “struck with a panick.” Another “capital loss” could spell ruin for their cause.13 Greene recommended burning New York. Two-thirds of the city belonged to Tories.
The next day Washington received an answer to his letter to Congress. They sent him a “resolve” ordering him not to burn New York if he had to abandon it. Washington called another council of war, and a clear majority of his generals, still devoted to Bunker Hillism, recommended they stand and fight. Most could not bear the thought of abandoning all those forts that their men had spent the long, hot summer constructing.
Washington was not convinced by this majority opinion. He had begun thinking for himself about fighting and winning this war. The next day he wrote to Congress, revealing a new strategy. He said it was only a question of time before they were forced to abandon New York. He realized that a general and his army might be reproached for retreating. But “the fate of America” was at stake here. With the help of “experienced men,” he had decided that his army should “on all occasions avoid a general action, or put anything to the risque, unless compelled by necessity into which we ought never to be drawn.” Instead they should “protract the war.”14
Congress, not grasping the breadth and depth of this change, approved Washington’s plan to withdraw from New York if necessary but again forbade him to burn the city. This left Washington to formulate a plan that would not distress the majority of his generals, who still wanted to fight for the city. He calmly began moving most of the army northward, to the high ground known as Harlem Heights, and beyond it to the northern tip of Manhattan, called Kingsbridge. He left only 5,000 men in the forts constructed along the three miles of New York City’s shoreline.
To contest a British landing elsewhere, he assigned Connecticut militia and some New York regular troops to defend the coves that indented the East River shore at present-day 15th Street (Stuyvesant Cove), 34th Street (Kips Bay), and 42nd Street (Turtle Bay). These men had neither the time nor the inclination to build serious fortifications. They dug crude trenches and talked loudly to each other about the damage they would inflict on any British soldiers foolish enough to come ashore in their bailiwicks.
For several days, there was no sign of the next British move. Then flatboats began moving up the East River’s opposite shore. Landing parties seized two islands in the river. At 7:00 P.M. on September 14, five British frigates dropped anchor in Kips Bay—close enough for the men onboard to exchange insults with the Connecticut militia regiments on the shore. When an American sentry called, “All is well,” a sailor on one of the ships shouted, “We will alter your tune before tomorrow night!”
At dawn on September 15, the militiamen awoke to discover that the frigates had moved “within musket shot of us,” recalled one of the part-time soldiers. HMS Phoenix was close enough for men on shore to read her name. The militiamen shouted insults, waved their guns, and dared the British to try coming ashore. But the sailors were busy loading their cannons. Two hours later, as the sun rose, a hot muggy haze enveloped Manhattan Island. The waiting militiamen began to find the enemy’s silence ominous.
Out of Bushwick Creek, on the opposite shore, came dozens of flatboats. With sailors rowing in steady beats, they began moving across the East River. In the lead boat was General Henry Clinton. Around him were seven battalions of red-coated British light infantry and grenadiers and a brigade of elite British Guards. Nearby were three German battalions of blue-coated grenadiers and green-coated jaegers (huntsmen)—their version of light infantry.
Opposing General Clinton on the Manhattan shore was overage Major General Joseph Spencer of Connecticut—one of too many ranking officers Congress had chosen for purely political reasons. He was little more than a spectator as the British flatboat armada approached. He gave no orders to his scattered regiments. No one tried to concentrate men at Kips Bay. Instead, when the wind and tide bent the line of oncoming British and Germans toward Turtle Bay, militiamen scampered in that direction. Others thought the British would wait for the tide to ebb, carrying them to Stuyvesant Cove, and ran there.
At 11:00 A.M., when the flatboats were about fifty yards from the shore of Kips Bay, the eighty-six cannons aboard the frigates exploded. One militiaman thought his head would fly off with the crash. He dove to the bottom of his trench and lay there, wondering “which part of my carcass was to go first.” For fifty-nine minutes the guns pounded the militiaman in their primitive trenches. From the haze of gun smoke emerged the flatboats, in three columns, heading for the shore.15
The Connecticut militiaman took one look at these murky, murderous shapes and started running. By the time the first British flatboat grounded several dozen yards from the beach and the men began floundering through the mud to the rocky shore, only the commander of the Kips Bay militia brigade and a handful of men over whom he had immediate control were still in the trenches. Four New York regiments stationed at Stuyvesant Cove and five regiments of Connecticut militia stationed near 23rd Street should have rushed to Kips Bay. But they were paralyzed by the cannonade and the awesome sight of the oncoming British attackers.
As the grenadiers and light infantry reached dry ground, to their disbelief no one fired so much as a shot at them. They had their bayonets leveled and ready. But there was no one to bayonet. The Connecticut militia were legging it north along the Boston Post Road. The British were soon in possession of the gently sloping high ground at present-day 34th Street. The German grenadiers, preceded by a screen of jaegers, approached some nearby woods and fields. From the woods came a blast of musketry. The grenadiers charged with bayonets, and it was Long Island all over again: the mercenaries skewered whimpering, pleading young Americans as they tried to surrender.
By 1:00 P.M. the British had total control of their beachhead and were cautiously expanding it north and south. General Clinton still expected a massive American counterattack. But no such event was forthcoming. George Washington and his staff and other generals, including the hapless Spencer, were frantically trying to rally the fleeing militiamen. They hoped to organize a stand along the Bloomingdale Road around present-day 41st Street, where stone walls divided farms and the corn stood high. The generals brought with them two brigades of Connecticut militia—about 2,500 men. None of them had been anywhere near the Kips Bay beachhead. But when they saw the former defenders of that shoreline running helter-skelter up the road and across the fields, these regiments also collapsed. A glimpse of seven or eight British light infantrymen on the crest of a hill a quarter mile away completed their panic.
In vain General Washington roared, “Take the wall! Take the cornfield!” The men raced past him up the road or scrambled into the fields around him.
Washington saw his military reputation vanishing. He flung his hat to the ground and cried out in anguish, “Are these the men with which I have to defend America?” Cursing stupendously, he lashed runaways within reach of his riding crop. Neither the words nor his blows had the slightest effect. The fleeing troops deserted their commander in chief on the Bloomingdale Road, surrounded by abandoned muskets, knapsacks, canteens, and cartridge boxes.
Washington seldom let his temper get out of control. When he did, the explosion of raw energy drained him to the point of stupor. He slumped in his saddle, staring dazedly around him. A ten-year-old boy with a toy sword could have taken him prisoner. His bewildered aides waited for him to recover. The oncoming British light infantrymen hesitated, suspecting a trap. Finally, one of Washington’s aides rode up to the general, took the bridle of his horse, and led him up the road in the wake of his troops. It was the low point of Washington’s performance as a commander in chief. It also resolved any lingering doubts he may have had about Congress’s strategy of relying on a large turnout of militia.
While this drama unfolded, and the British stood poised to advance across the rest of Manhattan Island, 5,000 men, including most of the army’s irreplaceable artillerymen, still manned the supposedly impregnable forts in New York City. Their commander, General Israel Putnam, was looking forward to a replay of Bunker Hill when he received an order from General Washington to retreat immediately. Putnam was inclined to defy the order but a young officer named Aaron Burr convinced him that doing so would lead to disaster. Frantic efforts to load ammunition, guns, and baggage ensued, and a long weary column wended its way up the west side of Manhattan to the safety of Harlem Heights. Its sluggish, almost sullen pace was mute evidence of the regret that tormented almost all these men, who had devoted so many hours to building the forts that they were now abandoning without a fight.
LATER THAT day, Washington grimly informed Congress of the awful performance of the militia at Kips Bay. Now, he reported, his army was temporarily safe on the “Heights of Harlem,” where it could inflict serious damage on the British if they attacked. Such a successful repetition of Bunker Hill required the men to behave with “tolerable resolution.” But experience, to his “great affliction,” had led him to regard this conduct as “rather to be wished for than expected.” He could only hope that some of them were ready “to act like men and show themselves worthy of the blessings of freedom.”
As he finished this letter, one of his aides rushed into the room to tell him of an exchange of gunfire on “the plains of Harlem,” not far away. At dawn Washington had ordered Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Knowlton of Connecticut, commander of 150 rangers, to prowl closer to the British lines to look for signs of dangerous movement. At about present-day 106th Street, they collided with some four hundred British light infantry camped in a wood. The Americans put up a good fight until Knowlton spotted the 42nd Regiment, the famed Scottish Black Watch, advancing on his left. He ordered his men to begin falling back. The light infantry followed, and the skirmish continued with considerable ferocity all the way to what New Yorkers called “the Hollow Way,” a mini-valley at present-day 125th Street.
The light infantry, aware that they were getting dangerously close to the main American army, ceased their pursuit. One of their officers ordered a bugler to sound a call familiar from the fox hunt—a series of whoop-whoops meaning the chase was over, and the fox was dead. It was a peculiarly British touch of arrogance that the Americans understood all too well. Joseph Reed, one of Washington’s aides, later told his wife, “I never felt such a sensation before. It seemed to crown our disgrace.” He was thinking of the army’s awful performance at Kips Bay.
Washington, a veteran fox hunter, shared Reed’s feelings. He ordered Knowlton to take his rangers and three rifle companies from a Virginia regiment through the woods on Vanderlyn Heights—present-day Morningside Heights—and get in the rear of the light infantry, cutting off their retreat. (The infantrymen were close to the site of present-day Grant’s Tomb.) The light infantry met the challenge with sheets of bullets. Both Knowlton and the major in command of the Virginians went down, mortally wounded. But this only inspired the men in the ranks to press home a ferocious attack. Washington, sensing the chance of a victory that could revive the army’s morale, poured in another eight hundred men. Soon the light infantrymen had only one thought in their heads—a retreat to the safety of the British lines. The British ordered the Black Watch into the fight, but even their famed pugnacity could not withstand the pressure from the swarming Americans. Soon the British withdrew into the woods lining the sloping hill along which Broadway now runs.
The sight of the enemy all but on the run galvanized the Americans. Parts of two Maryland regiments charged into the woods, and the red-coated light infantry soon abandoned their shelter. They were temporarily relieved to find reinforcements greeting them, two more battalions of light infantry with two field pieces. This did not in the least discourage the Americans. For another hour, a firefight raged in a buckwheat field between present-day 120th and 119th Streets. The British started running out of ammunition and retreated again. By now everyone in both armies was watching the contest. Even some frigates in Stryker’s Bay on the Hudson River tried to help their comrades in arms, blasting numerous cannonades at the Americans. They hit no one. Several regiments of German and British grenadiers now entered the fray, and the Americans, more than satisfied, pulled back to Harlem Heights.
Washington was enormously pleased by the way this minor skirmish lifted the morale of his army. Even some of the runaway militia from Kips Bay stood ready to fight, though no one was inclined to commit them to combat. One man later recalled how they had waited on Harlem Heights for an order to advance, even though some of them were faint with hunger, having had no food for almost forty-eight hours. On the British side, one officer admitted which side had won the fight, telling his diary it was “a most unfortunate affair.”
Admiral and General Howe could think of nothing to do next but issue another call for a negotiated peace. From a diplomatic point of view, this decision was a disaster. It confirmed what the three congressmen who talked with the admiral on Staten Island had reported and the newspapers soon printed: the British commanders dealt only in “generalities,” which could mean almost anything—or nothing. Privately the Howes admitted in a letter to their civilian superior in London, the secretary of state for American affairs, that the rebels betrayed not even a hint of an inclination to restore “public tranquility.”
Within twenty-four hours, new proof of rebel determination reinforced this pessimism. Shortly after midnight on September 20, the cry “Fire” rang out in New York streets. A stiff wind blew from the south, and the flames, which began near Whitehall ferry slip, swept north with devastating rapidity. Hundreds of seamen from the fleet in the harbor rushed ashore, and two regiments of soldiers joined them. But they could do little. There was a shortage of buckets, and running water was scarce. The British caught a number of men setting fires in advance of the blaze and killed most of these incendiaries without mercy—or questioning.
General Howe feared the fire might signal an all-out attack by the Americans and refused to commit additional soldiers. Only by pulling down dozens of buildings and creating firebreaks did the men fighting the blaze get it under control. By that time it was almost dawn, and at least 600 houses—by some estimates, as many as 1,000—had been destroyed, constituting a third of the city. Washington never admitted a role in this conflagration. But his cryptic comment on it said a great deal. In a letter to his cousin Lund Washington, he admitted that he had asked Congress for permission to destroy the city and been refused. He considered this denial “one of the capital errors of Congress.” He was grateful that “Providence—or some good honest fellow—had done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”
TWO DAYS after the fire, Washington stole time “from hours allotted to sleep” to write a long letter to Congress. He pleaded with its members to abandon the strategy of depending on short-term militia. He needed the right to enlist enough men for the duration of the war to give him a standing army that he could train and equip to equal that of the British. He knew the term “standing army,” with its historical echoes of Oliver Cromwell, made some politicians nervous. But the evils of a standing army were “remote,” while not having one as soon as possible would lead to “inevitable ruin.”16
The general also warned Congress that it was time to show more judgment and care in the selection of officers. The officer corps was “the soul of every army.” To find the right men, Washington told Congress, it was time to accept a hard truth—the fervent emotions that persuaded people to support a cause did not last very long. It was foolish to assume that “any other principles but those of Interest” influence most men. To expect otherwise “was to look for what never did, and I fear never will happen.” This meant Congress had to pay officers enough to live like gentlemen. At the moment scanty pay was driving a dismaying number of officers to “low and dirty arts.” These included looting civilians as well as filching from the public treasury.
This insistence on the significance of “interest” (self-interest) clashed with the largely New England opinion that true patriotism transcended such selfish emotions. No one had paid the militiamen who fought so well on April 19, 1775. (In one or two cases, a town offered to pay its minutemen, only to be told that “volunteers” did not take money.) Serving his country was proof of a man’s virtue—the only reward he should seek. No one gave the issue much thought for the moment—but it would engender serious quarrels in the years to come.
WHILE WASHINGTON was enunciating these basic principles, his army continued to dissolve. Among the Connecticut militia regiments, one had dwindled to fourteen men, another to thirty; several others had fewer than fifty soldiers in their ranks. Some regiments were openly mutinous and threatening to go home. General Howe tried to accelerate this dissolution by putting 5,000 men aboard flatboats in the East River and landing them unopposed on Throgs Neck, a point of land near the junction of the East River and Long Island Sound in the present-day Bronx. The Americans quickly destroyed the only route off Throgs Neck to the mainland—a causeway and bridge. This suggests that Howe’s chief purpose was to get the American army off Manhattan Island. He accelerated this process by moving the 5,000 men north to Pells Point in present-day Pelham, New York, and shipping them reinforcements.
In a council of war, Washington’s generals advised him to withdraw from Manhattan as soon as possible. Another nightmarish retreat ensued. There were not enough horses to pull the wagons and guns. Some cannons had to be dragged by hand. The American army was a long, exposed line of 13,000 weary men. But General Howe chose not to attack. He was still pursuing his strategy of knocking Washington’s army out of the war without completely destroying it.
The Americans entrenched on the hills around the village of White Plains. Now, at last, Bunker Hill II was sure to happen! The British made a few feints, which local boosters still call the “battle” of White Plains. They captured a hill that outflanked the entire American position. But they again declined to hurl their regiments en masse up the slope at the waiting rebels. Instead General Howe detached a large chunk of his army and sent it back to Manhattan to eliminate the last pocket of enemy resistance there—some 3,000 men entrenched in a large earthwork named Fort Washington. The area around it is now called Washington Heights. Washington had left them there because Congress had urged him to retain control of the Hudson River. Theoretically, the guns of the fort and a fort on the New Jersey shore, named for the army’s second in command, Major General Charles Lee, could manage this.
The British attack on Fort Washington was a military masterpiece. From every piece of high ground, artillery rained down shot and shell. A column of Germans struck from the north; the British light infantry assaulted from the south. In two hours, the defenders were driven from their outworks into the central fort, where they milled around, a packed, panicked mob. A German captain stalked in the gate under the protection of a white flag and gave them a half hour to surrender. He made it clear that the Germans intended to honor the military tradition of slaughtering to the last man defenders of a fort who declined to yield. The Americans capitulated.17
Major General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island had played a large part in persuading Washington to leave the men in the fort. Watching from Fort Lee on the New Jersey shore, the two generals saw a fifth of their army vanish. It was the nadir of the American strategy for winning the war in 1776. It was also the last gasp of Bunker Hillism in George Washington’s awakening strategic mind.
By this time, Washington had retreated into New Jersey with 3,000 men to rally that state against the oncoming British, who swiftly put 5,000 men across the Hudson River to challenge him. Washington had left General Charles Lee in command of about 7,000 men in Westchester County, with orders to keep the British from invading New England. Instead, the British began reinforcing their New Jersey invaders until they were 10,000 men strong, under the command of one of their most aggressive generals, Charles, Lord Cornwallis. Washington asked Lee to join him for a stand on the Raritan River around New Brunswick. Lee, a headstrong compound of radical political opinions and careening military ambition, ignored Washington’s request; he wanted an independent command. In letters to Congress he began referring to Washington’s men as “the western army.”
Meanwhile, New Jersey’s 17,000 militia declined to mobilize. Not a single regiment responded to Governor William Livingston’s call. Only about 1,000 individuals showed up at mustering sites, a turnout almost as useless as none at all. The numbers proved the British were waging a very successful war for the loyalties of New Jerseymen. Along their line of march they distributed a proclamation offering pardons and guarantees against “forfeitures, attainders and penalties.” Rebels need only appear before a British official within sixty days and sign a statement promising to “remain in peaceable obedience to His Majesty.”18
On November 29, Washington was in New Brunswick, with an army riven by three months of retreat and defeat. Militiamen broke into stores of rum and got drunk. Others, mostly from Pennsylvania, deserted in droves, despite having been paid to stay until January 1. Men whose contracts expired on December 1 announced they were going home too. Charles Lee continued to ignore Washington’s pleas to join him for a united effort in New Jersey. Washington informed Congress that within twenty-four hours, “our force will be reduced to a mere handful.” By December 1 he was down to an unstable mix of regular and militia troops that barely totaled 3,000 men. At least 6,000 British were crunching toward the bridges over the Raritan River. Washington told Congress, “We shall [have to] retreat to the west side of the Delaware.”
Stunned by its militia’s mass defection and Washington’s seeming abandonment, New Jersey slid toward collapse. The legislature issued one more appeal to the militia and disbanded. As many as three to four hundred people a day flocked to British army posts at New Brunswick, Elizabethtown, and elsewhere to renew their allegiance. Brigadier General Alexander McDougall was soon writing from Morristown, “This state is totally deranged, without Government or officers, civil or military that will act with any spirit.”19
Lee finally realized the fate of the infant nation was at stake in New Jersey and crossed the Hudson River into Bergen County. He was not encouraged by what he encountered along his line of march. One sergeant wrote in his diary, “The inhabitants abused us caling us Damd rebels and would not sell Us anything for money.” A sergeant sent to buy a hot breakfast for three men stopped at every house for ten or twelve miles before he found one whose occupants sold him some food—at noon. General Lee began saying the mass of New Jerseymen were “strangely contaminated.”
Lee’s solution was force. An early believer in the dictum that revolutions grew from the point of a gun, he wrote to friends in Congress, urging them to draft militia to fill up the ranks of a new army. He sneered at the idea of volunteers, who drew from “the most idle, vicious and dissolute part of every society.” A volunteer standing army would put the “arms of the Republic in the hands of its worst members.” On his march through northern New Jersey, Lee gave his mostly New England soldiers carte blanche to rob anyone suspected of loyalism.
Washington took a very different view of New Jersey’s collapse. In a letter to General William Heath, who was guarding the Hudson Highlands, the American commander in chief wrote, “The defection of the people… has been as much owing to the want of an Army to look the Enemy in the face, as any other cause.”20
Here, he enunciated another principle of the strategy that would not only win the American Revolution but lay the foundation of the future American regular army. When he wrote that letter, an event had already occurred that enabled him to implement the idea almost immediately. On Friday, December 13, British cavalry captured Major General Charles Lee as he slept at an inn several miles from his troops. Washington promptly took command of Lee’s army, which had dwindled to about 4,000 men. He began organizing small armies of militiamen and regulars operating around Morristown and Springfield under the command of Continental officers such as McDougall. He gave the Morristown volunteers three regiments of Lee’s troops. He ordered General Heath to invade Bergen County with six hundred Continentals. These mini-armies were soon disturbing the British peace in supposedly pacified New Jersey.
None of this activity impressed the members of Congress in Philadelphia. On December 12 they voted to abandon the city and retreat to Baltimore. They had been debating the structure of a national government for the American nation that they had recently founded. But it was difficult to think clearly with the British only a day’s march away. Congressman William Whipple of Connecticut blamed this embarrassing move on Philadelphia. He said the city had been struck “with such a panick in all orders of the people… that the contagion seized the nerves of some members of Congress.”21
General Washington’s nerves, on the other hand, remained remarkably steady. On the west bank of the Delaware River, he began planning an attack that would galvanize his army and send a signal to all the people of New Jersey. For his target he chose the British outpost at Trenton, garrisoned by three regiments of German mercenaries. The British had stationed troops there and at Bordentown, Princeton, and other towns across the state to protect the inhabitants who had returned to peaceable obedience to His Majesty. General Howe admitted the posts were a bit exposed. But by now he had decided they could “take liberties” with the hapless Americans.
With a canny combination of espionage, double agentry, and surprise, Washington first befuddled then assaulted the Germans at Trenton in a howling sleet storm on December 26, capturing 868 officers and men and killing or wounding 106. Another four hundred escaped by doing what had heretofore been an American specialty: running for their lives. Returning to Pennsylvania, Washington persuaded his soldiers to stay in the army for another six weeks—virtually the entire force had enlisted only for the year 1776, thanks to Congress’s insistence on a twelve-month maximum for all volunteers. With these extremely temporary troops, he recrossed the Delaware, determined to give New Jersey an army to look the enemy in the face. General Lord Cornwallis came after him with every available man and gun.
Washington conducted a fighting retreat but could not hold Trenton. He fell back to the bank of the Delaware River, where, as far as the British could see, Bunker Hillism would soon provide them with the denouement of the Revolution. Washington’s position looked hopeless. If he retreated into South Jersey, he was on a peninsula, in another trap. If he tried to flee across the Delaware, at least half his army would be smashed in the process. It never occurred to the British that Washington was planning an attack.
Again he marched by night, leaving campfires burning briskly to simulate the presence of his army. Dawn found him miles in the British rear, mauling three British regiments at Princeton. The astonished Royal Army came puffing and blowing down the road behind him. But Washington had vanished into the country like a will-o’-the-wisp, heading for the main British supply base at New Brunswick. The panicked British marched all night to get there first and took up defensive positions in the hills around the town.
When Washington failed to appear, it dawned on the British—and everyone else—that the king’s troops had been outfought, outgeneraled, and, worst of all, made to look ridiculous. Washington settled his weary troops into winter quarters at Morristown, where high ground gave him security and time to begin recruiting a new army. He issued a proclamation to New Jerseyans. Anyone who had succumbed to the British offer of pardon could return to the fold by visiting the nearest military post to swear “allegiance to the United States.” The demoralized British contributed to the potency of this tactic by withdrawing from western New Jersey, creating a line of posts around New Brunswick that offered no protection to loyalists in two-thirds of the state. At least as important was the safety of the nation’s capital, Philadelphia. An exultant General Henry Knox wrote to his wife, “The enemy were within 19 miles of Philadelphia. They are now sixty miles.”22
Throughout New Jersey and the rest of America, news of the victories at Trenton and Princeton revived the dying Revolution like a massive jolt of electricity. A loyalist in Virginia reported, “A few days ago they had given up their cause for lost. Now they are all liberty mad again.” The British dream of making New Jersey the first state to submit to the king’s peace went a-glimmering. Every British officer who rode alone or with a single escort now risked ambush. Foragers looking for food to feed the hungry troops in New Brunswick frequently found themselves fighting mini-battles with militia firing from nearby woods and fields.
General Howe ruefully admitted Washington’s successes had “thrown us back further than was at first apprehended from the great encouragement it has given the rebels. I do not now see a prospect of terminating the war, but by a general action”—precisely the climactic battle that George Washington had resolved that General Howe would never get. The strategy of maintaining an army to look the enemy in the face dovetailed with the policy of never risking that army on one roll of the dice of war. The idea was already manifest in Washington’s decision not to continue his march to New Brunswick with the half-starved, exhausted troops who had won at Trenton and Princeton. He saw “the danger of loosing the advantage we had gaind by aiming at too much.”
For the next five years, Washington fought this protracted war with immense patience and skill. It proved a far more complex task than anyone—including the commander in chief—foresaw, as the war spread north and south, engulfing almost every state. But the victories at Trenton and Princeton had enabled him to obtain from Congress the means of fighting it his way. The shaken lawmakers gave Washington almost dictatorial powers. Henceforth he could enlist men for three years in an army that was truly continental, in name as well as in fact. It would have well-trained artillerymen as well as cavalry, bolstering their ability to confront a British army with similar troops. Also available would be enough money to finance an intelligence operation that enabled Washington to anticipate and move promptly to counter the enemy’s plans.
Henceforth victory would be a reasonable possibility—but never a certainty. If there was one indisputable truth about fighting a war, it was its unpredictability. Also problematic were the impatience and personal ambitions of some of the men around Washington, who were hostile to this protracted conflict, and his civilian critics in and out of Congress, who still hungered for a quick victory in one big battle. The next years would continue to provide high drama crowded with opportunities for that other crucial ingredient in wartime: personal courage.