The day after the Battle of Paoli, Gen. Howe directed several of his regiments northwest in a strong feint toward the Continentals’ Reading storehouses. It was only a ruse, but it worked. By the time he recalled his troops, Washington had responded by withdrawing north, away from Philadelphia, and forming a defensive line between the British and the Pennsylvania interior. The city’s fate was sealed.
Moving at a leisurely pace, Howe’s army of some 14,000 took nearly a week to reach Philadelphia. As it lumbered through the suburbs of Norristown and then Germantown clad in a rainbow of uniforms—dragoons in crimson coats faced with dark blue lapels; grenadiers in brick red with their multicolored facings reflecting their parent regiments; artillerymen in dark blue, their buttonholes laced yellow; Hessian Jägers sporting their customary forest green, their omnipresent waxed mustaches cultivated to such a density as to qualify as topiary—onlookers (and spies) noted its surly disposition. In contrast to the sprightly Continentals who had marched into Philadelphia just over a month earlier, the British appeared anything but happy to be here, an ocean away from home, chasing an elusive enemy who refused to stand and fight like proper European adversaries.
Finally, at noon on a crisp Friday, September 26, with Gen. Lord Cornwallis in the van of the parade marching down Second Street and up Vine Street, Howe claimed his prize unopposed by a single musket shot. Cornwallis’s triumphal entry into the city proper was accompanied by row upon row of lace-coated fifers and drummers playing “God Save Great George Our King.” Each of Howe’s soldiers had tied a sprig of green to his hat or his horse’s tail. It is not recorded if the crowd of mostly women and children—the majority of the town’s men were gone—recognized the mocking allusion.
Three thousand troops under the command of Cornwallis were billeted in the city proper. The remainder, under Howe, were encamped six miles away at Germantown. Soon, Howe would move into the city, settling himself and his staff in a 110-year-old, three-and-a-half-story brick mansion on the corner of Sixth and Market Streets that had once been the home of William Penn’s grandson.I But, for now, he remained on the periphery to ensure that his greater force formed up properly as a bulwark between Philadelphia and Washington’s army. He had arranged, however, for one further derisive gesture beyond his troops’ green sprigs. While the lower floor of Independence Hall was converted into a barracks for a small company of grenadiers, Howe ordered the upper floor of the statehouse where the Declaration of Independence had been signed converted into a holding pen for some 70 American officers, predominantly Virginians and Pennsylvanians, captured at Brandywine and Paoli.
Only months earlier Washington would have considered the capture of the capital of the United States a fatal blow to the revolution. Now, just as the bend of the river compels the pilot’s course, the fall of Philadelphia proved more academic than calamitous, particularly with the Continental Congress safe in York and, thanks to Alexander Hamilton, most of the city’s storehouses either emptied or destroyed.
A week before the first clomp of British horses echoed across the cobblestones of Market Street, the redoubtable Hamilton had led a small party of dragoons to the city’s outskirts. They were in the process of burning a brace of flour mills along the Schuylkill when a company of British cavalry, drawn to the flames, ambushed them in the dark. One American was killed, another wounded, and Hamilton’s horse was shot out from under him. While the rest of his mounted company fled, Hamilton and four other Continentals managed to secure a tiny, flat-bottomed skiff and row to the middle of the river as Redcoats swarmed the bankside and “emptied their carbines and pistols at the distance of ten or twelve paces.” When their boat was caught in the eddies in the middle of the river, Hamilton and his compatriots dived in and swam to safety. From the opposite riverbank he dashed off a message to John Hancock warning that the British were closer to the city than anyone imagined.
The irascible corset maker turned pamphleteer Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense had electrified the movement for American independence a year earlier by demythicizing the aura of a benevolent King George, recalled the panic that ensued. Even at midnight, Paine wrote, Philadelphia’s moonlit streets resembled market day at high noon as disbanding militia companies rushed about wildly and hundreds if not thousands of citizens hitched teams to overloaded wagons and carts to flee west.
Washington, meanwhile, was distraught when the horsemen under Hamilton’s charge reached camp and reported their leader dead. But just as the commander in chief was digesting this hard communication, who should appear at the entrance to his tent on a borrowed horse but the sodden and disheveled dead man himself. It was the best news of a bad time.
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Hamilton, then all of 22, had come to Washington’s attention a year earlier during the Battle of Harlem Heights, one of the few bright spots of the New York campaign. The commander in chief had been impressed by the precocious artillery officer’s proficiency at constructing defensive earthworks, and had invited Hamilton to his headquarters. As the two conversed, Washington was further taken with the young man’s military acumen. It is likely Hamilton did not bring up an incident from weeks earlier, when during the Battle of Long Island his cannoneers, some of them drunk, had been decimated by British warships sailing up the Hudson. Since the abandonment of New York, Hamilton’s reputation had only risen. During the engagement at Trenton the pinpoint accuracy of his field pieces had sent the Hessians into a panic. The following day at Princeton, when a company of some 200 British soldiers took refuge in the school’s main hall, lore has it that one of Hamilton’s cannonballs blasted through the head of a portrait of King George II, compelling their surrender.
Two months later, in March 1777, Washington had brought the short, slim “Little Lion” onto his staff as his principal aide. This was no small promotion. When Congress had tabbed Washington to lead the army two years earlier, it had also authorized a military secretary and three aides-de-camp to assist him. To Washington the two positions were interchangeable, as both job descriptions consisted of composing letters and orders, delivering messages on and off the battlefield, leading scouting missions, interrogating prisoners of war, and helping to run the various spy rings that sprang up during the revolution.
The commander in chief well knew the sacrifices these men made—most who accepted the positions would have preferred more prestigious posts as line officers. In a letter to John Hancock decrying the pittance that Congress set aside for his staff’s salaries, Washington provided a stark insight into the character of the men with whom he surrounded himself. “Aid de Camps are person’s in whom entire Confidence must be placed,” he wrote. “It requires Men of abilities to execute the duties with propriety and dispatch where there is such a multiplicity of business as must attend the Commander in chief of such an army as our’s; and perswaded I am that nothing but the zeal of those Gentlemen who live with me and act in this capacity for the great American Cause and personal attachment to me, has induced them to undergo the trouble and confinement they have experienced since they have become Members of my Family.”
Given the mortification Washington had felt at being betrayed by the man Hamilton was replacing, Joseph Reed, it was something of a wonder that the commander in chief retained such high opinions of his aides. The charming and loquacious Reed, a prominent Philadelphia attorney, was Washington’s original secretary and aide-de-camp. Reed attended Princeton before studying law at London’s Middle Temple, and his academic credentials probably overimpressed the Virginia planter, ever self-conscious about his own lack of higher education. As the biographer Joseph Ellis notes, “Instead of going to college, Washington went to war,” and his innate solitariness, manifested by his reluctance to place his complete trust in anyone except his wife, Martha, was legendary. Yet he grew to view Reed not only as a confidant, but as a friend. Which made it all the more devastating when, after the retreat from New York, Washington discovered that Reed was conspiring to have Congress throw him over and vault Gen. Charles Lee into the supreme command of the Continental Army.
General Lee had since been captured by the British while undertaking a foolhardy escapade involving a tavern girl. And Washington, though seething inwardly, had granted Reed a temporary furlough to tend to his law practice. In the four months since the incident, Washington had been overburdened by bureaucratic clerical duties, and Hamilton seemed the correct fit to step in. In the interim between Reed’s dismissal and Hamilton’s hiring, Washington’s vast network of correspondents had become accustomed to receiving communiqués in the commander in chief’s distinctive and imposing handwriting, marked by frequent if erratic use of capital letters. Washington considered effective communication a key to his management style, and to his mind this included an emphasis on presentation. If anything, Hamilton’s beautiful penmanship, written in a consistent, elegant slope imbued with a series of decorative loops, outdid his new commander’s. How he had acquired his many talents was a strange story.
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Alexander Hamilton was born a bastard on the Caribbean island of Nevis. His mother, Rachel, died from a tropical fever when he was nine, leaving him to look after his younger brother James. With the help of a Scottish Presbyterian minister named Hugh Knox, he found employment in the customhouse in the bustling port of Saint Croix and appeared destined for an anonymous life as a mid-level clerk, or “quill driver.” Then lightning struck—literally and metaphorically—when a descriptive letter he wrote at the age of 14 to his departed father in the wake of a ravaging hurricane was reprinted in a local newspaper.II This caught the attention of a company of local merchants who, taken with the boy’s natural industriousness and intelligence, set up a fund to pay for his formal education.
Denied entrance to any Church of England school because of his illegitimacy, he sailed to America in 1772 to enroll at the Elizabethtown Academy in New Jersey. Like Lafayette, Hamilton displayed a penchant for attracting the attention of influential older men, not least of them the future governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, with whom he found lodging. Livingston was already a proponent of independence from Great Britain, and his young charge carried this revolutionary notion along with his ever-present bag of books to New York when he enrolled at King’s College, now Columbia University.
Hamilton was still a student at King’s College when he published a series of pamphlets and gave a string of speeches advocating American independence. But he had also matured into a man of decency and integrity, and he was credited with saving the life of the college’s president, Myles Cooper, when Cooper was attacked by a mob for his Loyalist leanings. When the revolution broke over the 13 colonies, Hamilton and a few of his classmates formed a militia company, dubbing themselves the Corsicans. Later, perhaps feeling betrayed by Gen. Paoli’s conversion from resistance fighter to London dandy, they renamed their unit the Hearts of Oak. By now Capt. Hamilton’s sack of books was heavily weighted toward military tactics and history. As he employed his autodidactic learnings to real-world effect in battles from Harlem Heights to White Plains to the Raritan River to Trenton, his fearlessness and composure under fire were evident enough to prompt Gen. Lord Stirling and Gen. Alexander McDougall, a Scottish-born former privateer now serving under Washington, to invite him onto their staffs. He turned down both, stating his preference to remain a field officer. It is worth noting that he accepted Washington’s similar offer only when it was proffered in conjunction with a promotion to lieutenant colonel.
By the time the British marched into Philadelphia, Hamilton was so deeply immersed in his position as Washington’s chief secretary and aide-de-camp that, as the bibliographer Chernow notes, he was “the surrogate who was not only a good scribe but could intuit the responses [Washington] himself would write.” No further proof of this is needed than the hundreds of letters to Congress, governors, and senior officers that Hamilton composed in his exquisite penmanship in Washington’s name. He wrote, as the popular Broadway musical based on his life put it, as if he was running out of time. During his tenure on Washington’s staff—he would not officially resume field duty until July 1781—Hamilton formed with Lafayette and John Laurens a triad of bright and eager young men who filled a void in the childless general’s military family. It is rather astounding that, by the fall of 1777, three men barely out of their teens had become some of the most essential figures of the American Revolution.
Like the prickly John Adams, who viewed the enemy’s occupation of Philadelphia as a “gloomy, dark, melancholy, and dispiriting” occasion, Hamilton was crestfallen at the capture of America’s capital city to the point where he wondered if this meant the beginning of the end of the revolution. Yet not every American patriot saw the event as quite so dispiriting. The great propagandist Paine, for instance, now serving as secretary to the Foreign Committee of Congress, noted that the quest for independence was not a fight for “a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause we are defending.” And half a world away in France, when 71-year-old Benjamin Franklin was breathlessly informed that Gen. Howe had captured Philadelphia, he waved off his courier’s conspicuous anguish.
“No,” he quipped, “Philadelphia has captured Howe.” For all of Franklin’s quick wit, there was usually a kernel of truth at the heart of his pithy aperçus.
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By late September the first frost of the season had already whitened the rolling green hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. Short of a pitched battle to retake Philadelphia, Washington understood that his best chance to stymie Gen. Howe was to keep the British fleet literally at bay. If the Americans could prevent Adm. Howe from sailing his supply ships up the Delaware River, his brother would soon enough be hard pressed to feed his army. This meant relying on the Continentals’ riverside forts, and to that end Washington detached a regiment of close to 1,000 men to reinforce the stockades on the lower Delaware. He felt able to spare these troops upon receiving word that the brigade he had summoned from Poughkeepsie was now but a day’s march away. Yet when he discovered that this unit consisted of only some 900 men and officers, he sent word to Gen. Putnam to hurry another 1,600 troops south to Pennsylvania.
Upon receiving this order Putnam was again astonished and angry—why not just invite the British to stroll up from New York City and seize the entire Hudson Highlands? Such were the perils of the era’s communication lines that Putnam and the other American generals stationed in the north were under the impression that Washington commanded an army of some 40,000 men—enough, one commented, to make the British in Philadelphia “but a breakfast” for the Continentals.
In fact, not counting the 2,000 soldiers marching from Virginia and the combined detachments from Putnam’s command, at the moment Washington could field only around 5,000 fighting men, with but 2,000 of them considered battle-hardened regulars. A salient fact about the Revolutionary War is that out of a population of three million, the 13 colonies never managed to raise an army of more than 50,000 men at any one time, including state militias. Even that figure is misleading, as it counts the rolls of soldiers who technically enlisted but may or may not have served for any length of time. In truth, the entire Continental Army never numbered more than around 20,000, and Washington never had more than 12,000 or so troops under his direct command.
For all of Putnam’s obstreperousness, Washington had a soft spot for the gnarled 59-year-old. With his crop of thick curls turned badger-gray to match the great puffy pouches underlining his eyes, “Old Put,” as his soldiers called him, wore the face of a melancholy sheepdog. He had been a popular and inspiring leader of men since his Indian-fighting days with Rogers’ Rangers, and it was only half-jokingly remarked that he was totally unfit for any venue except the battlefield. As a civilian Putnam had tried his hand at farming and sheepherding—he was rumored to have crawled into a wolf’s den to kill the last she-wolf in the state of Connecticut—but soldiering was his true calling. It was Putnam who at Bunker Hill had growled the command to hold fire “until you see the whites of their eyes,” and as a sentimental sop to the old warhorse, Washington sent instructions allowing him to consolidate his farther-flung American outposts spread about the Hudson Highlands. But even this peace offering received Putnam’s derision, with one of his officers fuming at the “Paper Men” of Washington’s army and mocking the “boasted Courage of the Southern Heroes.” After Brandywine and Paoli, the patriots of the north country had no idea of how much worse it would get for the paper men in Pennsylvania.
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On September 28, Washington summoned a war council to solicit opinions about whether to “make a general and vigorous attack upon the enemy, or to await further reinforcements.” Early in his military career, while fighting in the French and Indian War, Washington had discovered that he made his best decisions after listening to a spectrum of suggestions from his subordinates. He found that weighing the judgments of others reliably led him to the correct course of action—a course he invariably stuck to once he had decided upon it. On this occasion the vote to defer an assault on Philadelphia until more troops arrived was nearly unanimous—a consensus that, historians suggest, Washington was in agreement with and knew was coming. It was often noted that Washington exerted more influence on events by concealing rather than advertising his preferences. “He possessed the gift of silence,” as John Adams noted years later. Within 48 hours the Virginia troops had reached York to the delight of the Continental Congress, whose members watched them step smartly through the town. Washington was decidedly less enthusiastic when he discovered their conspicuous dearth of firelocks.
Still, as September wound down Washington was again cautiously stalking the British, moving his army to within 16 miles of Germantown. Congress, particularly the Pennsylvania delegation, was pressing him to attack. But he was not certain he had sufficient firepower to stand and fight the bulk of the British regulars stationed at Germantown, much less the total British force. Surprising the enemy would be his only recourse. But when and where? As it happened, events in the north went far toward settling the decision for him. For when word reached Congress that Gen. Gates was successfully blocking the British path to Albany, the pressure on Washington to mount an offensive only grew. As the Valley Forge historian Wayne Bodle writes, “The news [from the north] had its intended effect as a morale booster, and seemed to call for a corresponding triumph in the southern theater.”
Once again, Gen. Howe solved his counterpart’s problem. As Washington suspected, by occupying Philadelphia, Howe had created an internal crisis. On the march to the city his troops had provisioned themselves by living off the countryside, particularly the farmsteads around Valley Forge. Now, however, his quartermasters reported their food and gunpowder supplies dwindling. It was imperative for Howe to break the stranglehold the Americans had on the Delaware River and allow his brother’s supply ships to pass. About four miles below the city, on either side of a narrow section of the Delaware, Continental regulars manned two forts that constituted a strategic choke point. In addition to the redoubts, a small flotilla of American ships—facetiously dubbed “George Washington’s Navy” and consisting of a motley collection of merchantmen turned privateers and several floating artillery batteries—patrolled the waters near the outposts. These were abetted by smaller craft crewed by local Pennsylvanians.
Taken together, the forts and the ships constituted a formidable defense, and Gen. Howe was neither prepared nor inclined to meet it head-on. A few miles below the two riverside outposts, however, rose a much more vulnerable, half-completed earthen fortification at Billingsport, where the Delaware’s main channel swung hard against the New Jersey embankment. This outpost could conceivably form a threat to his brother’s supply ships offloading provisions farther downriver to be conveyed overland to Philadelphia. This would be the British general’s first target. He had no idea that his decision to assault the dilapidated stockade at Billingsport would inadvertently lead to a pitched battle 27 miles away, at Germantown.
I. Masters-Penn House, known today as President’s House, was later home to both President George Washington and President John Adams.
II. In the letter, Hamilton described “the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning, the crash of the falling houses, and the ear-piercing shrieks of the distressed.”