While Alexander Hamilton awaited approval of his artillery captain’s commission from the New York Provincial Congress, Elias Boudinot wrote from Eliza-bethtown to dangle a post as brigade major in the newly formed New Jersey Militia. Hamilton would probably be the youngest major in the Revolutionary armies. Boudinot, now a leader of New Jersey’s Provincial Congress, out of his own pocket was buying up gunpowder and shipping it to General Washington in Massachusetts. Chafing at the New York Congress’s slow pace in commissioning him, Hamilton mulled Boudinot’s offer of serving as aide-de-camp to Lord Stirling, commander of New Jersey’s troops. He knew Stirling well: Stirling was brother-in-law to William Livingston and a member of the Board of Governors of King’s College. Appointed by Washington to take command of defending New York City, Stirling was trying to fortify Manhattan Island.
Hamilton had first met Stirling at his New Jersey estate during vacations from Elizabethtown Academy. He admired the wealthy, handsome Scotsman, whose claim as sixth earl of Stirling had been disallowed by the English House of Lords, a particularly touchy point for Hamilton, illegitimate son of a Scottish laird.
About this time, Nathanael Greene, a logistical genius who was leading his brigades south from Massachusetts to defend Long Island, also invited Hamilton to become aide-de-camp. In either case, Hamilton believed, he would serve fine military commanders, but he himself would not be able to lead troops into combat. Making his first military decision, he declined both offers of promotion to remain in command of his own contingent of troops, a choice more significant to his future than he could imagine. Had he joined either general’s staff, he might never have distinguished himself in battle. His restraint now was to catapult him a few months later to prominence in the Revolution.
Instead, Hamilton set about recruiting the thirty men required for his company. The very first afternoon, Hercules Mulligan, who helped him, later remembered, “We engaged 25 men.” The persuasive pair signed up lieutenants, sergeants, corporals, bombardiers, and gunners, but couldn’t get beyond that number because, as Hamilton complained in writing to the Provincial Congress, he could not match the pay offered by Continental Army recruiters. On April 2, 1776, two weeks after Hamilton’s commission finally arrived, the Provincial Congress ordered Hamilton and his fledgling artillery company to relieve Alexander McDougall’s First New York Regiment. They were to guard the colony’s official records, which were being shipped by wagon from New York’s City Hall to the abandoned Greenwich Village estate of Loyalist William Bayard to keep them out of reach of counterattacking British forces.1
The New York Congress chose Hamilton’s provincial company because it cost less than paying Continental troops for guard duty. Hamilton took this as a springboard for campaigning for higher pay for his militia men. By late May 1776, only ten weeks after becoming an officer, Hamilton was boldly addressing his first long letter to the Provincial Congress, in session in New York’s City Hall. He argued the “considerable importance to the future progress” of recruiting of granting parity in pay for his company. He impatiently urged a “speedy” reply from Congress. Citing the pay rates spelled out in the Continental Congress’s own journal, he contrasted them rank by rank to his own payroll:
You will discover a considerable difference. My own pay will remain the same as it is now, but I make this application on behalf of the company, as I am fully convinced such a disadvantageous distinction will have a very pernicious effect on the minds and behavior of the men. They do the same duty with the other companies and think themselves entitled to the same pay.
His men did not accept the argument that they were being used only on the defensive. They would “willingly leave the colony and take the offensive.” Captain Sebastian Bauman of the Continental artillery was offering Hamilton’s men higher pay, and “men will naturally go to those who pay them best.” While he was at it, Hamilton wanted to be able to offer expense accounts to recruiters to fan out over the countryside and sign up more men. Evidently, the supply of unemployed sailors willing to use their gunners’ skills in New York’s artillery was about exhausted. One further request: he wanted to be able to buy his men loose-fitting frocks for summer fatigue duty as they dug trenches and built gun emplacements. He argued that this would spare their heavy uniforms harder wear, making them last “much longer.” The day the Provincial Congress received Captain Hamilton’s hardheaded, practical missive, it capitulated to all his requests. His first siege had been a complete success. Inside three weeks, the indefatigable young officer’s company strength was up to sixty-nine better-paid men, more than double the requirement.2
Two months later, he was back again. This time, he demanded better rations for his men. He had taken matters into his own hands, ordering far more food from his commissary, Cornelius Roosevelt, than the Provincial Congress allowed. This time, Congress papered over Hamilton’s complaint that his men were allotted less money for food than Continental or other provinces’ militias by lending his company to General John Morin Scott’s Continental brigade, acceding to Hamilton’s demands without parting with New York funds. By hectoring New York Revolutionary leaders, overnight young Hamilton in effect became a captain in the Continental artillery.
But Hamilton’s most important crusade as a newly minted officer was to have far more lasting effects. It was Hamilton who broke with the age-old tradition of appointing only gentlemen as officers and never promoting them from the ranks of enlisted men. When one of his lieutenants was promoted to captain of one of Benedict Arnold’s row galleys on Lake Champlain, it opened up a slot for a lieutenant. Only five weeks after the new nation was born on the Fourth of July, 1776, Hamilton, in an August 12, 1776, letter to the convention of the newly proclaimed State of New York, raised the question of democratically rewarding the exemplary service of an enlisted man with promotion to an officer’s rank:
I would beg the liberty warmly to recommend to your attention Thomas Thompson, now first sergeant in my company, a man highly deserving of notice and preferment. He has discharged his duty in his present station with uncommon fidelity, assiduity and expertness. He is a very good disciplinarian, possesses the advantage of having seen a good deal of service in Germany [during the Seven Years’ War], has a tolerable share of common sense and is well calculated not to disgrace the rank of an officer and gentleman…His advancement will be a great encouragement and benefit to my company…and will be an animating example to all men of merit…3
The New York Convention sent Colonel Peter R. Livingston to meet with Hamilton and study his proposal. On August 15, the convention promoted Thompson to lieutenant, establishing a precedent for American armed forces that broke with European custom. Perhaps it should be noted that Hamilton’s stroke of genius at making the infant American army democratic was repaid symbolically on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, when his artillery company, the oldest unit in the United States Army, fired its guns in salute to their founding father.
Hamilton took Revolution as a carte blanche opportunity for change. He reexamined the very nature of a company of soldiers, and he went on establishing precedents in his year and a half as an artillery officer. When a cannon exploded and one of his matrosses, William Douglass, lost his right arm, Hamilton again wrote to the New York Convention. This time, he urged that the state pay the man a disability pension just as the Continental Congress paid “for all persons disabled in the service of the United States.” He insisted that, in all matters, the individual states’ soldiers and sailors had the same rights as Continental troops, and when some of his men deserted to a Continental warship where they could receive a share of any loot captured at sea, he obtained the convention’s permission for a state officer—himself—to lead a boarding party onto the Continental ship, search it, and haul back the miscreants for flogging.4
At the outset of a revolution, Hamilton repeatedly showed his innovative genius in analyzing a need and ignoring his own status in pushing for reform. Illegitimate, an immigrant of an unknown family, he audaciously dismissed birth and social status as requisites for winning a revolutionary war. To many other Revolutionaries, his suggestions seemed not only reasonable but vital. America had many men and few officers. Everything he urged helped the common cause. As he ignored rank and privilege, he quickly made himself known to Revolutionary leaders and became an inspiration for the enlisted men.
To fill out his company, he took men who knew nothing about artillery. With the help of a few skilled gunners, he taught them everything he could about artillery, including what each piece was and how it was supposed to work. Hamilton could expect no new weapons since the English had banned the manufacture of iron in the colonies. Guns had to be stripped from ships at anchor in the harbor or seized from British forts. Among the pickup lot of guns left over from England’s and France’s past colonial wars, Hamilton could find two basic kinds: guns with relatively long barrels fired solid shot, usually of three, six, nine, or the rarely found eighteen pounds, and mortars with short barrels threw shells at high elevations. Fieldpieces were mounted on wheeled carriages drawn by horses; heavier siege guns usually were mounted on fixed gun emplacements but sometimes could be maneuvered on the battlefield on carriages. There were mortars of various sizes that were used especially for sieges of fortified positions. Usually aimed at a fixed elevation of forty-five degrees, they could be adjusted by wedges, called quoins, placed under the barrel. Cannon were typically made of cast iron, but superior guns were made of stronger bronze. Mortars were always bronze. Small mortars were called cohorns, a corruption of the name of the Dutch military engineer Baron Menno van Caehoorn, who introduced them. Somewhere between guns and mortars and with barrels of intermediate length were the howitzers, which, like mortars, fired shells at a high angle.
Neophyte artilleryman Hamilton had to learn about the three types of ammunition. Solid cast-iron shot—cannonballs—weighed from three to forty-two pounds. Fieldpieces were generally three- or six-pounders, siege guns eighteen- to twenty-four pounders. Light cannonballs fired from fieldpieces usually were aimed at enemy soldiers, the heavier projectiles at fixed defenses. Guns, especially fieldpieces, also fired scatter ammunition, either grapeshot, a cluster of grape-size small shot packed into a cloth bag, or canister shot, made up of mixed small shot and nails and bolts enclosed in a can, used especially to shred sails. Scatter shot was used as a particularly vicious deterrent of infantry or cavalry charges.
Shells or bombs were explosive and were made of hollow cast iron filled with gunpowder through a small hole in which the fuse, a small hollow wooden plug several inches long, was inserted. A fine priming powder was tamped into the fuse, which was wider at one end in the shape of a cup, which, in turn, was filled with a fine powder dampened with alcohol. The wooden fuse was trimmed to determine the timing of the explosion: it projected from the shell by a quarter inch. To ignite the fuse, the bombardier touched it with a “slow match” made of strands of cotton rope soaked in chemicals: it burned at the rate of four inches an hour.
During the American Revolution, the range of a cannon was only about a mile, the accurate range even less. Mortars had a greater effective range than guns with solid shot: they were aimed by varying the powder charge. Most cannon had such short ranges because the black powder was so weak, made up of six parts saltpeter (potassium nitrate) to one part of charcoal and sulfur. When this noxious concoction burned, it freed three hundred times its volume in smoky gases, quickly enveloping a battlefield in a choking dark fog. But in the smog of war, the artilleryman was a particular target. Alexander Hamilton had chosen the state-of-the-art weaponry but probably the most exposed and dangerous duty.
HAMILTON DID not have to wait long to go to war. The war came to him. In his first flying visit to New York City in June 1775, General Washington had ordered an offensive against Quebec province under the command of Major General Philip Schuyler. In an attempt to bring Canada into the United States by conquest, in September 1775, an army of New York and New England troops had invaded Quebec province. But the aging Schuyler was ill. His successor, Richard Montgomery, captured Montreal in November. An in-law of William Livingston and a veteran British officer, Montgomery joined forces with Benedict Arnold, who had led 1,060 men through the woods of Maine, for a winter assault on the walled city of Quebec. Montgomery was killed by cannon fire at point-blank range in the opening assault on the Canadian capital. Of fourteen New York officers with Montgomery as he charged the blockhouse the last day of 1775, only one, Montgomery’s aide-de-camp Captain Aaron Burr, survived. McDougall’s First New York Regiment, which Hamilton had freed from garrison duty for the Canadian campaign, suffered heavy casualties. One of McDougall’s sons was killed, the other taken prisoner; both were friends of Hamilton. John Lamb’s artillerymen and their cannon had bogged down in snowdrifts. New York’s few remaining artillery officers became precious commodities. Captain Alexander Hamilton drilled his new artillery company in New York City even longer and harder each day.
The first of 479 British warships—52 men-of-war and 427 troop transports—sailed into New York harbor and began to disgorge thirty-nine thousand troops—the largest expeditionary force in English history—onto Staten Island on July 4. Through his telescope atop Bayard’s Hill, Captain Hamilton watched the forest of ship masts growing ominously to the east. On July 9, 1776, five days after its adoption in Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence arrived in New York City. At six o’clock that evening, Captain Hamilton and his Corsicans stood to attention on the commons to hear it read aloud from the balcony of City Hall. Then the soldiers roared off down Broadway to the Bowling Green where a crowd had pulled down and smashed to bits the only equestrian statue of King George III in America. Later that afternoon, a cavalcade of horse-drawn carts began to haul the four thousand pounds of shattered lead fragments off to Ridgefield in the Berkshire hills of Connecticut, where scores of women melted them down to mold 42,088 lead bullets. The head of the statue they mounted on a stake at Blue Bell Tavern at present-day Broadway and 181st Street, at the northern approach to the city. There was no more time to celebrate.
It took nearly six weeks before Washington began to move the major portion of his army south from Boston to respond to the British landings. He detached his second-in-command, Major General Charles Lee, who let everyone know he thought the situation hopeless. Lee, a former British lieutenant colonel, had served in the French and Indian Wars and in Poland against the Turks. To counter the expected British landings, Lee was supposed to erect forts at strategic points across Manhattan island and at Brooklyn Heights on Long Island. Lee believed that, while the American army could not hold New York City, it could slow down a British invasion that “might cost the enemy many thousands of men to get possession of it.”5
When Washington arrived on April 13, he found that Lee had done little before Congress ordered him to South Carolina. Washington pressed servants, slaves, and every able-bodied man into building fortifications. Fourteen new batteries with a total of 120 cannon took shape on Manhattan, Governors Island, Red Hook, and Paulus Hook on the New Jersey shore. By midsummer, ten thousand American troops transformed New York City into an armed camp.
Two huge bivouacs took shape, crammed with tents, shacks, wagons, and mounds of supplies. At one of them, on present-day Canal Street in Greenwich Village, just outside town along the Post Road, Hamilton and his company dug in. Atop Bayard’s Hill, he built hep-tagonal Fort Bunker Hill at the intersection of present-day Canal and Mulberry Streets, the highest ground overlooking the city. Hamilton ordered his men to rip apart fences and cut down the stately trees for which the city was famous to build barricades and provide wood for cook fires. All over Manhattan island, other American officers were commandeering homes, warehouses, and loft buildings belonging to Loyalists. King’s College became an army hospital. Its library books, so long the grist for Hamilton’s literary labors, were hauled away in carts. They turned up nearly a century later in a nearby church basement. In the country houses of Loyalists, soldiers propped their muddy boots on damask furniture, ripped up parquet floors to fuel the fireplaces, tossed their garbage out windows, and turned their horses loose to graze in the gardens and orchards. One Loyalist watched in horror as army woodcutters, ignoring his protests, chopped down his peach and apple orchards on Twenty-third Street. Despite a curfew, drunken soldiers caroused and prostitutes thrived in the brothel-lined streets around Trinity Church.
At five o’clock every morning Hamilton and his men reported for duty to draw their tools and receive instructions for the day’s digging. They labored in summer heat and humidity until sunset, stopping only long enough for drills and inspections. Hamilton’s men signed the pay book with English names, some Irish and Scottish, a few Dutch. Many of the rank and file were illiterate, making their marks as they drew their pay. Hamilton had been assigned to construct the commanding redoubt in a line of earthworks that reached halfway across Manhattan island. His friend Nicholas Fish described Fort Bunker Hill as “a fortification superior in strength to any my imagination could ever have conceived.” When Washington inspected the works with its eight nine-pounders, four three-pounders, and six cohorn mortars in mid-April, he commended Hamilton and his fatigue parties “for their masterly manner of executing the work.”6
One of Washington’s soldiers wrote in his diary that it seemed “all London was afloat.” On July 12, Hamilton’s battery went into action the first time. The British commander, Lord Richard Howe, probed the American shore defenses by detaching two vessels, the forty-four-gun Phoenix and the twenty-eight-gun Rose, from his forest of ships to sail up into the Hudson. The captain of the Rose coolly sipped claret on his quarterdeck as the two vessels glided past the Battery at Fort George—where an ill-trained American gun crew immediately blew itself up. The two British ships sailed unmolested up the Hudson to Tarrytown and back as Washington’s men abandoned their posts to watch. Appalled, Washington fumed to the New York Provincial Congress, “Such unsoldierly conduct gives the enemy a mean opinion of the army.” As the two British ships passed within cannon range of Hamilton’s company at Fort Bunker Hill, Hamilton ordered his nine-pounders to fire. The British warships returned his fire. In the brief skirmish, one of Hamilton’s cannons burst, killing one man and severely wounding another.7
ON AUGUST 8, Hamilton tore open orders from Washington. Washington believed the main British attack would come on Manhattan. Hamilton and his company were to be on round-the-clock alert on Bayard’s Hill, Manhattan’s northernmost outpost, where Washington believed the British would strike first:
The movements of the enemy and intelligence by deserters give the utmost reason to believe that the great struggle in which we are contending for everything dear to us and our posterity, is near at hand.
Hamilton was to give the alarm at the approach of British transports to the Manhattan shore: “A flag in the daytime, or a light at night…with three guns fired quick but distinct [as] a signal for the troops to repair to their posts and prepare for action.” Hamilton was to order all the camp’s drums to be beaten. The men were to keep enough food ready for two days and their canteens filled.8
The long weeks of suspense ended early the morning of August 27, 1776. Hamilton watched, helpless, as everything went wrong. The British ferried fifteen thousand troops over from Staten Island, not to Manhattan island but to Long Island, in a single morning. There was little American resistance as Hessians quick-marched inland from the British beachhead, which stretched all the way from Flatbush to Gravesend. Israel Putnam, the American commander, had only 2,750 men in four makeshift forts spread too thinly over four miles of Gowanus ridge, which ran like a wooded spine west to east. Each outpost roadblocked a pass. But Lord Cornwallis moved to Flatbush on the American east flank where only a mounted patrol of five young militia officers, including Hamilton’s college roommate, Robert Troup, guarded Jamaica Pass. British dragoons easily captured them, enabling ten thousand redcoats to march stealthily at night around behind the Americans. The Americans tried to turn and fight, but the American riflemen had no time to reload before German jaegers were on them. Cut off from retreat by an eighty-yard-wide swamp, twelve hundred Americans died in the rout, many of them drowning.
From his Manhattan hill fort, Alexander Hamilton watched the debacle. According to his friend Hercules Mulligan, Hamilton huddled with Mulligan and the Reverend John Mason over dinner at Bayard’s Fort and hastily formulated a plan that led to Washington’s miraculous night retreat. By row-boat, barge, sloop, skiff, and canoe in a howling northeaster, a regiment of New England fishermen ferried Washington’s surviving ninety-five hundred men across to Manhattan. According to Mulligan, it was he who had crossed to Washington’s headquarters during the Battle of Brooklyn and handed a letter proposing the plan of escape to Colonel Samuel Blachley Webb, Washington’s chief aide-de-camp. Mulligan stood waiting while Webb read it. He left assured that Webb would take Hamilton’s plan to Washington. Whether Mulligan was gilding Hamilton’s laurels posthumously, the decisions Washington and his staff made in the next few days left Hamilton and his company in peril. Mulligan never made it back to Bayard’s Fort to tell Hamilton whether he had delivered the plan: on his way toward the ferry landing, he was recognized as a member of the Committee of Sixty by a Loyalist and captured by British dragoons.
At a September 12, 1776, council of war, Washington asked his generals whether New York, if the American army evacuated it, ought “to stand as winter quarters for the enemy?” The Continental Congress had resolved that the city be spared but Rhode Islander Nathanael Greene, Washington’s second-in-command, argued that “the city and island of New York are no objects to us.” He contended that “a general and speedy retreat is absolutely necessary” and insisted that “I would burn the city and suburbs.” Most of the property, Greene argued, belonged to Loyalists. The council of war decided to split the army into three divisions and spare the city.9
The British attacked again before the Americans could evacuate their guns and supplies. They attacked at Kip’s Bay, on the East River between present-day Thirtieth and Thirty-fourth streets, two miles above Hamilton’s hill fort. Hamilton’s company, along with the rest of Henry Knox’s artillery and John Morin Scott’s New York infantry brigade, were now cut off and in danger of being captured by the British. Washington sent Putnam with his aide-de-camp, Captain Aaron Burr, to lead their rescue. They reached Fort Bunker Hill on Bayard’s Hill just as American militia from lower Manhattan began to stream past Hamilton up the Post Road (now Lexington Avenue). At Kip’s Bay, Howe’s troops blocked the Post Road, but they had stopped for tea on the east side of a peach orchard. Hamilton had received orders from the chief of Continental artillery General Henry Knox to rally his men for a stand at the hill fort, but Burr, carrying Washington’s express order to evacuate the city, countermanded Knox. Burr knew a concealed path that would lead them safely to Bloomingdale Road and on up the west side of the island. As Burr guided Hamilton and his men, clouds of dust from tramping feet and horses’ hooves shrouded their escape. Hamilton had to leave behind at the fort virtually everything he owned: books, papers, clothing, everything but the uniform on his back and his horse as he dragged two cannon up Manhattan island.
It was dark before Hamilton’s company reached the freshly dug entrenchments of Harlem Heights. Here, according to some historians, Hamilton met Washington for the first time. He impressed Washington as he kept his exhausted troops hard at work throwing up makeshift defenses in the dark. With all his picks and shovels left behind in his escape, Hamilton had his men pull up corn plants with mud-caked roots and stack them to look like ramparts through an enemy’s spyglass. According to legend, Washington invited Hamilton to his marquee tent. At best, it was a brief meeting interrupted by aides riding in all directions with fresh orders.
THE BRITISH celebration after taking New York City was short-lived. As they paused fully four weeks to build defenses across northern Manhattan, someone set fire to New York City. The fire, fanned by high winds, broke out at midnight on September 20 in a frame house along the waterfront near Whitehall Slip. Only a shift in the wind kept the flames from engulfing the entire town: as it was, 493 houses between Broadway and the Hudson River—one fourth of the city’s buildings—were destroyed before British soldiers and sailors and the townspeople put out the flames. The British accused Washington of ordering the fire set, but no proof has ever been found. Washington would only comment, in a letter to his brother at Mount Vernon, “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”10
In mid-October, the American army had withdrawn north from Harlem Heights to White Plains. There, on October 28, the British again overtook them. Behind hastily built earthworks atop 180-foot-high Chatterton’s Hills, Alexander Hamilton’s artillerymen crouched tensely as Hessians built a bridge of felled trees and fence rails across the flooded Bronx River and unleashed a bayonet charge up the wooded slope. Hamilton, his gunners flanked by Maryland and New York troops, repulsed the assault, causing heavy British casualties. Crossing a ford downriver and marching north, the British again attacked up the heights. Despite dogged resistance by Hamilton and his artillerymen, the British ignored his grapeshot and finally drove back the Americans.
Breaking off the fighting, the British went into winter quarters in basements and tents amid Manhattan’s smoldering ruins. Cold weather pinched the toes and numbed the fingers of Hamilton’s soldiers as they dug embankments. His pay book shows that he was desperately trying to round up enough shoes for barefoot frostbitten men. But the expected British attack to the north did not come. Instead, Howe’s redcoats and Hessians stormed the last American stronghold on Manhattan island, Fort Washington, and present-day 181st Street on the Hudson River shore, where some 2,818 besieged Americans surrendered. Four days later, the British force crossed the Hudson and stormed Fort Lee on the New Jersey shore. This time, the Americans escaped, evacuating the fort, useless for controlling the Hudson without Fort Washington. In their pell-mell retreat they left behind 146 precious cannon, 2,800 muskets, and 400,000 cartridges.
Three days later, on November 10, Captain Hamilton and his artillery company were sent up the Hudson River to Peekskill, when he received orders to join Lord Stirling’s retreating column. He was to cross the river to Haverstraw, then march ahead of the main army’s vanguard through the Clove, a gap in the Palisades. He was then to go on to Hackensack, New Jersey, where Washington would overtake him with fifty-four hundred “much broken and dispirited” men.11
Hamilton hitched the horses to his two remaining six-pound guns and went on ahead. Managing to stay out front, Hamilton marched his gun crews twenty miles in one day to the Raritan River. Rattling through Elizabethtown, he passed the academy where, only three years earlier, his greatest concern had been studying Latin and Greek. School seemed so long ago. But nothing now mattered as much as the shimmering bayonets of British grenadiers so close behind him.
Oddly, at this point the British pursuit stalled for a full week to allow time for the commander-in-chief, Howe, to overtake his fast-moving army and plan the winter’s deployments. During this unexpected breather, the main American army waited for reinforcements by New Jersey militia that never came. At Hackensack, Captain Hamilton dug in near Washington’s headquarters. He was startled when his old friend, Hercules Mulligan, showed up on November 20. Because the English considered Mulligan a gentleman, he had been entitled to be released and placed on his parole of honor not to leave New York City. Violating his parole and risking imprisonment, he managed to slip by boat across the Hudson. He overtook Hamilton five miles west of Fort Lee. After their overjoyed reunion, Hamilton evidently suggested to Mulligan that he return to New York City and act, as Mulligan later put, as a “confidential correspondent of the commander-in-chief”—a spy. Hamilton knew not only that Mulligan outfitted British and Loyalist officers but that his brother Hugh, as a ship’s chandler and wholesale merchant, was in constant touch with British officials and supply officers who would know troop movements and strengths. But there was no time now to formulate a plan.
Finally, the British, now twice the Americans’ numbers, resumed their onslaught. Hard on Hamilton’s heels at the Raritan River, the British arrived at noon, November 29. From the opposite bank, Hamilton and his guns kept up an incessant hail of grapeshot at British and Hessian grenadiers, shielding American troops as they tore up the planks of the New Bridge. Under Hamilton’s valiant covering fire, Washington and his army were able to slip away toward Princeton. Halfway there, Washington dispatched a brief message by express rider to Congress in Philadelphia: “The enemy appeared in several parties on the heights opposite Brunswick and were advancing in a large body toward the [Raritan] crossing place. We had a smart cannonade whilst we were parading our men.”12
The smart cannonade came from Hamilton. On the high west bank a few hundred yards above the Raritan, he had deployed his field pieces. Again and again, the slight, boyish-looking captain yelled, “Fire! Fire!” to his gun crews, ordering them to ram home bags of grapeshot and touch the matches, then quickly reposition the jumping, recoiling guns. Even after his slashing grapeshot repulsed the British attack, Hamilton kept up a steady fire for several hours, lobbing solid shot at the stalled British column until Washington was safely away—so far away that he had lost contact and had no idea if Hamilton, his Horatio at the bridge, had survived. Washington’s step-grandson Daniel Parke Custis later wrote that Washington was “charmed by the brilliant courage and admirable skill” of the twenty-one-year old Hamilton. On the march toward Princeton, Washington sent one of his aides to find out just who it was who had halted his pursuers. A veteran officer, observing Hamilton shortly afterward, recorded that he had
Noticed a youth, a mere stripling, small, slender, almost delicate in frame, marching, with a cocked hat pulled down over his eyes, apparently lost in thought, with his hand resting on a cannon, and every now and then patting it, as if it were a favorite horse or a pet plaything.
Another officer later recalled that day when Hamilton’s company marched into Princeton:
It was a model of discipline; at their head was a boy, and I wondered at his youth, but what was my surprise when he was pointed out to me as that Hamilton of whom we had already heard so much.
Hamilton overtook Washington and the main army at Princeton the morning of December 2.
After losing all of New Jersey to the British, Washington ordered his army ferried across the Delaware River by every boat and barge along the Delaware River for sixty miles. A shivering Hamilton and his gunners crossed the river in a Durham ore boat, joining artillery ranged along the western riverbank. Whenever British patrols ventured too near the water, Hamilton’s artillery repulsed them with brisk fire. As it grew steadily colder, British commander Howe said he found the weather “too severe to keep the field.” His redcoats returning to New York City, he posted a Hessian brigade for the winter at Trenton.13
In command of Trenton, the British strongpoint nearest the Americans, Howe placed Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall, whose troops had slaughtered Americans as they tried to surrender on Long Island, and at Fort Washington on Manhattan island. Rail’s regiments had a reputation for plunder and rape. One day an American patrol on the Pennsylvania riverbank heard a group of women calling for help. Rowing over to New Jersey, the American soldiers learned that all of the women, including a fifteen-year-old girl, had been raped that morning by the invaders. While the American patrol dared not retaliate at once, they passed the word to headquarters, where American officers would later be in a position to retaliate. Hessian brutality succeeded where all Washington’s appeals had failed. Jersey farmers, who until now had refused to help the American army, formed marauding militia bands that ambushed Hessian patrols and British scouting parties whenever they ventured outside Trenton. “We have not slept one night in peace since we came to this place,” a Hessian officer moaned.14
For weeks, Washington had been using spies to cultivate the myth of his army’s impotence. One member of his fledgling secret service was John Honeyman, who had been conscripted to serve with the British in the French and Indian Wars and had been bodyguard to General James Wolfe, conqueror of Quebec in 1760. Honeyman was eager to provide vital information to Washington. Posing as a cattle dealer and butcher, on December 22, he walked into a woods inside the American lines. Cracking his bullwhip as if chasing cattle, he attracted the attention of an American patrol that took him into custody and delivered him to headquarters. Honeyman gave the commander-in-chief detailed information on the deployments and route inside Trenton. Washington then handed Honeyman a key to the guardhouse where he was to be locked up.
The Americans had to attack quickly before the enlistments of the last Continental troops expired at midnight December 31. On Christmas Eve, Dr. Benjamin Rush rode out to visit Washington. He found him scribbling on small pieces of paper. Rush picked one up and read, “Victory or Death.” It was the watchword for the all-out Christmas Day attack on Trenton while its garrison slept off the effects of its Christmas celebration. A victory, even over a small outpost, would inspire lagging Patriots, cow the Loyalists, encourage reenlistments, drive back the British—in short, keep the Revolution alive. Defeat could mean death for the American cause. The main assault force was made up entirely of toughened veterans including Hamilton’s battle-tested New Yorkers. Henry Knox, Nathanael Greene, James Monroe, John Sullivan, and Alexander Hamilton, the future leaders of America’s republic, huddled around a campfire at McKonkey’s Ferry the frigid afternoon of December 25, 1776, to receive their marching orders. Hamilton and his men wore capes made out of their blankets as they hefted the two heavy six-pounders and their cases of shot and shells onto the nine-foot-wide, sixty-foot-long Durham iron-ore barges they had commandeered, then pushed and pulled their horses aboard. Nineteen-year-old James Wilkinson noted in his journal that footprints down to the river were “tinged here and there with blood from the feet of the men who wore broken shoes.” Jut-jawed Marble-head ship captain John Glover ordered the first boatloads to push off at two o’clock in the morning into the storm. By then, the wind was rising and clouds were beginning to blot out the moonlight. Snow and sleet stung Hamilton’s eyes.15
Tramping past darkened farmhouses for twelve miles, Hamilton with his artillery company led Nathanael Greene’s division as it swung off to the east to skirt the town. One mile north of Trenton, Greene halted the column to allow John Sullivan’s column time to reach its destination. At precisely eight in the morning, Hamilton’s advance guard attacked the Hessian outpost. At three minutes after eight, Hamilton heard the firing to his right. The Americans poured into the town. Driving back the few Hessian pickets with their bayonets, they charged into the old British barracks and woke the groggy Hessians at gunpoint. Some Hessians in nearby houses attempted to regroup in the streets and counterattack. At the west end of King Street, Hamilton and his guns were waiting for them. Firing in tandem, Hamilton’s cannon cut the Hessians down with murderous sheets of grapeshot. The Hessians sought cover behind houses but were driven back house by house by Virginia riflemen, who stormed into the houses and fired down from upstairs windows. Hessian artillerymen managed to get off thirteen rounds from two brass fieldpieces before Hamilton’s gunners killed them. Riding back and forth behind the guns, Washington this time saw for himself the brutal courage and skillful discipline of this youthful artillery captain as he stood up to the deadly Hessian fire and repulsed repeated enemy charges.
The Hessian’s best regiments, the Rall and the Lossberg, surrendered. But one Hessian regiment, the Knyphausen, escaped to warn the British at Princeton. The Americans had to march swiftly to Princeton and attack them or slog back upriver with 948 prisoners, their vital supplies and weapons, including sixty precious cannon. But the Americans were too battle-weary. As they recrossed the Delaware, it was so cold that both the Americans and their prisoners had to stomp their feet in time in the boats to break up the ice that was forming. Five men froze to death.
Stung by the Trenton defeat, the British field commander, Lord Cornwallis, raced across New Jersey with battle-seasoned grenadiers to retaliate. The Americans, $10 gold reenlistment bonuses in their pockets, recrossed the Delaware to intercept them. The British drew up their lines across from the American camp along a three-mile stretch of Assunpink Creek just outside Trenton. Washington ordered a rear guard to continue all night digging noisily within the hearing of British pickets and to pile firewood on their roaring campfires while his main force slipped away.
At one in the morning on January 2, 1777, Hamilton and his artillerymen hitched up their horses and guns. Their numbers reduced from sixty-nine to twenty-five men by death, desertion and expired enlistments, they wrapped rags around the wheels of their cannon to muffle the noise on the frozen road. Avoiding the main route (now Mercer Street) into Princeton, the advance division followed a new and unmapped road, strewn with tree stumps, through darkened woods. After picking their way all night, they emerged at sunrise on the south end of Princeton—right into a corps of British light infantry. The two forces raced for the high ground. General Hugh Mercer fell with seven bayonet wounds. The Americans broke before a British bayonet charge. When Washington galloped onto the battlefield with his division and surrounded the British, about two hundred redcoats ran to Nassau Hall, the main building at Princeton College. The British had begun firing from its windows by the time Alexander Hamilton arrived with his two cannon. It had been a little more than three years since Hamilton had sought admission on his own terms to Princeton and been rejected. Now he came with field artillery—and promptly opened fire on the rear of the four-story red sandstone edifice. College tradition holds that one of Hamilton’s six-pound balls shattered a window, flew through the chapel, and beheaded a portrait of King George II. Under Hamilton’s unnerving cannonade, the British quickly surrendered.16
ONE EFFECT of twin victories at Trenton and Princeton in only ten days was that militia volunteers began to swarm to the American standard, far more than could be fed, clothed, or armed, despite all the captured Hessians’ munitions. Washington realized that his staff, short-handed, was ill-equipped to coordinate logistics and state militia. A shortage of experienced officers on his headquarters staff had plagued him since he took command. In four months since the British onslaught had begun, three hundred American officers had been killed or captured. “At present,” Washington complained,
my time is so taken up at my desk that I am obliged to neglect many other essential parts of my duty. It is absolutely necessary for me to have persons [who] can think for me as well as execute orders.
Washington explained what he expected in an aide:
As to military knowledge, I do not expect to find gentlemen much skilled in it. If they can write a good letter, write quick, are methodical and diligent, it is all I expect to find in my aides.
Washington explained to the president of the Continental Congress that his letters were “first drawn by my secretaries and aides-de-camp.” But judging from the variety and sheer volume of correspondence at headquarters, Adjutant General Timothy Pickering was probably closer to the mark when he said that “not only the composition, the clothing of the ideas but the ideas themselves originated generally with the writers,” in particular Hamilton who was “scarcely in any degree” Washington’s amanuensis. An aide’s letters usually contained some variant of the tagline, “composed for the General’s signature.” But the letters all had to represent the thought and temper of the commander. Until an aide proved his adeptness at this art form, he worked from a dictated memorandum or a set of scribbled notes. One longtime aide, Colonel Tench Tilghman, observed that “the weight of the whole war lay upon the commander’s shoulders.” After months of fighting and marching and fighting again, the army swelling and shrinking, starving and freezing while politicians cut and ran, Washington’s other staff officers were vigilant for bright, young, battle-tested officers who could help them deal with congresses, contractors, spies, doctors, militias—all the myriad intermediaries who must be coordinated from a headquarters on wagon wheels. The paperwork was only going to get worse as the war dragged on. “Winter quarters,” Tilghman wrote to his friend Robert Morris, brings “an increase in business in the way of papers, pens and ink.”17
As early as the summer of 1776, Nathanael Greene, assessing New York’s defenses before the British invasion, had noticed Alexander Hamilton briskly drilling his company. Again, as the Americans dug in for the futile last-ditch defense of Manhattan, Greene had noticed Hamilton, who may or may not have suggested a way out of the British trap on Long Island. At Trenton and Princeton, Greene watched Hamilton adjust the guns and, sword slashing, line up infantrymen to protect his gunners as they went about their deadly, methodical work until more than two hundred Hessians were killed in less than ten minutes. Impressed by Hamilton’s bearing under fire, shortly after the army was led into winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey, in January 1777, Greene sent a messenger to invite him to dinner at Washington’s headquarters. There, other Continental officers, including artillery chief Henry Knox, paid their compliments to the boyish Hamilton, who had just turned twenty-two.
Washington need an aide with good connections in New York. In January 1777, he invited Hamilton to join his headquarters staff. The appointment carried a promotion from captain to lieutenant colonel. While Hamilton had earlier turned down two appointments as aide-de-camp, this time he did not hesitate. Because he knew what to expect, he would not give up his battle commission to be an aide to anyone less than the commander-in-chief. He had the imagination to see that he would be at the center of a great and dramatic struggle. As he made himself a central figure in planning and executing campaigns, he would also make himself invaluable both as Washington’s assistant and, in designated areas, as his proxy, a role he had already learned in a St. Croix countinghouse. He would become Washington’s personal liaison with his generals in battle. He would be called upon not only to convey orders but to carry out special missions requiring judgment and diplomacy. He also would be in a position to work closely coordinating American intelligence-gathering operations: it was at this time that he made Washington aware of Hercules Mulligan and his value as an American mole inside British lines in New York City.
Hamilton must have been aware that the men so close to power could play central roles in a new nation once—and if—independence was secured by battle. But Alexander Hamilton was not merely opportunistic. He was dedicated to an ideal, a revolution that was already obviously changing the rules of American society. Or how else could the bastard son of a bankrupt merchant, an immigrant with no wealthy family connections but only his skill as a writer, his daring, and his panache in whatever society he found himself, presume to join the official “family” of a commander-in-chief? But he had found himself in battle. For the next four years, Hamilton would help to win a revolution, then he would help to make a nation. On March 1, 1777, Hamilton turned over the command of his artillery company to Lieutenant Thompson, the sergeant he had dared to make an officer, and joined Washington’s headquarters staff.
For the next four years, he would excel at particularly delicate and discreet tasks that would, a few years later, propel him to one of the highest offices in the land. When Timothy Pickering first met Hamilton at camp, he considered him “a very extraordinary young man.” Many years later, the prickly Pickering declared Washington’s great good fortune to recognize Hamilton’s talents when he was so young—and then to harness them throughout most of their joint careers:
During a long series of years, in war and in peace, Washington enjoyed the advantages of Hamilton’s eminent talents, integrity and felicity, and these qualities fixed [Hamilton] in [Washington’s] confidence to the last hour of his life.18
Hamilton, the impecunious abandoned son, Washington the patriarch without a son, had begun a symbiotic relationship that, except for a few months of misunderstanding, would endure for nearly a quarter century, years corresponding to the birth, adolescence, and coming to maturity of the United States.
ALEXANDER HAMILTON still—always, in fact—looked younger than his age. For some unexplained reason, he contributed to this image of his youthfulness by lying about it, understating his age by two years. While it is difficult to know when he began this practice, as he reached his time of majority, he stepped into his new role with an ease that amazed the young aristocrats around him. From his first winter at Morristown, as one visiting Pennsylvania officer described it, Hamilton
presided at the General’s table, where he dined…in a large company where there were several ladies, among whom I recollect one or two of the Miss Livingstons. He acquitted himself with an ease, propriety and vivacity that gave me the most favorable impression of his talents and accomplishments.
As one of a half dozen headquarters staff officers, the twenty-two-year-old Alexander Hamilton settled into an always difficult, sometimes dangerous routine that proved a continuation for another four years of the spartan life he had always led but with infinitely more responsibility. In all, thirty-two aides were to pass through headquarters in eight years, but few were more loyal and durable than Hamilton—or turned out to be more valuable. It was a touchy business. Working closely with Washington was no fun.19
“I give in to no kind of amusement myself,” wrote Washington, “and consequently those about me can have none.” If he allowed “the same relaxation from duty” to his staff as other officers had, they would not get so much done. The commander asked aides to “have the mind always upon the stretch, scarce ever unbent, and no hours for recreation.” For an ambitious young officer like Hamilton who wanted to stretch his mind, the great man’s notice and approval was usually compensation for the relaxation he rarely allowed himself anyway.20
As one of his colleagues put it, writing home to a father concerned that his son would pursue pleasures that damaged his health,
You need be under no apprehension of my losing it on the score of excess in living. Vice is banished from the General’s Family. We never sup but go early to bed, and are early up.21
But there Hamilton found other forms of pleasure. He loved to read and study. The quartermaster general always commandeered the best house in any region as headquarters, often one with a well-stocked library. Hamilton was able to indulge this particular passion, as he always had, while others slept.
Fortunately, he also made friends easily. His closest new friend was volunteer aide-de-camp John Laurens of South Carolina, who limned this sketch of a day and a night at headquarters for his father, president of the Continental Congress Henry Laurens, from “a small noisy crowded room”:
Between copying and composing I have inked a great deal of paper and it begins to be time for me to join my snoring companions, who are extended before the fire in the style which we practiced formerly in the interior parts of South Carolina.22
But, after months of frigid nights in tents or in open air, even this intimate form of camping must have seemed luxurious to Hamilton, especially after a long day of what he called the “hurry of business.” Just as often, in the fighting seasons, sleep came in a tent after a day of writing on a portable desk.
There were breaks. When Martha Washington arrived at camp each winter, she organized the other officers’ wives into a closely knit society that put on cotillions. Hamilton, never to be outdone, once danced with Mrs. Nathanael Greene for a full three hours. Mrs. Theodorick Bland, a Virginia officer’s wife visiting Morristown that winter, noticed one aide in particular. Colonel Hamilton was “in our riding party generally.” She described Hamilton as “a sensible, genteel, polite young fellow, a West Indian.” Because of his avidity, both in battle and in society, Hamilton had already earned from his fellow officers the nickname “The Little Lion.” It would stick. But Martha Washington had a more oblique way of letting it be known that she had noticed Hamilton’s singular attentiveness to women. At headquarters, she found a tomcat that constantly pursued the females of his species. She named it Hamilton. As well as Washington and his staff there were often official visiting members of Congress. After a meager meal, whenever young ladies were visiting, Hamilton and his fellow officers liked to take them into the nearby village of Morris-town, ostensibly for tea.23
EVENTUALLY, HAMILTON, like any other new staff member, decoded exactly what the general expected of him, often learning it from conversations with sympathetic colleagues. Washington did not make his wishes explicit: it was not until more than twenty years later, when he, as ex-president, was reorganizing the army, that he wrote down what he sought in a staff officer:
The variegated and important duties of the aids [sic] of a commander in chief or the commander of a separate army require experienced officers, men of judgment and men of business, ready pens to execute them properly and with dispatch. A great deal more is required of them than attending him at a parade or delivering verbal orders here and there, or copying a written one. They ought, if I may be allowed to use the expression, to possess the Soul of the General, and from a single idea given to them, to convey his meaning in the clearest and fullest manner.24
While Washington here was downplaying the importance of attending him on parade, he had always been fastidious about his uniform and demanded proper attire from his staff. Fellow aide John Laurens wrote that an aide was supposed to wear suitable clothing to “contribute to the propriety of the commander-in-chief’s family.” Hamilton, like Laurens, had “but one pair of breeches that are wearable.” He was to order fabric and buttons to have made up by a tailor in time for “the opening of the campaign” in spring: “blue and buff cloth…lining [and] double gilt buttons sufficient to make me a uniform coat…besides corded dimity for waistcoats and breeches.” In addition, Hamilton would need gold epaulettes, gloves, hair powder, pomade, and a comb plus the aide-de-camp’s blue sash. Hair could be pomaded and powdered, but no American officer wore a wig: that would be too aristocratic, too English. A revolution was taking place and the attire of the general’s staff had symbolic importance. To help him dress each day and to tend to his horse, Hamilton was assigned an orderly from the ranks. Yet Hamilton, like Laurens, had difficulty outfitting himself from his meager pay, and he had no wealthy kinsman to write home to. However, there is no hint that, at first at least, Hamilton felt at a disadvantage.25