Providence intervened on the American side. On 28 August 1776, a violent north-easterly storm soaked both sides, damping their ammunition and making the Americans vulnerable to a bayonet charge, which many British officers urged on their commander. More significantly, the weather prevented the British fleet sailing up the East River. General Howe now misjudged badly. Possibly assuming that he would get his chance once his brother the admiral closed the trap with the navy, or that the Americans would be equally immobilized by the storm, or that they would surrender, or even conceivably that peace negotiations were possible if he showed mercy, he bided his time. As Israel Putnam put it, ‘General Howe is either our friend or no general. He had our whole army in his power … and yet offered us to escape without the least interruption … Had he instantly followed up his victory, the consequence to the cause of liberty must have been dreadful.’
Washington’s officers had convinced him that his position in Brooklyn was untenable and he must evacuate. Overnight on 30 August the storm subsided; a dank and impenetrable mist settled on both positions, and the choppy river settled to glass-like smoothness. For the first time, Washington displayed his genius as a commander. The entire American force of 9,500 men, with all their provisions and ammunition and most of their guns, was evacuated over the river to New York. The following morning the British discovered that the bird had flown. As a British general remarked, ‘It cannot be denied but that the American army lay almost entirely at the will of the English. That they were therefore suffered to retire in safety has by some been attributed to the reluctance of the commander-in-chief [Howe] to shed the blood of a people so nearly allied.’
Howe promptly decided that instead of attacking New York City, which would lead to house-to-house fighting and destruction, he would organize a flanking movement further up the East River to bottle up Washington’s forces in New York, where they would again be trapped. This was sensible, as New York was a hotbed of pro-British sentiment, and destroying the city would have needlessly antagonized its inhabitants. But the British would have to act with alacrity.
Despite their miraculous escape, there was no disguising the Americans’ demoralization. Hundreds of militiamen deserted outright, while Washington and his officers sought frantically to organize musters, court martials and whippings to stop them. In an army where British-style discipline was unknown, this was next to impossible.
Meanwhile Admiral Howe instructed invited American delegates to Staten Island to discuss how to end the war. The British still fondly believed that the whole issue was an unfortunate misunderstanding, failing to realize that the very people to whom they were appealing for peace were the American minority that had been working for independence for years, and would fight to the bitter end.
The admiral was rebuffed by a mission headed by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. As Franklin argued, ‘Forces have been sent out and towns destroyed, that they could not expect happiness now under the domination of Great Britain; that all former attachment was obliterated; that America could not return again to the domination of Great Britain and therefore imagined that Great Britain meant to rest it upon force.’
To the British, however, the end of the war must have seemed very near. Washington’s army had narrowly escaped total annihilation; and it could now be cut off in New York, which the commander was doggedly determined to defend until otherwise ordered by Congress. Both Putnam and General Nathanael Greene urged withdrawal from the city, the latter arguing that the Tory stronghold should be burnt down – an indication of the ruthlessness with which the rebels were prepared to punish their own people. Congress sharply overruled Washington and ordered that he should quit New York, and that ‘no damage be done to the said city by his troops, on their leaving it: the congress having no doubt of being able to recover the same’.
But time was running out: on 13 September British ships sailed up the East River and blasted away at American defensive earthworks at Kip’s Bay. The militia promptly abandoned their positions, and the British landed hundreds of men unopposed. Washington, hearing of the landing, took to his horse and headed towards the British landing site with two New England brigades, while, with eminent good sense, Putnam furiously led a headlong retreat from the New York trap up the west side of Manhattan Island, his forces carrying as many provisions and as much ammunition as they could, but leaving their guns behind.
Washington, on reaching his fleeing troops, for the first time lost his ice-cool composure and started whipping officers and men with his riding cane, dashing his hat on the ground and raging, ‘Are these the men with whom I am to defend America?’ The American commander-in-chief feared another debacle to match that on Long Island; after his triumph in Boston, this would be humiliation indeed. He would have been captured by the fast-advancing British, but an aide seized his bridle and his horse and pulled him away.
Astonishingly, in spite of his perfectly executed landing, Howe again held back from springing the trap. He sent his troops north and south up the main road, but failed to cross over to the western Hudson river side of Manhattan Island to cut off Putnam’s line of retreat. By evening, the American forces were relatively safe at Harlem Heights, north of the city.
A skirmish the following day gave a bloody nose to the British advance guard below the heights, but one of America’s best soldiers, Colonel Thomas Knowlton, was killed. Having almost caught their prey, the British veered off into another attack on a defended uphill position, and the fleeing American army was momentarily safe again. Meanwhile the British had routed another army and taken New York. As a British officer remarked, ‘The [Americans] had intended to contest every inch of ground. In every street they had made ditches and barricades, and fortified every little eminence about the town. But when the British landed, they fled, leaving their defences to fill up with stagnant water, damaged sauerkraut, and filth.’
Understandably, by this time the British were becoming contemptuous about their enemy’s fighting abilities. All the same, Howe, fearing he had too few troops to risk sacrificing them in a significant engagement, remained remarkably cautious.
Rather than storming the heights, his forces remained entrenched before them for nearly a month while preparing the next movement – a pincer this time, leaving a garrison in New York and sending a force up the Hudson and another up the East River. The strategy was again impeccable, but leisurely executed. Some 400 men were landed at Throgg Point, at the bottom of Long Island Sound, on 14 October.
This prompted Washington to evacuate Harlem Heights altogether and march north to White Plains, four days later. He was proving an adept runner. The ever-cautious Howe waited several days before disembarking more troops further up at Pell’s Point and Myer’s Point and marching to attack the far left of the American position at Chatterton’s Hill, which the British took with difficulty at the cost of 229 men to 140 Americans.
Washington was forced to retreat again to a better position at North Castle Heights, only to see the British suddenly withdraw south west towards an American stronghold he had inexplicably left behind on the Hudson, Fort Washington. The skilful tactical movement left Washington floundering. Leaving 10,000 men behind, he crossed the Hudson with 5,000 to threaten the British should they choose to attack Forts Washington and Lee on either side of the river. These garrisons, containing 3,000 and 2,000 men respectively, were supposed to prevent the British fleet from moving up river, but were otherwise useless, and sitting ducks for the British.
What followed was glorified by Washington as a ‘war of posts’, or a ‘defensive’ war. It was in fact nothing less than a British chase and an American retreat as the British forces marched in skilful pursuit of the bedraggled, confused American forces. Having left these useless garrisons behind his lines, Washington could do nothing now to save them.
On 16 November, in a three-sided classic attack, the British surrounded and routed the American lines around Fort Washington, at a loss of 300 British dead to 54 Americans, capturing a garrison of 2,900 men and all their stores. It was the biggest victory so far in the war.
Four days later, the most able British commander, Lord Cornwallis, crossed the Hudson to a position just below the other redundant American garrison, Fort Lee, whose commander, General Nathanael Greene, evacuated his 2,000 men in great haste, joining up with Washington’s 5,000 in a desperate attempt to escape yet another British trap. Moving with furious urgency, Washington and Greene reached Newark, New Jersey, on 22 November. There they sought to rally their men. But, with their terms of enlistment at an end, 2,000 soldiers decided to abandon an apparently lost cause.
Washington had now had his fill of bitterness, defeat and retreat. He commented:
I am wearied almost to death with the retrograde motion of things, and I solemnly protest that a pecuniary reward of twenty thousand pounds a year would not induce me to undergo what I do; and after all, perhaps to lose my character, as it is impossible, under such a variety of distressing circumstances, to conduct matters agreeably to public expectation.
His force was reduced to just 3,000 men, who escaped in the nick of time on 28 November as Cornwallis and 4,000 British troops arrived in hot pursuit, and even on occasion in sight. Washington reached New Brunswick the following day, and would have been caught but for an order from General Howe to Cornwallis not to engage, and the destruction of the bridge across the Raritan river. Cornwallis was to be criticized for not overcoming both obstacles and destroying Washington’s small army once and for all.
Washington’s next refuge was Princeton. The British, marching under Howe and rejoined by Cornwallis, almost surrounded them there, but the depleted American forces escaped and at last reached Trenton and the Delaware river, which they crossed, destroying every boat for seventy miles in the process. Howe lingered on the north bank for a week before deciding to pursue no further and return to winter quarters in New York.
It had been one of the great chases in military history, covering some 170 miles in two months. Washington had narrowly escaped with the rump of the American army. The flame of resistance was still flickering, but barely more. His whole campaign from New York to the Delaware had been a string of disasters, defeats, miscalculations and retreats. He had been wrong to risk his army in the defence of New York; wrong to send the bulk of it across to Long Island, and then reinforce it there; wrong in his half-baked defence of Brooklyn; wrong to seek to hold New York after the disaster there; wrong to flee north to White Plains instead of seeking to concentrate his forces in New Jersey, and wrong to leave a large garrison at Fort Washington to be picked off in his wake.
Military ability was apparent only in his well-organized evacuation from Brooklyn; in Putnam’s hastily improvised and speedy retreat from New York; and in the army’s flight across New Jersey, as well as the finely executed withdrawal across the Delaware. The Americans had shown themselves supremely skilled in the difficult matter of flight. They had suffered two major defeats – at Brooklyn and at Fort Washington – and a minor one at Chatterton’s Hill, with only the skirmish at Harlem Heights as a consoling victory. They had been driven from New York, Fort Washington, Fort Lee, Newark, New Brunswick, Princeton and Trenton and, in a separate attack, from Newport in Rhode Island.
Worse still, to the demoralized American high command, New York and New Jersey showed no inclination to rally to the rebel side. The idea of a united American effort to overthrow the British oppressors was in tatters. These states had wholly failed to follow New England’s lead and emerge as centres of armed resistance to the British. All were now virtually under British control. The people’s conduct, Washington complained, was ‘infamous’, and their militia were ‘a destructive, expensive and disorderly mob’ who ‘exulted’ at British successes. In fact the majority were probably indifferent and eager only for a quiet life, wanting to be on the winning side for motives of self-preservation. But there seemed to be as many, if not more, loyalists as rebel supporters.
The American army had lost around 5,000 men in casualties and prisoners compared with around 1,000 British soldiers. It had been slashed by war, disease and destruction from around 20,000 men to just 3,000 under Washington’s command and a further 5,000 left behind under the control of General Charles Lee at North Castle and Peekskill.
The British had also made serious mistakes – notably their failure to follow up their success at Brooklyn and their landing near Harlem and at Throgg’s Point, as well as their strangely slow march to New Brunswick. But they had outmanoeuvred the Americans at Brooklyn, had staged skilful flanking moves and fearless landings up the East River, and had spectacularly routed Washington with their marches on Fort Washington and Fort Lee and their effective pursuit of the enemy.
As they returned to winter quarters, the war seemed as good as won. After the disaster in Massachusetts, they had experienced nothing but success. General Howe returned to the comfort of New York and his mistress for the winter. Clinton, who in his quiet way had begun intensely to dislike his commander’s cautious instincts, went to Newport. Cornwallis prepared to return to England. The American Congress’s capital of Philadelphia, just thirty miles from the British forward position, was within reach. If it could be occupied, a mopping up operation in the south – where enthusiasm for independence was underwhelming – and then the crushing of isolated New England seemed in prospect.
News of another potentially lethal blow to the American cause soon reached the demoralized Washington, across the Delaware, and Congress, which had fled to Baltimore in expectation of an attack on Philadelphia. Washington’s second-in-command, General Charles Lee, possessed of a formidable military reputation, had been left in charge of 5,000 troops in North Castle. A Welshman who had fought as a captain of grenadiers in 1756, he had served with Washington in the ill-fated Braddock expedition. Well-read and a linguist, yet temperamental and coarse in his habits, he was foul-mouthed and ill-mannered with a brutish, ugly appearance. He had married an Indian wife and been adopted into the Mohawk tribe of the Bear. Of her he wrote:
My wife is daughter to the famous White Thunder who is Belt of Wampun to the Senakas – which is in fact their Lord Treasurer. She is a very great beauty, and is more like your friend Mrs Griffith than anybody I know. I shall say nothing of her accomplishments, for you must be certain that a woman of her fashion cannot be without many … if you will allow good breeding to consist in a constant desire to do everything that will please you, and a strict carefulness not to say or do anything that may offend you.
He served in Portugal and became a mercenary for Poland, then all over Europe, where he showed exemplary toughness and bravery.
Lee had presided over one of the few American victories so far: the successful defence of Charleston, South Carolina, at the end of June. A substantial British force under General Clinton had laid siege to some 3,000 men bottled up in Sullivan’s Island, which contained the main fortress defending the city – a wooden bastion with sixteen-foot-thick earth-filled ramparts and some twenty-five guns. Lee, dispatched to take part in the town’s defence, initially favoured abandoning the fort as a potential ‘slaughter pen’, but fortunately gave way to the commander on the spot, Colonel William Moultrie.
The British attack proved ineffectual: the troops were unable to cross deep water to storm the fort, and their cannonballs made little impact on the fortification. Moultrie reported that ‘We had a morass that swallowed them up instantly, and those that fell in the sand, in and about the fort, were immediately buried, so that very few of them burst amongst us.’ The British ships, badly damaged by shots from the fortress, withdrew after twelve hours. With this real, if limited victory, Lee won admirers both in Congress and among American officers.
When Washington had departed south in his ineffectual attempt to prevent the seizure of Fort Washington and Fort Lee, he had left Lee’s 5,000 men with the warning that ‘[The British] may yet pay the army under your command a visit’. Washington’s fear – and his motive for leaving so substantial a force at North Castle Heights – was that the British would revert to their old tactic of staging a loop around New England to join up with a force coming south from Canada. If they did not, Washington stressed that Lee should hurry southward and join forces with him: ‘I have no doubt of your following, with all possible dispatch, leaving the militia and invalids to cover the frontiers of Connecticut in case of need.’ Lee, however, had no confidence whatever in Washington’s leadership.
Lee clearly blamed Washington for much of the failure of the New York campaign, and in particular the disastrous loss of Fort Washington. Some of Washington’s own staff agreed with Lee. One, Colonel Joseph Reed, wrote to him:
I do not mean to flatter or praise you at the expense of any other, but I do think it is entirely owing to you that this army, and the liberties of America, so far as they are dependent on it, are not entirely cut off. You ascribe to this our escape from York [Manhattan] Island, King’s Bridge and the Plains. And I have no doubt, had you been here, the garrison of Mount Washington would now have composed a part of this army.
And from all these circumstances, I confess, I do ardently wish to see you removed from a place where there will be so little call for your judgment and experience, to the place where they are likely to be so necessary. Nor am I singular in my opinion. Every gentleman of the family, the officers and soldiers generally, have a confidence in you. The enemy constantly inquire where you are and seem to be less confident when you are present.
Lee reflected, ‘There are days when we must commit treason against the laws of the state, for the salvation of the state. The present crisis demands this brave, virtuous kind of treason.’ He replied to Reed lamenting ‘that fatal indecision of mind [on Washington’s part] which is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even want of personal courage’.
Washington, however, intercepted the letter and became aware of the disaffection. Coolly, he asked to be excused for believing the letter to be an official dispatch and for reading ‘the contents of a letter which neither inclination nor intention would have prompted me to’. This may have been one of history’s glorious accidents, or an example of the suspicious and highly efficient, even duplicitous, personality of the comman-der-in-chief. Meanwhile, in the same icy tone he repeatedly urged Lee to reinforce him. On 21 November he had written that the ‘public interest’ required Lee to march. By 27 November, after discovery of the plotting, he urged furiously, ‘My former letters were so full and explicit as to the necessity of your marching, as early as possible, that it is unnecessary to add more on that head.’
Lee’s delay in reinforcing Washington is hard to explain except as a kind of suppressed mutiny. He may have believed that a major defeat would assure him of the American command. In his defence, he possibly believed that by holding back he could strike more effectively at the British from behind, as they pursued Washington, rather than merely joining up to make a joint stand. Not until early December did he move at a leisurely pace across the Hudson. Not only were the Americans on the run, their two chief commanders were also in bitter rivalry.
The figure of Lee has been so demonized historically, being cast as a fallen angel to Washington’s archangel, that the official version of events recounted by Major James Wilkinson must be viewed with some scepticism. Wilkinson was himself a biased observer, acting for his own ambitious master, Horatio Gates, another of the principal American generals, who would himself later challenge Washington’s authority and had good motives for remaining a rival.
According to Wilkinson, the slovenly Lee, having risen late on 13 December and settled down to breakfast at ten at an inn some eight miles away from his army at Morristown, wrote a letter to Gates which began, ‘The ingenious manoeuvre of Fort Washington has completely unhinged the goodly fabric we had been building. There never was so damned a stroke. Entre nous, a certain great man is most damnably deficient.’ At that moment, Wilkinson, who had been ordered by Gates to visit Lee, exclaimed ‘Here, sir, are the British cavalry … around the house’. The general had been caught napping, and was whisked away by a British patrol under the command of a name soon to inspire terror in the American side – Banastre Tarleton.
Congress, reeling from the capture of one of America’s best commanders, despairingly declared a day of fasting ‘According to the custom of our pious ancestors in times of imminent dangers and difficulties … to implore of Almighty God the forgiveness of the many sins prevailing among all ranks, and to beg the countenance and assistance of his Providence in the prosecution of the present just and necessary war’.
What was Lee doing so far from the bulk of the army? How had the British received such precise information as to his whereabouts – for the surrounding of the inn was clearly a carefully staged raid based on excellent intelligence. Might he have been planning secret talks with the British and been double-crossed? Could Lee have been betrayed by one of his own officers, irked by his ambition to supplant Washington? Could the latter have betrayed him? Had Gates or Wilkinson inadvertently led the British to Lee’s hideout? Had Lee been lured to the inn by the promise of meeting Gates there?
Lee’s capture was a major setback for the American cause, but an extraordinary stroke of luck for Washington, whose chief rival had been whisked away at a moment when few Americans had any confidence in their commander-in-chief. Yet it is hard to believe that Washington himself, now across the Delaware, could have been so duplicitous as to have played an active role.
Lee’s abduction was also to prove highly convenient to Horatio Gates, now moving through northern New Jersey with a small reinforcement for Washington’s army dispatched by General Schuyler from Fort Ticonderoga. The ambitious Gates wanted to be rid of Lee as much as, later, he wanted to be rid of Washington. Lee’s henchman Wilkinson had spread the stories of Lee’s idleness and sloppiness.
Washington’s greatness is so much part of the American myth that it is difficult to accept that at this stage, and later, his authority was far from established over other candidates jousting to take his place. Except for the successful occupation of Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston, and his retreat from Long Island, his command of American forces had been a string of disasters, defeats, retreats and displays of indecision. His sole remaining card seemed to be his skill as a ‘political’ general – in particular, and unlike the brusque, impetuous, grumpy Lee, in his careful wooing of Congress to retain its confidence.
Even when Lee’s leaderless contingent reached Washington, he still had only some 6,000 men, ‘Many being entirely naked and most so thinly clad as to be unfit for service. Ten days more will put an end to the existence of our army … Our only dependence now is upon the speedy enlistment of a new army. If this fails, I think the game will be pretty well up.’ He begged for greater powers, expressing ‘no lust after power, but I wish with as much fervency as any man upon this wide-extended continent for an opportunity of turning the sword into the ploughshare.’
On 27 December Congress accorded him these and also, ludicrously, the authority to raise 104 infantry battalions for terms of three years or until the end of the war, amounting to 76,000 men. This grandiose declaration to set up a paper army was in stark contrast to the reality of the huddled and barely clothed rump living in shabby wooden huts along the banks of the Delaware. But extending the terms of enlistment was important: for a great stride had been made towards Washington’s ambition – apparently justified by the war – of establishing a substantial standing army in place of the shambolic, if occasionally effective, guerrilla militias.