Alexander Hamilton (17 page)

Hamilton proved dolefully accurate in his predictions. On August 22, the British began to transfer a huge invasion force across the Narrows from Staten Island to Brooklyn. Within a few days, British redcoats and Hessian mercenaries on Long Island numbered around twenty thousand, or more than twice the number of ablebodied Americans. Following a deceptive lull of several days, the British soldiers then advanced north through quaint Dutch and English farming villages. Moving through marsh and meadow, they leveled homes, flattened fences, uprooted crops in their paths, and slaughtered the inexperienced American soldiers. They took different routes, but their common objective was to reach and breach the patriotic fortifications erected on Brooklyn Heights. Although Washington rushed in reinforcements from Manhattan, the battle of Brooklyn turned into a full-blown fiasco with the patriots heavily outgunned. About 1,200 Americans were killed or captured, dwarfing British losses, and it looked as if Washington’s army was now trapped in a vise, with the British Army in front and the East River at its back. The British had a chance to smash the revolt with one decisive blow.

It is commonly said that Hamilton took no part in the battle, yet an unnamed correspondent for the
Royal Danish American Gazette
submitted a narrative of his own involvement. One suspects the dispatch was Hamilton’s handiwork, though the author identified himself only as a member of the “Pennsylvania troops.” Along with Maryland and Delaware troops, these soldiers were commanded by Hamilton’s hard-drinking former patron, Lord Stirling, and they displayed great valor. In the words of Stirling’s biographer, “Neither he nor anyone else could have predicted that this overweight, rheumatic, vain, pompous, gluttonous inebriate would be so ardent in battle.”
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The St. Croix correspondent credited the bravery of Stirling’s men, who defended a weak position with “but few cannon to defend them.” He also explained the strategy behind Washington’s famous nocturnal retreat across the East River on the night of August 29, saying that Washington feared that British men-of-war would sail upriver the next day and sever his access to Manhattan. The author told how in a cold, steady drizzle, “we received orders to quit our station about two o’clock this morning and had made our retreat almost to the ferry when General Washington ordered us back to that part of the line we were first at, which was reckoned to be the most dangerous post.”
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The reporter’s company, stranded on a spit of land, crouched within easy musket-fire range of the dozing British troops but were screened by darkness and thick, rolling fog. At dawn, the author and his men scurried safely aboard one of the last ships to slide away from the Brooklyn shore. In an exemplary act of gallant leadership, Washington waited for one of the last boats before he himself crossed the river.

Despite this stealthy retreat, it seemed to the British that everything was proceeding according to schedule and that their amateurish American foes would crumble before force majeure. Instead of pursuing the rebels and pressing their advantage, the complacent British forces dawdled and botched an opportunity that might have ended the conflict. On Sunday, September 15, they tardily resumed their offensive with a sustained, earsplitting bombardment of American positions at Kip’s Bay (approximately between Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Streets today), on Manhattan’s eastern shore. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before,” said Lord Howe’s secretary.
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As dozens of barges disgorged British and Hessian troops into the hilly, wooded area, the patriot forces lost their nerve and began to flee in undisguised terror, discarding any semblance of discipline. On horseback, an outraged Washington tried to stem the disorderly retreat. Though Washington was famous for his composure, his infrequent wrath was something to behold, and he cursed the panic-stricken troops and flailed at incompetent officers with his riding crop. Finally, he flung his hat on the ground in disgust and fumed, “Are these the men with whom I am to defend America?”
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Since the British dragged their feet and failed to give chase to the Americans rushing northward, most of the patriots found sanctuary in the wilderness of Harlem Heights.

Hamilton stayed cool under fire. Again, the story comes from the garrulous Hercules Mulligan: “Capt[ain] H[amilton] commanded a post on Bunker Hill near New York and fought with the rear of our army.”
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Hamilton later confirmed this story indirectly when he testified, “I was among the last of our army that left the city.”
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Hamilton showed great fortitude and did not reach Harlem Heights until after dark, having walked the entire length of a thickly forested Manhattan in a drenching rain. He was very dispirited, later telling Mulligan that “in retiring he lost... his baggage and one of his cannon, which broke down.”
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He had surrendered his heavy guns, and his company’s weaponry had now been whittled down to two mobile fieldpieces that could be pulled along by horse or hand.

As New York fell to the British, Hamilton and the ragged remnants of the Continental Army had little notion that they would be exiled from the city for seven years. Redcoats poured into Manhattan and went on a rampage, annihilating the hated vestiges of dissent. They slashed paintings and torched books at King’s College, which they used for a hospital. After midnight on September 21, a fire started at the Fighting Cocks Tavern near the Battery, the flames leaping from house to house until this blazing conflagration consumed a quarter of the city’s housing. Nobody ever solved the mystery of whether the culprit was nature or a renegade arsonist. The British, however, were convinced of rebel mischief and rounded up two hundred suspects, including an American spy, Captain Nathan Hale, who was hung from the gallows at a spot thought to be near the present Third Avenue and Sixtysixth Street. Much of New York had been reduced to charred rubble. Despite this, thousands of desperate Tories flocked to the city for refuge, swelling its population and setting the stage for later conflicts with returning patriots.

After the humiliating loss of New York, Washington thought the craggy, wooded area of Harlem Heights would shelter his army as a natural fortress. He nearly yielded to despair as he bemoaned the drunkenness, looting, desertions in the ranks, and short-term enlistments. In pleading with Congress for a permanent army, he voiced arguments that were echoed by Hamilton and that united the two men in future years: “To place any dependence upon militia is assuredly resting on a broken staff.”
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According to Hamilton’s son, it was at Harlem Heights that Washington first recognized Hamilton’s unique organizational gifts, as he watched him supervise the building of an earthwork. It was also at Harlem Heights that Hamilton’s company first came under the direct command of Washington, who “entered into conversation with him, invited him to his tent, and received an impression of his military talent,” wrote John C. Hamilton.
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It was yet another striking example of the instantaneous rapport that this young man seemed to develop with even the most seasoned officers.

In late October, Hamilton fought alongside Washington at White Plains in yet another bruising defeat for the patriots. The war was beginning to look like a farcical mismatch. The patriots were a slovenly, dejected bunch, while the redcoats, in their trim uniforms and brandishing polished bayonets, stepped smartly into battle to the inspirational strains of a military band. At White Plains, Washington posted the bulk of his troops on high ground while sending a separate detachment of about one thousand men to the west on Chatterton’s Hill, above the Bronx River. John C. Hamilton says that his father planted his two fieldpieces upon a rocky ledge at Chatterton’s Hill and sprayed Hessian and British columns with fire as they struggled to wade across the river. “Again and again Hamilton’s pieces flashed,” he wrote, sending “the ascending columns down to the river’s edge.”
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Soon the British regrouped, forcing Hamilton and his comrades to abandon the hill and finally the entire area. Nevertheless, at White Plains, the British forces suffered larger losses than did the Americans, which provided a fillip to the dejected spirits of Washington’s men.

After White Plains, the patriots, exposed to British seapower as well, had only a tenuous hold left on Manhattan. In the spring, they had built twin forts on opposite sides of the Hudson: Fort Washington on the Manhattan side and Fort Lee on the New Jersey side. On November 16, as he manned an observation post at Fort Lee, Washington gazed in dismay as a huge force of British and Hessian troops overran Fort Washington. Along with staggering losses of men, muskets, and supplies, the surrender of Fort Washington dealt another devastating, nearly mortal, blow to the fragile morale of the Continental Army. Washington was widely castigated for his failure to safeguard the men, not to mention all the cannon and gunpowder stored at the fort. Four days later, the patriots had to surrender Fort Lee hastily to Lord Cornwallis. With his army having dwindled to fewer than three thousand forlorn men, Washington had no choice but to retreat across New Jersey, with the vile epithets of his critics ringing in his ears.
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lagued by foul weather and abysmal morale and with the British tailing his movements, George Washington led the bedraggled Continental Army across New Jersey. The losses he had sustained in New York strengthened his

sense that he had to dodge large-scale confrontations that played to the enemy’s strength. “We should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to the risk,” he told Congress, “unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn.”
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Instead, he would opt for small-scale, improvisational skirmishes, the very sort of mobile, risk-averse war of attrition that Hamilton had expounded in his undergraduate article. Hamilton continued to believe in his theory. “By hanging upon their rear and seizing every opportunity of skirmishing,” the situation of the British could “be rendered insupportably uneasy,” he wrote.
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The rugged terrain and dense forests of America would make it difficult for the British to wage conventional warfare.

Washington had occasion to marvel anew at Hamilton’s prowess during the retreat. The general hoped to make a stand at the Raritan River, near New Brunswick, then decided that his straggling troops could not withstand an enemy offensive and decided to push ahead. Posted with guns high on a riverbank, Hamilton ably provided cover for the retreating patriots. According to Washington’s adopted grandson, the commander “was charmed by the brilliant courage and admirable skill” Hamilton displayed as he “directed a battery against the enemy’s advanced columns that pressed upon the Americans in their retreat by the ford.”
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In an early December letter to Congress, Washington, though not mentioning Hamilton by name, hailed the “smart cannonade” that allowed his men to escape.
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In yet another blunder, General Howe occupied New Jersey but permitted Washington and his men to cross the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. As he pondered his scruffy, poorly clad men, Washington warned Congress on December 20, “Ten days more will put an end to the existence of our army.”
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With the enlistment periods of many soldiers about to expire, he needed to assay something daring to rally his despondent troops, who lacked winter clothing and blankets.

In his waning days as an artillery captain, Hamilton confirmed his reputation for persistence despite recurring health problems. He lay bedridden at a nearby farm when Washington decided to recross the Delaware on Christmas night and pounce on the besotted Hessians drowsing at Trenton. Hamilton referred vaguely to his “long and severe fit” of illness, but he somehow gathered up the strength to leave his sickbed and fight.
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Through death and desertion, Hamilton’s company had now been pared to fewer than thirty men. As part of Lord Stirling’s brigade, they were summoned to move out after midnight, huddling in cargo boats caked with ice as they poled their way across the frigid Delaware.

After an eight-mile march through a thickening snowfall, Hamilton and his troops, equipped with two cannon, glimpsed the metal helmets and glinting bayonets of a Hessian detachment. When they exchanged fire, Hamilton narrowly escaped cannonballs, which whizzed by his ears. With snow muffling their footsteps, Washington and his men crept up on the main body of Hessians, groggy from their Christmas festivities the night before, and captured more than one thousand of them. The fire from Hamilton’s artillery company helped to force the surrender of many enemy soldiers. Patriots everywhere rejoiced at the news, which had a psychological impact far out of proportion to its slim military significance.

Eager to capitalize on his triumph, Washington then attempted a stunning foray against British forces at Princeton on January 3, 1777—another minor but hugely inspiring triumph that revived faith in Washington’s leadership. As his men rounded up two hundred British prisoners, an exultant Washington exclaimed, “It is a fine fox chase, my boys!”
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A senior officer recalled Hamilton and his rump company marching into the village. “I noticed a youth, a mere stripling, small, slender, almost delicate in frame, marching beside a piece of artillery, 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.”
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A mythic gleam began to cling to the young captain. People had already noticed his special attributes during the retreat across New Jersey. “Well do I recollect the day when Hamilton’s company marched into Princeton,” said a friend. “It was a model of discipline. At their head was a boy and I wondered at his youth, but what was my surprise when that slight figure . . . was pointed out to me as that Hamilton of whom we had already heard so much.”
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Hamilton found himself back at the college that had spurned him a few years earlier, only this time one regiment of enemy troops occupied the main dormitory. Legend claims that Hamilton set up his cannon in the college yard, pounded the brick building, and sent a cannonball slicing through a portrait of King George II in the chapel. All we know for certain is that the British soldiers inside surrendered. Hamilton believed that the Continental Army had regained its esprit de corps, showing that green patriots could outwit well-trained British troops. He later referred to “the enterprises of Trenton and Princeton . . . as the dawnings of that bright day which afterwards broke forth with such resplendent luster.”
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