Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (3 page)

Braddock came in for his share of the blame. But Washington, who would remain an admirer of his mentor, simply called him “brave even to a fault.”

The defeat affected all of the country’s inhabitants. Virginians feared that this demonstration of British impotence might incite a slave rebellion. “The negro slaves have been very audacious on the news of the defeat on the Ohio,” Dinwiddie noted. In Philadelphia, nervous inhabitants turned on the Irish, who as Catholics were suspected of sympathizing with the French.
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It was not slaves or immigrants whom the Americans had to fear, but the continent’s indigenous people. The defeat on the Monongahela touched off a series of violent Indian attacks on frontier settlements, atrocities known as the Outrages. Thousands of pioneers were pushed eastward by the Indians whom they had earlier dispossessed. The frontier regions of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia lost as much as half their population in the three years after the Braddock catastrophe.

George Washington remained at the head of the Virginia Regiment during the first years of what Americans called the French and Indian War. After early defeats, the British rallied. In 1758, Washington joined General John Forbes on a second expedition to the Ohio Country. That force overwhelmed the French and took Fort Duquesne without a major battle. General James Wolff led British forces in the conquest of Quebec a year later. Having utterly vanquished the French in North America, King
George III, who had assumed the British throne in 1760, emerged from the conflict with the most extensive empire of the age.

Washington showed little enthusiasm for the war he had inadvertently started. Elected to Virginia’s House of Burgesses in July 1758, he resigned his militia commission at the end of that year and took no further part in the struggle. He married Virginia’s wealthiest widow, Martha Dandridge Custis, in January 1759 and joined the colony’s elite.

One of Washington’s principal virtues was his ability to learn, and Braddock had been his most important teacher. The Virginian did not take a simple lesson from his experiences in the 1750s. He remained convinced of the efficacy of formal European fighting methods when properly employed, but he saw the need for flexibility and adaptation. Braddock’s misfortune showed that the forests of America were not the plains of Europe. Irregular fighting and the use of special forces could be valuable supplements to traditional tactics. It was a matter of balance, and a tendency to weigh and balance was a prominent feature of Washington’s mind.

From Braddock, Washington took his concept of how an army should be constituted and managed. In the egalitarian climate that would sweep America during the Revolutionary era, rigid hierarchy, taut discipline, and punishment by flogging would all come into question. But Washington would insist that “discipline is the soul of an army.”

Washington learned that a defeat, even a ruinous one like the cataclysm at the Monongahela, could be overcome. Perhaps the most important lesson he took from Braddock was a basic one: how to sustain an army in the field. In war, logistics could often be more critical than any single victory.

Like Braddock, Washington would favor the offensive. Like Braddock, he would scorn Indians as allies, maintain a military family of close aides, and pay close attention to such mundane issues as his troops’ hygiene and pay. Like Braddock, he would adopt the honorific “Excellency.”

He would not, like his mentor, emulate the studied decadence of the British officer class. He would discourage exorbitant drinking, gaming, and womanizing in the Continental Army, setting a tone that fit his own personality. A contemporary described him as “Discreet and Virtuous, no harum Starum ranting Swearing fellow, but Sober, steady and Calm.”
22

Washington’s behavior during the battle on the Monongahela overshadowed and erased the stain of his failure at Fort Necessity. Although a disaster for Braddock and the British, the campaign left Washington “the hero of the Monongahela.”

Washington had borne witness to the cost of war. Of 150 Virginia provincial soldiers who marched with Braddock, many of whom Washington had personally recruited, 120 had been killed or wounded. Washington would never again describe bullets as charming. He himself seemed a child of destiny, left untouched when so many others died. The Presbyterian minister Samuel Davis wrote at the time that he hoped Providence had preserved Washington “in so signal a Manner for some important Service to this Country.”
23

And so Providence had. A man who understood something of the military art, a social climber, a slave owner, an athlete, a lover of theater, a determined, self-deprecating man, always wary, subject to anger but not bluster, tempered by early defeats, open to the hard lessons of
experience—this was the man whom history had chosen to play the lead role in a drama that would change the world.

Two

Blows Must Decide

1774

Twenty years later, the colonies continued to feel the effects of the war that George Washington had started in 1754. The fighting had left Great Britain with a magnificent empire and a ruinous debt. The government’s attempts to tax the colonies had generated more protests than revenues and had goaded the inhabitants to the edge of violent insurrection.

During the tense summer of 1774, two men sat discussing the affairs of the day over pints of ale in the Boston tavern The Bunch of Grapes. One was the tall, paunchy Henry Knox, a well-known city bookseller of twenty-four, given to booming laughter and subtle, insightful analysis. The other was a pudgy, lame Rhode Island businessman named Nathanael Greene. Eight years older than Knox, he still showed the roughness of his country upbringing. But Greene was an avid learner and was in fact one of Knox’s best customers. The liberal-minded Knox admired his friend’s enthusiasm. To know freedom and not defend it, Greene asserted, was “spiritual suicide.”

Knox’s shop, the London Book-Store, was stocked with volumes on weapons, strategy, and tactics, ranging from Caesar’s
Commentaries
to Maurice de Saxe’s influential
Mes Reveries,
on the art of war. British officers frequented the shop to brush up on military theory. It was no contradiction that Knox had transformed himself into an expert on war. Both he and Greene had access to information that was out of the reach of most citizens, who could not afford to purchase books. Knox suggested a reading list for his friend, who was compiling a substantial library.

Knox had grown up during the last war. Greene had experienced the conflict as a teenager, although his Quaker family’s strict pacifism discouraged participation. Both men had come of age during the increasingly contentious and tumultuous years that followed the peace treaty of 1763. Both now sensed that the clash of interests between Great Britain and her American colonies was careening toward armed conflict.

His father’s bankruptcy and early death had forced Knox to drop out of Boston Latin School, a preparation for Harvard, at age nine. His mother apprenticed him to a firm of booksellers, where an indulgent proprietor let him continue his studies with borrowed tomes. Knox read Plutarch’s lives of great men, taught himself French, and absorbed the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers.

He knew violence early. Boston had for decades endured riots touched off by hunger and poverty. Forced impressment into the British navy particularly rankled seamen. The economic bust that followed the French and Indian War brought to the city a declining economy, high unemployment, and a flagrant contrast between rich and poor. Boston would come to be called the “Metropolis of Sedition,” a place where inhabitants, British observers noted, had an overblown notion of “the rights and liberties of Englishmen.”

A yearly occasion for expressing those rights was Pope’s Day, November 5, a date that commemorated the failed 1605 plot by papists to decapitate the English government. The day gave Boston’s poorer inhabitants a chance to shake their fists at alien Catholics and generally let off steam. Working men and apprentices like Knox looked forward to Pope’s Day as a rare respite from work. It was the annual jubilee of the gangs from the city’s North and South Ends. Once, when a wheel came off a Pope’s Day float, the prodigiously strong Knox lifted the axle himself to heave the weighty contraption forward.

During the celebration, parading crowds of “servants, sailors, workingmen, apprentices and Negroes” invaded the homes of the well-to-do to beg alms and strong drink. They broke the windows of burghers who stinted them. The day culminated in a monumental brawl, to which boys and young men came armed with “Clubs, Staves and Cutlasses” and fought among themselves with gusto. Afterward, the participants destroyed their floats in a huge bonfire. The teenaged Knox gained a reputation as one of Boston’s toughest street fighters, something to brag about in a city populated by fist-hard seamen and muscled dock workers.
1

In August 1765, when Knox was fifteen, Bostonians turned out for a more pointed purpose. Britain had imposed the Stamp Act. This tax on newspapers, legal writs, playing cards, and other documents was the first
direct tax on the colonies. The protests took on many of the trappings of Pope’s Day: bonfires blazed and intimidating mobs roamed the city. A “hellish crew” invaded the home of wealthy stamp master Andrew Oliver, smashed a mirror “said to be the largest in North America,” and wrecked the place.
2
The mob later burst into the mansion of royal lieutenant governor Thomas Hutchinson and left his home a wrecked shell.

Boston authorities expected new violence when Pope’s Day itself rolled around that November. Something more ominous greeted them. The North and South End factions, guided and bribed by radical Whigs like John Hancock and Samuel Adams, had made peace. The gangs marched together and gathered at the Liberty Tree, a celebrated elm on Boston Common. Effigies of government officials replaced those of the pope and devil. Oliver worried that “the People, even to the lowest Ranks, have become more attentive to their Liberties.”
3

Riots and gang fighting melded easily into political protest and what Massachusetts governor Francis Bernard called a “general Levelling, and taking away the Distinction of rich and poor.”
4
The mob began to think and reason. Boston became the focal point of growing discontent in the colonies. The gangs came to see themselves as “the people out of doors,” the assertive bane of monarchs. The Stamp Act, never enforced, was soon repealed.

Two years later, Knox watched as Bostonians marked King George III’s twenty-ninth birthday with a salute from three brass cannon. The concussions, the flashes of fire, and the power of the eruptions kindled his imagination. The seventeen-year-old immediately joined the artillery company, a branch of the provincial militia, and began to drill under Lieutenant Adino Paddock, a chair-maker and staunch Tory.

The unit attracted many of the same young men Knox knew from the South End gangs, the sons of mechanics and shipyard workers. The handling of great guns, as exacting as it was muscular, engaged both his intellect and his physical prowess. The science of artillery incorporated mathematics, mechanics, geometry, and chemistry. The company, known as the Train, became Knox’s absorbing interest. Drills were rigorous. Paddock passed on techniques learned directly from British artillery officers. Engineering was part of the gunner’s trade, and Knox studied the construction of fortifications and secure gun emplacements.

A new wave of rioting greeted the 1768 import duties known as the Townshend Acts. A British officer called Boston “a blackguard town and ruled by mobs.”
5
Patriots began a boycott of British goods. The British government sent four regiments, nearly two thousand soldiers, to occupy Boston. The order was handed down by General Thomas Gage, the
agreeable, cultivated officer who had led the advanced guard across the Monongahela thirteen years earlier. Gage, like Braddock before him, now reigned as military commander of all North America.

Knox joined the thousands of Bostonians who watched this “invasion,” which contemporary historian Mercy Otis Warren called the beginning of the “American war.” The troops marched up from the Long Wharf with fifes screeching and flags unfurled. One regiment featured black Afro-Caribbean drummers in yellow coats with red facings, a bizarre sight to the locals.

Intended to quell unrest, the occupation set off a seven-year slide toward war. Radicals encouraged citizens to arm themselves. Artillery drill took on an added urgency. The Train comprised both Whigs and Tories, designations borrowed from British political parties. In America,
Whig
came to be associated with “patriot,”
Tory
with “loyalist.” Both factions imagined rolling the great guns into action, one to resist oppression, the other to keep the peace.

In a city of fifteen thousand residents, the presence of so many soldiers became a festering intrusion. On the night of March 5, 1770, Knox was walking home through dark, frigid streets. He encountered a commotion around the Custom House. Bells were ringing as if announcing a fire. Residents were rushing into the street and shouting. He came upon some rowdy youths—a few years earlier he might have been one of them—taunting a British sentry.

The boys, backed up by a growing crowd, threw snowballs and jeered. Knox ordered them back and, seeing the sentry load his musket, told him “if he fired he died.” The sentry pointed his gun, the boys dared him to shoot.

Eight or nine men of the British guard, commanded by Captain Thomas Preston, hurried to the sentry’s aid, bayonets fixed. Knox, watching the situation spin out of control, grabbed Preston’s coat and warned him not to fire on the crowd. “Bloody backs!” the boys continued to scoff. “Lobster scoundrels!” The insult referred to the submission of British soldiers to the lash under the army’s draconian disciplinary regime, a degradation for which Americans felt deep scorn.

The scene grew chaotic. Bells continued to clang, more snowballs flew, chunks of ice. There were shouts of “You can’t kill us all!” and dares to “Fire!”

The regulars jabbed at the crowd with their bayonets. A soldier slipped. A shot shattered the cold air. After a pause, during which Preston failed to give a decisive command, the rest of the hyped-up soldiers fired a staccato volley. The street became a pandemonium of smoke, shouting, and groans. Five civilians fell dead, six suffered wounds.

Express riders carried word of the “massacre” through the city and out to the countryside. Thousands of citizens prepared to march on Boston. The colony teetered on the precipice of war, but no war came. Henry Knox testified as an eyewitness during the trial, in which lawyer John Adams successfully defended Preston against a charge of murder.

An alarmed British ministry withdrew their soldiers from Boston and repealed the Townshend taxes on all items except tea. Tensions eased. But the anniversary of the Boston Massacre became an annual focus of patriot rallies and an occasion for incendiary orations.

* * *

While Knox had known early the rough world of Boston’s crowded streets, Nathanael Greene had grown up two miles from his nearest neighbors. He had passed his youth working on the family farm and toiling at his father’s successful iron forge on the western shore of Narragansett Bay. Unlike his brothers, he was an avid reader, devoting every slack moment to whatever books he could get hold of.

While a life of hard work built his strength, Greene suffered from several physical ailments. He walked with a limp. Asthma attacks sometimes kept him struggling for breath night after night. He had dared to receive an inoculation for smallpox—the dangerous protective measure remained controversial—but in addition to conferring immunity, the procedure had left him with a scarred right eye prone to inflammation.

The domination of Greene’s severe Quaker father shaped his life into his late twenties. At an age when Henry Knox was swinging his fists in street brawls, Greene was still sneaking out to forbidden dances. He did not really come of age until his father died in 1770. That same year, the twenty-eight-year-old Greene fell in love with the well-connected Nancy Ward. She did not return his affection; her indifference broke his heart. He fantasized about winning the lottery: “I intend to turn Beau with my part of the Money,” he explained, “and make a Shining Figure.”
6

Greene regretted his upbringing as a “Supersticious” Quaker, and his lack of formal education. “I feel the mist [of] Ignorance to surround me,” he later wrote.
7
On his own he read Enlightenment authors like Voltaire and John Locke. Jonathan Swift, whose satires skewered English policies in Ireland, was a favorite. But the demands of the prosperous business that he and his brothers had inherited consumed his time. Politics remained theoretical. In February 1772, that changed.

One of the Greene brothers’ ships, the
Fortune,
with cousin Rufus Greene at the helm, was accosted in Narragansett Bay as it transported a load of West Indian rum and sugar. The commander of the British
revenue schooner
Gaspee,
a “haughty, insolent” man named Dudingston, had become the scourge of Rhode Island traders. He led a boarding party onto the Greenes’ cargo vessel.

The British sailors slapped Rufus around and confiscated the ship. Import duties were one of the few consistent sources of Crown revenue. The government was determined to prevent traders from sneaking past the customs house at Newport. The myriad of coves and islands in the bay made Rhode Island a smuggler’s paradise. Greene’s cargo may have been legal, but the
Gaspee
’s captain was going to make sure that the cargo had been taxed. When he heard the news, Nathanael erupted. It was piracy, he declared. He brought a court action against Lieutenant Dudingston, making the officer subject to arrest by Rhode Island authorities. New England merchants cheered the defiant Greene, who became obsessed with the affair. The seizure had brought into sudden focus for him the many issues of rights and liberty that had been percolating in the colonies for years.

The crew of the
Gaspee
continued to interdict shipping. In June 1772, chasing a merchantman in the bay, the British schooner ran aground. A gang of citizens, spurred on by the radical patriot group called Sons of Liberty, formed a posse and rowed out in longboats. During their altercation with Dudingston, they shot him in the groin, arrested him, and burned the schooner.

News of the outrage crackled through the colonies. Boston patriot Samuel Adams thought it could touch off a contest between Britain and America that would “end in rivers of blood.” The British offered a reward and threatened to send the perpetrators to England for trial. With the
Gaspee
’s captain now in custody, Nathanael Greene, who had a solid alibi for the night of the incident, pursued his lawsuit. He won a judgment of three hundred pounds for the improper seizure of his ship.