Washington's General (14 page)

Four days later, on August 15, Greene was among those “in a suffering condition.”

The weather that morning was wet and foggy, which screened the Americans' view of British movements on Staten Island. But reports of stepped-up activity had been coming into Greene's headquarters for several days, suggesting final preparations for a move across the Narrows onto Long Island. Greene was impatiently awaiting a new complement of militia companies that were a day late as of August 15. He told Washington the laggards would soon regret their tardiness. They would soon “feel my Resentment by vigorous and spirited Exertions of Military Discipline,” he said.

Greene never received the chance to make good on this grim promise. Soon after writing to Washington, he was confined to his bed with what he called a “raging Fever.” He sent word to Washington, across the East River on Manhattan Island, that he hoped to be back in his saddle soon, but his illness only became worse. Within two days, one of his two aides-de-camp, Major William Livingston, informed Washington that Greene had suffered through a “very bad night” and “cannot be said to be any
better this morning than he was yesterday.” His temperature was dangerously high; he had little appetite and almost no energy. He could sit up in bed for no longer than an hour at a time.

Washington had a crisis on his hands. After months of preparation, the defense of Long Island was in the hands of a sick, bedridden man just as the enemy was expected to unleash a powerful assault. Greene sought to reassure his commander by dispatching an optimistic message on August 18, reporting that he was feeling better and, while still weak, he believed that he would be out of bed “in a few days.”

The enemy, however, could strike at any moment. Washington acted swiftly, although perhaps not decisively: he ordered Greene to sail across the river to Manhattan to complete his recovery. In Greene's place as commander of Long Island, Washington at first named General John Sullivan, a lawyer from New Hampshire, but then reconsidered and sent a more senior general, Israel Putnam. The new commander was competent enough but had not been privy to Greene's strategy and his preparations. As reports came into headquarters of British troops boarding transport ships, Washington increased troop strength on Long Island from four thousand to nine thousand.

Greene was still weak and in bed, in a private home near the present intersection of Broadway and Ninth Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, when the British finally launched their assault on the defenses he had built and the troops he had commanded. The British landed unopposed on the southern shoreline of modern-day Brooklyn, near Gravesend, on August 22, and under cover of night on August 26 the main British force moved toward the virtually undefended Jamaica Pass on the American left while other units assailed the American right and center. In heavy fighting on the twenty-seventh, the Americans were outflanked and badly mauled. Washington, who had crossed the East River to take personal command of the battle, found himself trapped with the river to his back. That river, however, offered a desperate chance for salvation: on the foggy night of August 29, with the British asleep but prepared to finish off the rebels the next day, Washington withdrew his force across the river to the temporary safety of Manhattan.

Would the Battle of Long Island have turned out better for the Americans had Greene been in charge, and not the inferior Putnam? Probably not. The British had twenty thousand crack troops; the Americans had less than half that number, including undependable militia. Still, Greene quietly cursed his fate, and on August 30, as the Long Island defenders stumbled through the streets of New York City, Greene poured out his frustrations on paper.

Gracious God! to be confined at such a time. And the misfortune is doubly great as there was no general officer who had made himself acquainted with the ground as perfectly as I had. I have not the vanity to think the event would have been otherwise had I been there, yet I think I could have given the commanding general a good deal of necessary information. Great events sometimes depend on very little causes.

The loss of Long Island made the defense of New York City untenable. The British army commanded the high ground across the river; the British navy would rule the rivers surrounding Manhattan Island. On September 5, Greene, now recovered, sent a grim and clear-eyed analysis of the precarious American position to his commander in chief. He noted that the entire main army risked capture and destruction in New York because of the enemy's ability to land troops anywhere on the island, and that fate was to be avoided at all costs. “I give it as my oppinion that a General and speedy Retreat is absolutely necessary and that the honnor and Interest of America requires it,” he told Washington. As for the city itself, Greene was surprisingly cold-blooded. Let it burn, he said.

Two thirds of the Property of the City of New York and the Subburbs belongs to the Tories. ... I would burn the City and Subburbs. ... It will deprive the Enemy of an opportunity of Barracking their whole Army together. . . .
It will deprive them of a general Market. . . . All these advantages would Result from the destruction of the City. And not one benefit can arise to us from its preservation.

Washington agreed, but Congress did not. The politicians expressly forbade Washington to carry out Greene's wishes. “This in my judgment may be set down among one of the capital errors of Congress,” an exasperated Washington wrote to his cousin, Lund Washington. Greene then contended that the army should retreat from the city anyway, but nobody else shared his view. At a council of war on September 7 in Washington's headquarters, Greene's colleagues, including Washington, decided on a compromise plan that combined withdrawal and defense of the island. Nine thousand troops were ordered north to Harlem Heights in upper Manhattan, a dozen miles from the settled part of the city and south of an American strongpoint dubbed Fort Washington, which was perched on the high ground along the North River palisades. Five thousand Americans were left within the city itself, and another five thousand or so were stretched in positions between the city and Harlem Heights to guard against a British invasion from the East River.

This was a dubious evasion of a difficult decision. Instead of either withdrawing completely, as Greene argued, or fortifying the city, Washington and the other generals spread the American army thinly along the length of Manhattan Island. Greene stubbornly continued to press for a general retreat from the island. He was convinced that Washington was on the verge of a catastrophic miscalculation. With boldness that bordered on impudence, Greene addressed a petition to Washington, begging that a new council of war reconsider the decision to defend New York. Greene was the highest-ranking officer, and only major general, to sign the petition.

A new council of war took place four days later, on September 11, in the headquarters of General Alexander McDougall. Greene made an impassioned and effective argument in favor of withdrawal from the city. The army's youngest major general carried the day, and the vote was reversed. The troops in the city began moving north, toward Kings Bridge,
and Washington moved his headquarters to Harlem Heights to supervise the retreat. Left behind in the city, because of a lack of wagons, was about half of the army's cannons and other vital equipment and food supplies.

The British arrived even as the withdrawal was under way. They landed in force on a sultry morning, September 15, in Kip's Bay, along Manhattan's East River waterfront near present-day East Thirty-fourth Street. The American defenders, most of them militiamen, ran away. Their performance so embarrassed Washington that Greene would later say that his commander was “so vext at the infamous conduct of the Troops that he sought Death rather than life.”

The British halted their northward advance that day without assailing Harlem Heights. Other British troops had turned south, to take the city itself. As if to confirm Greene's assessment of their allegience, hundreds of New Yorkers turned out to greet the British forces. The following morning, September 16, Greene and his three-thousand-man division were deployed south of the heights, near where today's West 125th Street approaches the Hudson River, when gunfire signaled a skirmish nearby. An American patrol had stumbled upon British light infantry units operating north of the main British line. The Americans fired several volleys and then began withdrawing back toward the main American position. The British followed, and one of their buglers taunted the retreating rebels with a fox-hunting call used when the quarry disappeared into a hole. The American commanders flushed with embarassment and anger.

The British were far too eager to complete the rout. Their contingent numbered only about three hundred, and they had moved far in front of their lines. Washington seized a chance to redeem the previous day's dishonor; he told Greene to send a hundred and fifty men forward to distract the British from an encircling movement under the command of Colonel Thomas Knowlton.

The British spotted Knowlton before he could complete his maneuver, forcing the Americans to attack from the flank rather than from behind. The British buckled and began to retreat as Greene pressed from
one side and Knowlton from the other. The Americans saw something new and startling: the back of a British redcoat.

Major General Nathanael Greene had never been in battle before. The siege of Boston, though hardly casualty-free, was static and almost predictable, a waiting game. This was something else again. Men shouted and screamed to unhearing comrades; smoke covered the field; young, healthy men dropped in their tracks, dead before they hit the ground if they were lucky; if not, their youth and lives seeped away slowly, horribly, and they would scream until they could scream no more.

For Nathanael Greene, war no longer consisted of words on a page. It was happening all around him. He rode among the suddenly emboldened American soldiers, shouting orders and encouragement. The Americans continued to rally. After nearly two hours of intense fire, the British retreated again, and the Americans were prepared to pursue. Washington, however, dared not risk a general engagement, so he judiciously ordered his men to cease firing and return to their defenses.

The Battle of Harlem Heights was hardly an epic. The Americans suffered about sixty casualties; the British, about a hundred and seventy. Numbers aside, it was the sight of those redcoats in retreat that gave the battle significance. As Greene noted, at Harlem Heights the British had “met with a very different kind of Reception from what they did the day before.”

Still, there was no denying the disaster that had befallen the Americans. New York City was lost to the enemy. The day after the Battle of Harlem Heights, Washington dispatched Greene across the river to New Jersey to take command of that state's defenses, including a strategic fortress across from Fort Washington called Fort Constitution–later renamed Fort Lee. Greene's new assignment was critical. New Jersey offered a path from New York to Philadelphia; defending that path suddenly was of the utmost importance. Long Island and New York already had fallen. Could the cause survive the loss of Philadelphia, too?

Greene was given the task of guarding against the unthinkable. It would require all of Greene's organizing skills and strategic vision. But
Washington, whose faith in his troops remained shaken despite Harlem Heights, had decided that this young major general was fit for important work. Washington's secretary wrote that “Greene is beyond doubt a first-rate military genius, and one in whose opinions the General places the utmost confidence.”

Three days into Greene's new command, his wish for New York City came true. On the night of September 20, a series of fires erupted along the waterfront, and within hours, a third of the city was in flames. British soldiers summoned to perform the work of firefighters discovered that buckets and other firefighting equipment were either disabled or nonexistent. The fires became an inferno, and from his headquarters on Harlem Heights twelve miles to the north, Washington saw an orange glow in the sky. “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves,” he said as he watched the lost city burn. A good honest fellow who had nothing to do with the fire, but who was arrested in a roundup of suspected patriots that night, was Nathan Hale, an American spy. He was hanged the next morning.

If Greene felt some sense of satisfaction as he watched the flames from his post in New Jersey, he was discreet enough to keep such thoughts to himself. But there was no disguising his optimism, even in the face of disastrous defeats. “I apprehend the several retreats that have taken place begin to make you think all is lost,” he wrote to his brother Jacob. “Don't be frightened; our cause is not yet in a desperate state.” But Greene was not so sanguine about members of Congress who continued to believe the war could be won with part-time soldiers. That, Greene believed, was frightening.

The policy of Congress has been the most absurd and ridiculous imaginable, pouring in militia men who come and go every month. A military force established upon such principles defeats itself. People coming from home with all
the tender feelings of domestic life are not sufficiently fortified with natural courage to stand the shocking scenes of war. To march over dead men, to hear without concern the groans of the wounded, I say few men can stand such scenes unless steeled by habit or fortified by military pride.

Greene continued to insist that the nation needed a regular army to defeat the professionals of Britain and the mercenaries purchased from German princes. But until Congress came around to his (and Washington's) view, he would do his best to turn these militia outfits and inexperienced regulars into a fighting force. A corporal in New Jersey, John Adlum, quickly noticed a difference almost as soon as Greene arrived: There was, he wrote, “a great change with respect to the discipline of the troops, which before was lax.” As if to acknowledge Greene's complaint about the dangers of relying on militia, Congress soon authorized the raising of eighty-eight more regiments for the Continental army.