Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (20 page)

In Peters’s case and others, the stories were false, but they indicated one source of the problems Washington faced in holding his troops in line: Unreliable while out of combat, what would they do when they faced the regulars? To drive home his point about the importance of discipline—obeying officers, training seriously, and saving their powder until the battle began—he resorted to his usual exhortations. He demanded that officers crack down on delinquents, lead or force their
men in getting fortifications prepared, punish offenders against military order, and enforce the rule against the random firing of muskets. Not all of these officers satisfied him.

He had not come to New York with a full complement in any case, for the group of generals under him at Boston contained several who either did not want to go to New York or were not worth taking. Among them, Major General Artemas Ward had resigned on the eve of the move to New York, pleading bad health, but then retracted his resignation. Washington had never been entirely happy with Ward, and Ward had never fully reconciled himself to the fact that Congress had preferred having Washington rather than him in overall command. When Ward indicated his intention to resign, Washington had not objected—a month later he attributed Ward’s desire to leave the army to his discovery “that there was a probability of his removing from the smoke of his own chimney.”
²
(This was a phrase Washington used several times to describe men who showed no enthusiasm for the hardships of army life. In Ward’s case, he referred to a man who wanted to live at home while holding command.) The sardonic note in this dismissal of Ward was mild compared with his characterization of Brigadier General Joseph Frye, another New England officer who left the army when he learned that it would not remain in Boston. Frye, “that Wonderful Man,” in Washington’s account, received his appointment on January 11, but remained at home thereafter, without doing “one days duty.” In late March he resigned, effective April 11—exactly three months after he accepted appointment, in order to collect three months’ pay, though he had “scarce been three times out of his House.” Washington’s scorn is evident in the explanation he offered of Frye’s conduct. Frye, he wrote, “discovered that he was too old, and too infirm for a moving Camp—but
remembers
that he has been young, active, and very capable of doing what is now out of his power to accomplish; & therefore has left Congress to find out another man capable of making, if possible, a more brilliant figure than he has done.”
³

There were two others he would not have mourned had he lost them: Joseph Spencer, a Connecticut brigadier general, and William Heath, the brigadier general from Massachusetts. Neither had distinguished himself; nor had either suffered disgrace. Washington’s standards were high, and mediocrity, he thought, should be avoided. For the time being, Heath and Spencer remained. Only John Thomas and
Nathanael Greene drew complete approval from Washington, and both held important positions until Thomas was called to Canadian command, an almost hopeless assignment. Greene continued to serve as adjutant general. Charles Lee, more than acceptable to Washington, had been sent to the South to assume command there even before the main army left Boston for New York.
⁴

He could take comfort, at least for a few weeks before fighting for the city began, that rations, gunpowder, and clothing were not lacking. The weather was sometimes marred by rain, but temperatures did not require that camps furnish permanent barracks. There was sufficient tentage for many of the troops, and though digging trenches and throwing up redoubts and parapets was heavy work, it progressed from April through June.

Having outstanding commanders by his side seemed more than ordinarily desirable when Washington took a reckoning of the problems he faced in defending New York. At Boston he had been the besieger, charged with taking a city in a compact area; in New York he was the defender of a city spread out over three islands and on the edge of a major harbor. The central part of the city lay on New York Island, also known as Manhattan, abutting the North River, which opened the way through northern New York to Canada. Control of this corridor was vital, he thought, to holding New England. He was not alone in his assessment that New York and the corridor to Canada possessed great strategic importance. British commanders shared this conception, though they gave precedence to the West Indies, for reasons of economic policy as well as strategy for containing the French. Washington and congressional delegates also recognized the importance of the West Indies, but if at this time the leaders had a strategic obsession, it was Canada.

They converted the obsession into strategy in the summer and autumn of the year. Congress itself stepped into the planning with an order to General Philip Schuyler to mount an attack. The two points of importance for such an operation were the cities of Quebec and Montreal. Benedict Arnold headed a force put together to subdue Quebec, and Brigadier General Richard Montgomery was selected for Montreal. Washington, the supreme commander with no control of these
efforts, approved of them nonetheless and supplied troops and equipment. Arnold badly miscalculated the obstacles between Massachusetts, from which he set off, and Quebec. But he bravely persevered and on December 31—joined by Montgomery, who earlier had captured Montreal—he led an assault against British forces in the city. It was a romantic effort, made in a snowstorm by men who had endured a terrible march through the Maine wilderness, and it failed after a bloody struggle. Montgomery, fatally, took a bullet in the head, and Arnold one in a leg. Arnold pulled his troops back and besieged the city. But by mid-1776 it was clear to everyone that the Americans would not take Canada. The disappointment in Congress and the army was great; and the army and Washington knew that bleeding of a sort had not been confined to the North. Washington’s strength in troops and weapons was one of the casualties of the Canadian campaign, for he had, over the months of the siege, sent both north in support.
⁵

The problems in holding New York were great, and not much had been done to ready its defense before the Continental Army arrived. General Charles Lee had begun the process of planning fortifications but had made little progress on the ground. Washington studied New York’s vulnerabilities carefully and ordered the digging of emplacements. But more work was needed before the British arrived.

Such work indeed took precedence over everything else. Washington did not acknowledge that Congress had declared independence on July 4. He had expected its coming—the demand for such action by Congress had grown increasingly loud in 1776—and many in the army shared this popular feeling. On the ninth, officers read the Declaration to the troops standing in formations. There is no doubt that it received the soldiers’ approval.
⁶

William Howe and his fleet arrived in late June and early July. Some 100 to 150 ships brought his troops, making their way into New York waters over several weeks. Besides coming over an extended period, the ships carried men of varying quality and readiness. They numbered some thirty-two thousand when all came ashore on Staten Island, and included four thousand Hessians. A voyage at sea had left the men tired and, in many cases, sick. Getting them prepared for operations required time, and their officers did not press them into shape quickly.
⁷
But by August they were ready. General Howe put his force in motion from Staten Island to Gravesend Bay, Long Island, early on the morning of August 22. They sailed on small craft manned by sailors from British frigates in nearby waters, and by midday some fifteen thousand men had reached shore, supported initially by forty fieldpieces. These soldiers were all British regulars; a second group of Hessians, who had arrived in America on August 12, pleaded for time to rest and gather themselves. On August 25, sufficiently refreshed, two brigades of Hessians under General Philip von Heister, a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, joined Howe’s command. These landings went unopposed, as the Americans lacked the numbers to fortify all the beaches of Long Island.

Howe knew that his army outnumbered Washington’s; he knew also that most of his enemy were militia, not regulars, neither well armed nor well trained. But Howe and his officers did not expect a lark. Howe in particular acted with a feeling of some restraint—not fear or trepidation, but the knowledge that, while he could drive the Americans from Long Island and New York Island, he might lose his military superiority in the victory. For Bunker Hill had reinforced skepticism he and the professionals in his command felt about battle, especially in America. His force was finite—the casualties he might suffer would not soon be replaced, as reinforcements were an ocean away, and not sure to be sent in any case. And battle, as a German officer had said, expressing a widely shared belief, was the remedy of the desperate. Howe had endured one terrible fight with Americans who were entrenched, on Bunker Hill. After it was over, he commented that his losses in his victory were a “success … too dearly bought.”
⁸
General John Burgoyne agreed, and Gage, the overall British commander in Boston at the time, pronounced the deaths of his troops “greater than we can bear. Small armys cant afford such losses, especially when the advantage gained tends to little more than the gaining of a post.” General James Murray, another observer from afar—in Minorca—wrote after Bunker Hill that the “Americans’ plan ought to be to lose a battle every week, til the British army was reduced to nothing: ‘it may be that our troops are not invincible, they certainly are not immortal.’ ” Murray summed up Howe’s problem in a classic eighteenth-century military sentiment: “The fate of battles at the best are precarious.”

Howe’s restraint did not hobble him completely nor stay his hand in taking a chance in getting his troops across the water to Long Island. Though the sailors who sailed the small craft from Staten Island were among the best in the world, their task was not easy, for the night before, a storm filled with thunder and lightning had dumped a “prodigious heavy rain” on New York Harbor, and no one knew what the new day would bring. The weather turned out fine, as did the landing, and the army moved without opposition toward the American lines.
⁹

Washington had visited those lines on August 26 and made no changes, though the disposition of American troops was faulty. The original plan of defense called for a series of entrenchments, redoubts, and other fortifications built around Brooklyn. Those defenses were well placed and well constructed. The commander of all American forces on the island until just a few days before the British landing was Nathanael Greene, an able man with knowledge of the ground he was to defend. But in a terrible piece of bad luck, he fell ill with a high fever; Washington replaced him with Israel Putnam, a fighter of spirit but little tactical savvy. On taking up his new duty, Putnam decided to change the placement of his troops—now throwing forward a line along the Heights of Guan, a range of hills 100 to 150 feet in height, covered by heavy brush and woods. The south side rose abruptly to eighty feet in places and was thought to be impassable by troops in formation because of the rough, wooded terrain. The woods would also prevent horse-drawn artillery from being moved up through the hills. Four passes breached the Heights of Guan: the coastal pass near Gowanus, with its creek and salt marshes, on the American right; Flatbush, about a mile to the east; Bedford Pass, another mile farther east; and Jamaica Pass, almost three miles beyond.
¹⁰

Howe, ever cautious, felt out the American positions carefully, sending a patrol up the road near Bedford. A unit of Sullivan’s force repelled them—the British were not interested yet in a serious attempt to break the line, and pulled back almost immediately upon contact. Sullivan’s soldiers followed and burned three houses that they believed the British had occupied. When Washington heard that Americans had destroyed American property in this encounter, he rebuked them, through Putnam. Burning the houses was shameful, he wrote.
¹¹

This skirmish told Howe where the Americans were, but he was not yet in the mood to act on this information. In Boston he had mastered the art of the inactive, and now on Long Island he adhered to familiar practice, doing what he did so well: nothing. Nothing on the day after the landing, nothing on the next day, the twenty-fourth, nothing on the twenty-fifth.

Late on August 26, he at last moved. Inspired by a plan laid out by General Henry Clinton, he decided to outflank the American forces stretched along the Guan Ridge. He first fixed the bulk of Americans in place by sending James Grant against the American right at Gowanus Pass and Philip von Heister’s Hessians against the center of the ridge, where Flatbush and Bedford Passes cut through. These attacks were diversionary and held the forces of Sullivan and General William Alexander, Lord Stirling, in place. On the east end of the line, where Jamaica Pass lay, there were only five American officers, who, taken by surprise, could not notify the force down the ridge that Howe’s main body would be marching down the north side of the ridge. The Americans were dreadfully exposed but knew nothing of their danger, because the British moved swiftly but carefully on back roads until they reached the end of the line, which was defended by only the five befuddled officers. The British poured through the pass—Henry Clinton in the van, with dragoons and light infantry; General Charles Cornwallis at his heels, with two regiments of foot and artillery; and Howe, with the main body. The initial breach of the American line occurred about midnight, and by three the British were on the Bedford Road, securely behind their American enemy.