Patriots (57 page)

George Washington was convinced that Howe’s proposals would come to nothing. But after such a humbling defeat he was in no position to cancel Sullivan’s mission. Three days later in Philadelphia, John Sullivan told the Congress about Lord Howe’s generous terms. Sullivan’s behavior in Canada had soured many delegates on him, and he had barely begun to speak when John Adams whispered to Benjamin Rush, “
I wish that the first ball fired on Long Island had gone through his head.”

Like Washington, John Adams distrusted Howe’s overtures. Sullivan explained that the admiral proposed a meeting but could not deal with the Congress as an official body. He would be pleased to receive several members as private gentlemen for an hour or two of conversation. Adams spoke vigorously against any agreement with Howe and made no attempt to spare Sullivan’s feelings. “
A decoy duck,” Adams called him, “whom Lord Howe has sent among us to seduce us into a renunciation of our independence.”

But some delegates believed that spurning Howe’s offer might suggest to people, at home and abroad, who were uncommitted to American independence that the British legitimately sought peace and that the Americans were protracting the war. After days of debate, the members decided to send an official delegation to New York, which Howe would probably refuse to receive. And if he did see the delegates, Howe would have no chance of working his wiles on them. Two of the three chosen to go were John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina was the third. The Congress also accepted Howe’s offer to exchange Sullivan and Lord Stirling for two British prisoners.

When the delegates reached the town of Brunswick, New Jersey, all the inns were filled, and Adams and Franklin had to share a bed. Their tiny room had one small window. Adams closed it. He considered his health precarious and was wary of chills from the night air.

“Oh!” Franklin called to him. “Don’t shut the window. We shall be suffocated.”

Adams explained that he was afraid of catching cold.

Franklin assured him that with the window closed the air in their chamber would soon be worse than it was outside. “Come! Open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.”

Franklin was nearly thirty years older and one of the world’s
most distinguished men. Adams decided to risk a chill and hear the theory. He threw open the window and bounded back to bed.

Franklin began a detailed explanation. By respiration and perspiration, the human body destroyed a gallon of air every minute. Two persons in this room would consume all of its air within an hour or two. Then they would begin breathing in the material thrown off by the lungs and the skin, and that was the true cause of colds. Adams thought that Dr. Franklin sounded more than half asleep as he spoke, and Adams himself dropped off before the explanation was over.

There had been no chance that Admiral Howe would refuse to see the Americans. Protocol would not deter him if he had a chance to persuade the Congress to give up its war. He agreed to meet the delegates on Staten Island at a house across from Perth Amboy and sent a barge to fetch them. He greeted the Americans with elaborate thanks for the honor they did him in coming and led them past ranks of grenadiers to the house, where they found, amid the military squalor, one large and handsome room spread with moss and green sprigs for a carpet. John Adams approved the effect—romantically elegant, he thought—and the fine dinner of cold ham, tongue and mutton, accompanied by a good claret.

Adams was somewhat relieved not to be overwhelmed by this titled Englishman. He calculated that Lord Howe was about fifty and certainly well-bred, but Adams had met many Americans around Boston who were more clever and articulate. Early on, Adams scored off the admiral when Howe said he was meeting with them not as members of Congress but only as gentlemen of great ability and influence. Adams replied that his lordship might consider him any way he pleased, except as a British subject.

Howe turned to the others with a smile and said,
“Mr. Adams is a decided character.”

After a few more exchanges, it was clear that Adams had been right in his suspicions. Richard Howe had no particular powers. Any peace depended on the colonies once again pledging their full allegiance to the throne. As for John Sullivan’s assurances that Parliament would give up its right of taxation—why, said Howe, Sullivan had evidently misheard him.

At one point, Lord Howe insinuated a threat into his argument. Ravaging and destroying America, he told his guests, would give him great pain.

Benjamin Franklin promptly replied that the Americans must take proper—and, he hoped, effective—care to spare his lordship’s feelings.

The night with Howe ended as fruitlessly as John Adams might have wished, and the war remained George Washington’s to lose or win.

—

Henry Clinton had another bold plan and, after his masterful strategy on Long Island, might have expected William Howe to embrace it. Clinton wanted the British to surround Washington again, this time on Manhattan. He wasn’t satisfied with simply making the American Army run; he wanted to exterminate it. But Howe continued to have different ideas. For two weeks after the Americans crossed the river, he did nothing. Once more, Washington was waiting from night to night for an attack that didn’t come. Israel Putnam summed up the American response to Howe’s inaction: “
General Howe is either our friend or no general.”

Washington realized by now that he could not possibly hold New York. Nathanael Greene, recovering from malaria, had been reading military history and suggested a precedent that might be useful for the Americans. When France under Francis I had been invaded by the Germans, Francis had laid waste to vast territories, starving his enemies and defeating them without a battle. Why not burn New York? Tories owned two thirds of the town, and their hostility to the cause of freedom should cost them their property. The Congress had advised against that tactic, but John Hancock had written lately from Philadelphia that the army should not remain in New York a moment longer than the commander deemed safe. Washington’s generals were divided on whether the army should stay or go, but Washington reminded himself that America’s strategy had to be defensive. He must never let himself be drawn into a battle he could avoid. That was the advice of history, of his own experience, of friendly strategists visiting from Europe. The time had come to leave New York. Many citizens would welcome the British, and the town would provide excellent winter quarters for William Howe’s army, but that couldn’t be helped.

And yet Washington’s pride was telling him not to give up New York without another fight. Once again, he split his already weakened and badly trained forces. Putnam’s five thousand men
were ordered to stay in the lower three miles of Manhattan that made up the town of New York. Another nine thousand soldiers would hold a section of Harlem Heights to the north. Their northern flank would reach to a new set of trenches and bulwarks called Fort Washington. Nathanael Greene would hold the territory in between with somewhat less than six thousand men, most of them militia. Washington’s plan stretched the American Army over sixteen miles in a thin line that was particularly vulnerable at its center.

—

The British scheduled their attack for 4
A.M.
on September 15. Henry Clinton argued to the last for a flanking movement rather than a frontal assault. He responded to William Howe’s reasons for overriding him, “You may make every argument you wish. I will oppose you with all my might until four o’clock. But from that moment on, I will lead the attack as if I had planned it myself.”

Howe ordered Clinton to land his men at Kips Bay, north of the town of New York, at the center where Washington’s line was weakest. But as the British moved toward the riverbank in flat-bottomed boats, they confronted formidable-looking American defenses. Clinton thought the landing would be the most dangerous he had ever witnessed. The German troops in their open boats were singing hymns to keep up their spirits.

Their prayers were answered. The thunder from the eighty big guns of the British ships along the East River terrified the American soldiers waiting on the shore. Men thought that the sound alone would blow their heads off, and they leaped from their ditches to avoid being buried under sand and sods of earth. American officers saw that their lines could not hold. Without orders from General Washington, who was expecting the assault on Harlem Heights, they told their men to flee. The troops needed no urging. They broke and ran.

Waiting at the wrong place for the attack, George Washington heard guns, mounted his horse and galloped the four miles from the Heights to the riverbank where the British and the Germans had landed. Masses of terrified American soldiers poured toward him up the Post Road. Washington rode into their midst and cried out to them,
“Take the walls!” as he pointed to fences where they could still mount a defense. Then, because they were clogging the road and blocking an orderly retreat, he shouted, “Take the cornfield!”

Some men ran off the road to do as Washington directed. Most surged forward blindly. At an orchard to their right, a few Americans moved toward the Germans with their arms raised in surrender. On Long Island, some of Howe’s soldiers had pretended to give up, waited until the Americans drew close and then raised muskets and fired into their faces. This day the Germans were taking no chances. Despite the Americans’ upraised hands, they shot them down and stabbed them with bayonets.

Washington was lashing out with his cane at the backs of the fleeing soldiers. He cursed them as
“dastardly sons of cowardice” and threatened to run his sword through the next man who deserted. At one point he shamed a few hundred of the men into making a stand. But when a small unit of British soldiers appeared—no more than sixty or seventy—the Americans again turned and ran, leaving Washington and his aides unprotected. Nathanael
Greene thought Washington was so angry over his men’s conduct that he seemed more willing to die than to live. Other men said he threw down his hat in despair and cried, “
Good God, have I got such troops as those?” But Washington’s luck held, and he rode away unscathed.

New York was lost. With it went much of the American Army’s baggage and tents and fifty or sixty cannon. Only three British soldiers had been killed, another eighteen wounded. As Washington retreated with his faltering troops to Harlem Heights, Israel Putnam was leading his men in the same direction. The British troops marched down Broadway in New York at 4
P.M.
, twelve hours after their landing, while Putnam’s soldiers escaped along a parallel route next to the Hudson River. General Howe might have cut Putnam off with a rapid pursuit, but instead he was looking around town for rooms where he could be comfortable during the coming winter. When one of his officers pressed him to hurry after the retreating Americans, the general swore and said he would not be rushed. A conclusive victory was again within his reach, but Howe had decided that he could not crush George Washington this year.

The American Army was safe behind its ramparts on Harlem Heights, a rise four miles long and beyond the range of Admiral Howe’s naval guns. The Americans now numbered about ten thousand. Their losses included a few dead, and twenty officers and three hundred men taken prisoner. In New York, Tory civilians
came out of hiding to cheer loudly and carry British officers through the streets on their shoulders. The women were as wild with joy as the men, and one hoisted Britain’s banner on a flagpole. Other loyalists guided the British soldiers from door to door as they placed a large “R” for “Rebel” on every patriot house.

During the night, one last skirmish was fought on the plains below Harlem Heights. A band of British infantrymen had tracked the Americans back to their redoubt, and in the gloom before dawn a British bugler blew “Gone to Earth.” It was the hunter’s call when the fox had found his hole. Joseph Reed, the American adjutant general, thought he had never felt such a sensation of shame. The jeering notes seemed to crown America’s disgrace.

British soldiers inspected the elaborate trenches Washington’s men had dug throughout New York and laughed over how quickly the Americans had deserted them. One officer noted that the rebel defenses “appear calculated more to amuse than for use.” The morning after the battle, Washington was forced to report to the Congress from Harlem Heights on another disastrous rout. Given his position, he could hold the Heights, Washington said, if his troops would behave with a little resolution. But, he added, experience had taught him that he might wish for such behavior but could not expect it.

As if to prove him wrong, a sharp engagement broke out below the Heights before his letter was finished. American soldiers stood their ground, and for the first time in the war the British ran and the Americans chased after them. Washington feared a trap and recalled his men behind their defenses. But the brief exchange—in which the Americans suffered sixty casualties and the British lost a hundred more—cheered the American troops and even gave their commander a flicker of hope. Joseph Reed wrote to his wife, “
You can hardly conceive the change it has made in our Army. The men have recovered their spirits and feel a confidence which before they had quite lost.”

But during that invigorating exchange, Washington’s orders had often been reversed or ignored, and although morale had risen briefly, he knew how wretched his prospects were. The two defeats had cut to the quick of Washington’s pride. He even considered resigning his command, but his few confidants convinced him that the resulting confusion would doom the cause. His personal bravery had never been in doubt. From his time as a youthful commander,
he had dared bullets and survived them so often that he may have believed he was indestructible. Washington’s reputation as a strategist, however, was far more vulnerable, and every day it was assaulted. To Lund Washington he poured out his heart: He had never been so unhappy from the day he was born. If he wanted to wish the bitterest curse on an enemy this side of the grave, he would put the man in his place, with his feelings. He cautioned his cousin not to pass along any of this despair unless Washington fell in battle after all. Then the public should hear about militiamen who drew their provisions but never rendered an hour’s service, about officers not worth the bread they ate.