Washington: A Life (45 page)

 

 

EVEN BEFORE THE BRITISH SAILED for Nova Scotia, Washington had guessed correctly that they would end up in New York, whose numerous waterways would play to the strength of the world’s mightiest navy. With the redcoats gone, he apprised Congress, he would “immediately repair to New York with the remainder of the army.”
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He knew that if the British controlled the Hudson River, they would effectively control the all-important corridor between Canada and New York City, bisecting the northern and southern colonies. New York was also a stronghold of fervent Tories, noted Washington, filled with disaffected people “who only wait a favorable opportunity and support to declare themselves openly.”
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Hoping to head off this prospect, he started the journey southward on April 4, accompanied by his new personal guard, moving as rapidly as the many ceremonial dinners allowed. He didn’t yield to the euphoria that infected many compatriots and grimly prepared for the impending campaign, knowing that the patriots hadn’t yet experienced the full brunt of British power. The Crown needed to crush this uprising conclusively and establish colonial supremacy, lest it endanger the structure of its entire empire. It couldn’t afford to be humiliated by a ragged band of upstarts.

Having preceded Washington to New York, General Lee reacted with perplexity to the task of defending a city crisscrossed by waterways. Sleepless with worry and incapacitated by gout—he was carried into the city on a stretcher—Lee began to defend New York from naval assault by installing artillery at Governors Island in the upper bay, Red Hook in Brooklyn, and Paulus Hook (later Jersey City) on the Hudson’s western shore. The same qualities that made New York a majestic seaport turned it into a military nightmare for defenders. There was hardly a spit of land that couldn’t be surrounded and thoroughly shelled by British ships. “What to do with the city, I own, puzzles me,” a stumped Lee wrote to Washington. “It is so encircled with deep, navigable water that whoever commands the sea must command the town.”
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In hindsight, the city was certainly doomed, but Washington considered it “a post of infinite importance” that would be politically demoralizing to surrender without a fight .
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By the time Washington arrived on April 13, Lee had been posted to Charleston, South Carolina, leaving Israel Putnam in command. A mood of foreboding gripped the city, causing many inhabitants to flee. Washington set to work at his headquarters on lower Broadway, right beside the Battery. A despised symbol of royalty, an equestrian statue of George III, stood outside his door on Bowling Green. When Martha arrived four days later, she and her husband occupied a mansion north of the city that had been vacated by Abraham Mortier, the former deputy paymaster general of British forces in America. With its wide verandas and splendid views of the Hudson River, the house stood in bucolic Lispenard’s Meadows, at what is now the intersection of Varick and Charlton streets.

Because British troops had been accused of abusing Boston’s citizens when they were billeted there, Washington took pains to prevent such misbehavior by soldiers lodged in Manhattan houses. He comprehended the war’s political dimension and swore that soldiers would have to answer for “any wood being cut upon the floors or any water or filth thrown out of the windows.”
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To win the allegiance of local farmers, he warned his men against trampling crops in their fields. More difficult to supervise were men frequenting the Holy Ground, the notorious red-light district near the Hudson River where up to five hundred prostitutes congregated nightly on land owned by Trinity Church. Venereal disease raced through several regiments, threatening to thin their ranks before the enemy arrived. As William Tudor of Boston wrote home, “Every brutal gratification can be so easily indulged in this place that the army will be debauched here in a month more than in twelve at Cambridge.”
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Over the winter Washington had wondered whether his plenary authority over troops in Cambridge extended to operations in New York. Showing exemplary modesty with Congress, he had consulted John Adams, who proclaimed unequivocally that “your commission constitutes you commander of all the forces … and you are vested with full power and authority to act as you shall think for the good and welfare of the service.”
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This seminal moment wiped away any doubt that Washington wielded continental power and oversaw a national army. Where another man might have grown giddy, the new power sobered him. “We expect a very bloody summer of it at New York and Canada,” he told brother Jack in late May, “as it is there I expect the grand efforts of the enemy will be aim[e]d, and I am sorry that we are not, either in men or arms, prepared for it.”
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Having visited New York only twice before, Washington needed to familiarize himself with this new terrain. The harried general complained of being holed up in his office with endless paperwork when he wanted to be out in the field. He faced the herculean task of shoring up a chain of posts stretching across lower Manhattan to Brooklyn. Building on Lee’s plans, he projected the construction of a pair of twin forts, to be known as Fort Washington and Fort Lee, on rocky high ground farther up the Hudson, outposts designed to prevent the British from turning the river into a thoroughfare to Canada. Washington knew that in New York the odds were badly stacked against him. To ward off attacks by sea, he sealed off the end of every street with a barricade and sank offshore obstructions to British ships. By early June the Continental Army had 121 cannon in Manhattan, on the New Jersey shore, on Governors Island, and in Brooklyn, all ready to bombard the British fleet.

Though satisfied with his progress, Washington was dismayed to learn in May that King George III had hired seventeen thousand German mercenaries to fight in North America. This news confirmed that the conflict would be resolved only through a long, bloody war. Soon to be a master at espionage, Washington wondered whether he could infiltrate patriotic Germans among the Hessians to stir up disaffection and spur desertions.

In late May he rode to Philadelphia to consult with Congress about military strategy, trailed by unfounded rumors that he intended to resign. The round of talks made clear that the patriots would contest every square inch of New York, however impossible that seemed. Philadelphia was ablaze with talk about declaring independence from Great Britain, but Washington, as a military man, withheld public comment. In private, however, he was more militant than ever and scoffed at congressmen who were “still feeding themselves upon the dainty food of reconciliation.”
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Prodded by Washington, Congress decided to offer ten-dollar bounties to attract new soldiers and also set up a Board of War, headed by John Adams, to improve recruiting and supply distribution.

By this point it was self-evident that Martha Washington would spend extended periods with her husband and might be exposed to smallpox. Washington could not advocate inoculation if his own wife shrank from it. After the liberation of Boston, Martha had refrained from entering the city to celebrate with officers’ wives who enjoyed immunity to the disease. She had vowed to be inoculated against smallpox, but Washington remembered how anxious she was when Jacky was inoculated in 1771; he doubted she would now make good on her pledge. Nevertheless, when they reached Philadelphia, Martha conquered her fears and submitted to the procedure. She came down with a fever and developed only a dozen pustules (none on her face), spending several weeks in quarantine. On June 10 Jacky Custis, in Maryland with his wife, wrote an appreciative note to Washington about his mother’s successful recovery. He used the occasion to express gratitude for everything his legal guardian had done, thanking him for the “parental care which on all occasions you have shown me. It pleased the Almighty to deprive me at a very early period of life of my father, but I cannot sufficiently adore His goodness in sending me so good a guardian as you Sir. Few have experienc[e]d such care and attention from real parents as I have done. He best deserves the name of father who acts the part of one.”
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It was an eloquent, well-deserved tribute for the often-thankless care that Washington had given to his stepson.

 

 

WITH MANY LOYALISTS scattered across the city, a more pervasive fear of espionage existed in New York than in Boston, where the patriots and British had been widely separated. With thousands of troops cooped up in southern Manhattan in a tense atmosphere, a vigorous hunt was launched in early June for Tories who allegedly supplied British warships off Sandy Hook and spied on patriots. On June 17 the New York Provincial Congress received a shocking report from a Loyalist named Isaac Ketchum, who was arrested on counterfeiting charges. While held at City Hall, Ketchum fingered two members of Washington’s personal guard, Thomas Hickey and Michael Lynch, also detained on counterfeiting charges, as being in league with the British to sabotage the Continental Army as it defended New York. In their wild boasting, the two men had contended that when British warships anchored in the harbor, William Tryon, the royal governor, would distribute royal pardons to defectors. Lynch and Hickey also referred darkly to “riflemen on Staten Island” and “Cape Cod men” who were supposed confederates in the plot.

As the probe widened, investigators learned that a gunsmith named Gilbert Forbes was assigned to pay off turncoats to the British side and that Forbes was being supplied with money by David Mathews, New York’s mayor. Once alerted to this allegation, Washington moved swiftly and had Mathews arrested at one o’clock in the morning at his Flatbush home. Under questioning, Mathews admitted that Governor Tryon had “put a bundle of paper money into his hands” and asked him to convey it to Forbes to purchase rifles and muskets. Only after the war did Mathews add the sensational disclosure that “he had formed a plan for the taking Mr. Washington and his guard prisoners.”
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Mathews named Thomas Hickey, a swarthy, brazen fellow, as a henchman in the plot. Washington believed that the conspiracy originated with Tryon, who had employed Mathews as his cat’s-paw. A dozen arrests occurred as rumors ran through town that the commander in chief had refused to eat a plate of poisoned peas that had subsequently killed some chickens.

News of the plot unleashed a wave of fierce reprisals against New York Tories; some of them were tarred and feathered, and others were subjected to the torture of “riding the rail.” Once the angry atmosphere cooled down and Hickey’s court-martial began, the plot took on more modest proportions. The conspirators had planned to spike patriot guns when the British fleet arrived, in return for pardons and bonuses. One witness testified that seven hundred patriots had promised to defect. In his testimony, he made a claim that must have unnerved Washington: no fewer than eight members of Washington’s personal guard formed part of the plot. Hickey showed no remorse, was found guilty of sedition and mutiny, and was singled out for hanging. Not taking any chances, Washington deployed 140 men to guard him and other prisoners at City Hall.

The entire conspiracy had the unintended effect of rallying support for Washington, whose life had been in jeopardy. But he didn’t want to exaggerate the plot, which might have been demoralizing. In reporting it to John Hancock, he said it had been concocted by the guilty parties “for aiding the King’s troops upon their arrival. No regular plan seems to have been digested, but several persons have been enlisted and sworn to join them.”
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He also believed that 200 to 250 Loyalist conspirators were hiding in the Long Island woods and swamps; he had boats patrol the Narrows at night to intercept anyone trying to flee to British-controlled Staten Island.

Mayor Mathews and several others were packed off to Connecticut to serve jail time—a lenient sentence for a treasonous plot—and either escaped or were let go without a trial. Washington decided to make an example of Hickey and ordered every brigade to witness his hanging at eleven A.M. on June 28, 1776. The gallows were erected in a field near the Bowery, and twenty thousand spectators—virtually the entire New York population—turned out to watch. Hickey waived his right to a chaplain, calling them “cutthroats,” and managed to hold back tears until the hang-men actually looped the noose around his neck.
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In his general orders for the day, Washington drew a rather bizarre lesson from Hickey’s fate. He hoped the punishment would “be a warning to every soldier in the army” to avoid sedition, mutiny, and other crimes “disgraceful to the character of a soldier and pernicious to his country, whose pay he receives and bread he eats.”
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The next sentence gave a strange twist to the whole affair. “And in order to avoid those crimes, the most certain method is to keep out of the temptation of them and particularly to avoid lewd women who, by the dying confession of this poor criminal, first led him into practices which ended in an untimely and ignominious death.”
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This coda, with its sternly puritanical lesson, shows that Washington may have been more worried about health hazards posed by the Holy Ground than by treasonous plots.

BY THE SUMMER OF 1776 the British were convinced that they would make quick work of the rebel forces and took comfort in a superior, complacent tone. Braggadocio—always a poor substitute for analysis—grew fashionable in official circles in London. At the start of the year, Lord Rawdon assured the Earl of Huntingdon that “we shall soon have done with these scoundrels, for one only dirties one’s fingers by meddling with them. I do not imagine they can possibly last out beyond this campaign.”
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Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, reacted contemptuously to the notion that the sheer number of colonists could overpower royal forces. “Suppose the colonies do abound in men, what does that signify? They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men.”
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George Germain, secretary for the American colonies, cherished the hope that all that was needed was a “decisive blow.”
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What was required was a show of force so huge and terrifying that the deluded colonists would tremble at the assembled might of the British Empire.