Washington: A Life (46 page)

While Great Britain did have a respectable army, it paled beside those of France, Austria, and Prussia. It was the Royal Navy that was peerless in Europe, and New York Harbor was a big enough basin to absorb this giant fleet. Awaiting these ships, Washington had his men strain every nerve to detect their arrival, even sleeping with their arms and “ready to turn out at a minute’s notice.”
⁴
On June 29 patriotic sentries stationed on Staten Island signaled to Washington that forty British ships, the first installment of the fleet, had been spotted off Sandy Hook and would soon glide majestically through the Narrows. The news touched off hysterical activity in Manhattan. Writing in rapid, telegraphic style, Henry Knox informed his brother: “The city in an uproar, the alarm guns firing, the troops repairing to their posts, and everything in the height of bustle.”
⁵

Washington had decided to make a costly (and in the end, mistaken) gamble of trying to hold New York. In fairness, it must be said that Congress had assigned a high priority to retaining the city. A day earlier Washington had issued an urgent summons to Massachusetts and Connecticut to dispatch militia posthaste to the city, and he now accelerated preparations for an imminent British attack, having his men pile up sandbags everywhere. Faced with incessant work, the tireless Washington noted that he was “employed from the hour of my rising till I retire to bed again.”
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Prompted by fear, a tremendous exodus of women and children left New York, crossing paths with an influx of militia. “On the one hand,” wrote the Reverend Ewald Shewkirk, “everyone that could was packing up and getting away; and on the other hand country soldiers from the neighboring places came in from all sides.”
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Reflecting the parlous state of things, Washington exiled Martha to the comparative safety of Philadelphia. To make their separation tolerable, she asked Charles Willson Peale to execute a miniature watercolor of her husband clad in his blue uniform and gold epaulettes.

Until reinforcements arrived, Washington was woefully shorthanded. He had fewer than 9,000 men, with 2,000 too sick to enter combat. Meanwhile, he steeled himself for the advent of 17,000 German mercenaries who would form part of a gigantic expeditionary force—the largest of the eighteenth century—that might total 30,000 soldiers. When this first wave of ships grew visible from Manhattan, an armada of 110 warships and transport boats, the sight was impressive, almost dreamlike, to behold. “I could not believe my eyes,” Private Daniel McCurtin wrote after peering at the panoply of British power. “Keeping my eyes fixed at the very spot, judge you of my surprise when, in about ten minutes, the whole bay was full of shipping … I declare that I thought all London was afloat.”
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These were the same ships that had evacuated Boston in March and marked time in Halifax before sailing south to New York. Fortunately for Washington, this advance guard under Major General William Howe, his former nemesis from the siege, decided not to force the issue. Some British ships dropped anchor off Gravesend, Long Island, and newly arrived British soldiers camped on Staten Island, but no offensive action materialized. General Howe was biding his time until the bulk of the fleet, sailing from England under the command of his brother Richard, Admiral Viscount Howe, joined him in New York.

In general orders for July 2, Washington tried to rouse his untried men with impassioned words. He had a genius for exalting the mission of his army and enabling the men to see themselves, not as lowly grunts, but as actors on the stage of history. “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves … The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage … of this army.”
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That same morning an alarming incident occurred when five British men-of-war passed through the Narrows and seemed on course to attack patriot forts. Confronting this threat, the Continental Army reacted with notable esprit de corps. Colonel Samuel Blachley Webb wrote in his diary that “never did I see men more cheerful. They seem to wish the enemies’ approach.”
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Despite his uneasiness, Washington was encouraged by this spirited response, telling Hancock that “if the enemy make an attack, they will meet with a repulse as … an agreeable spirit and willingness for action seem to animate … the whole of our troops.”
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In the end the British ships approached no closer, and Washington concluded that General Howe had deferred action until his brother’s arrival. Thus far Washington had commanded the Continental Army for an entire year without engaging in a single battle, but he knew he would shortly experience his first decisive test.

 

 

AN UNWAVERING ADVOCATE of independence, Washington thought his compatriots would eventually come to share his belief. “My countrymen, I know, from their form of government and steady attachment heretofore to royalty, will come reluctantly into the idea of independency,” he wrote that spring. “But time and persecution brings many wonderful things to pass.”
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In May, to his delight, the Virginia Convention in Williamsburg favored independence, and his neighbor at Gunston Hall, George Mason, drew up an eloquent Declaration of Rights that featured the lines “That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights … among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
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Thomas Jefferson would prune and shape these words to famous effect. Still another Virginian, Richard Henry Lee, introduced a congressional resolution on June 7 declaring “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.”
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On July 2 Congress approved Lee’s resolution, then spent the next two days haggling over the precise wording of the Declaration of Independence. The final text was approved on July 4. Congress had two hundred broadsides printed up and disseminated throughout the colonies.

On July 6 Hancock sent Washington a copy and asked him to have it read aloud to his army. The Declaration made the rebels’ treason official and reminded them of the unspeakable punishments the British government meted out for this offense. Only recently a British judge had handed down this grisly sentence to Irish revolutionaries: “You are to be drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, where you are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, for while you are still living your bodies are to be taken down, your bowels torn out and burned before your faces, your heads then cut off, and your bodies divided each into four quarters.”
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The British proved more lenient to captured American officers, but Washington knew that treason was a capital crime and that he had passed the point of no return. Employing a vivid metaphor, he later said that he and his colleagues had fought “with halters about their necks.”
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In the event of defeat, Washington knew, he would be hanged as the chief culprit; he decided that he would “neither ask for nor expect any favor from his most gracious Majesty.”
¹⁷
He contrived a plan to flee, if necessary, to lands he owned in the Ohio Country, telling Burwell Bassett that “in the worst event, they will serve for an asylum.”
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On July 8 Washington held in his hands a broadside of the Declaration of Independence for the first time and ordered his troops to gather on the common at six P.M. the next evening to hear it read aloud. In general orders for July 9, he previewed its contents by noting that Congress had declared “the United Colonies of North America” to be “free and independent states.”
¹⁹
Lest this sound abstract, he underscored the practical significance for the average soldier, pointing out that each was “now in the service of a state possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit and advance him to the highest honors of a free country.”
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Among other things, Congress could now coin money and devise other lucrative incentives.

The troops rejoiced upon hearing the document. “The Declaration was read at the head of each brigade,” wrote Samuel Blachley Webb, “and was received with three huzzas by the troops.”
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Washington was gratified by the “hearty assent” of his men and their “warmest approbation” of independence.
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News of the Declaration elicited snide rebukes from the British side, one officer saying that it served to highlight “the villainy and the madness of these deluded people.”
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Reading of the document led to such uproarious enthusiasm that soldiers sprinted down Broadway afterward and committed an act of vandalism: they toppled the equestrian statue of George III at Bowling Green, decapitating it, then parading the head around town to the lilting beat of fifes and drums. The patriots made excellent use of the four thousand pounds of gilded lead in the statue, which were melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets. Washington was appalled by the disorder. Ever the strict parent, he told his men that while he understood their high spirits, their behavior had “so much the appearance of riot and want of order in the army” that he disapproved their actions and urged that in future they should be left to the “proper authority.”
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His reproach might have sounded priggish, but Washington wanted this revolution to be an orderly one, with due respect for property, and he refused to abide even the desecration of the king’s statue. He sounded rejuvenated by the Declaration, writing defiantly to Hancock on July 10 that should the British mount an attack, “they will have to wade through much blood and slaughter before they can carry any part of our works.”
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Such bravado proved premature. On the afternoon of July 12, propelled by a stiff breeze and a powerful tide, five British ships—the forty-gun
Phoenix
and the twenty-gun
Rose,
along with a schooner and two tenders—sailed toward the Battery. In their first test, American defenses failed miserably. Only half the artillerists manned their guns, and hundreds of gaping soldiers stood onshore transfixed by the enemy ships, as if attending a sporting regatta. It was an ominous sign for the still-amateurish Continental Army. Six patriots were killed in an artillery company under Captain Alexander Hamilton when their cannon exploded, possibly from defective training or from mishandling by intoxicated gunners.

Unscathed by steady fire from the Manhattan and New Jersey shores, the
Phoenix
and the
Rose
streamed up the Hudson River and pounded the urban population of New York with a terrifying two-hour cannonade that shrouded the city in smoke and panicked its occupants. The episode demonstrated the vulnerability to British warships of a town encircled by water. Attuned to the psychology of war, Washington saw with dismay that his soldiers were unnerved by the plight of overwrought civilians. Since his own early combat experience had been in frontier locations, this urban chaos was something altogether new for him. “When the men-of-war passed up the river,” Washington observed, “the shrieks and cries” of the women and children were “truly distressing and I fear will have an unhappy effect on the ears and minds of our young and inexperienced soldiery.”
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Afterward Washington tried to clear the city of remaining civilians to avoid a repetition of the episode. He was especially indignant at soldiers who had stood hypnotized by British ships bombarding the town. The next day Washington chastised them unsparingly: “Such unsoldierly conduct must grieve every good officer and give the enemy a mean opinion of the army … a weak curiosity at such a time makes a man look mean and contemptible.”
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Just as Washington feared, the British ships’ foray in the Hudson severed communications between New York and Albany and the strategically located upstate lakes.

Washington had gotten his first unforgettable taste of British sea power. Because of their speed and mobility, enemy ships could disappear, then surface anywhere, and they would keep him in suspense for the next seven years. As he would complain, “The amazing advantage the enemy derive from their ships and the command of the water keeps us in a state of constant perplexity.”
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On the evening of the
Phoenix
and
Rose
episode, Washington and his officers noticed that the appearance of a new ship, the
Eagle,
triggered delirious cheers from British soldiers aboard ships and encamped on Staten Island, and they deduced correctly that Admiral Richard Howe had arrived.

The Howe brothers, whose grandfather had been elevated to the peerage by King William III, boasted a blue-blooded pedigree that the young George Washington might have envied. Educated at Eton, befriended by King George III, they had become moderate Whig members of Parliament. Tall, well built, and graceful, the pleasure-loving General William Howe, forty-seven, had bold eyebrows, full lips, and a dusky complexion. He had fought bravely at Quebec in the French and Indian War and exposed himself to danger at Bunker Hill. He indulged the vices common to his class, especially gambling and whoring, and saw no reason why the American war should dampen his escapades. He took as his North American mistress the fetching Boston-born Elizabeth Lloyd Loring and made her husband, Joshua Loring, Jr., a commissary of prisoners. This opportunistic husband, content to be cuckolded, played the bawd for his wife, who became notorious as “the Sultana of the British army.”
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As one Loyalist writer said cynically, “Joshua had no objections. He fingered the cash, the general enjoyed madam.”
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Admiral Richard Howe, fifty, less of a bon vivant than his younger brother, had earned the nickname “Black Dick,” which referred to both his complexion and to his downcast nature. He was a somber man, thin-faced and tight-lipped, with a cool, somewhat forbidding gaze. So marked was his reticence that Horace Walpole described him as “silent as a rock.”
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For all that, he was a superb seaman, renowned for his courage, fighting spirit, and ethical standards.