Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (17 page)

The day after Washington’s arrival in Cambridge, he rode the lines. Something far from expelling the British was on his mind; the question, rather, was whether he could hold his position and maintain what seemed to be a siege. To that end, he began straightening his lines, which amounted to moving several redoubts and strengthening others. These steps entailed the construction of heavier fortifications, with more gabions and fascines added to existing positions. Washington worried in these early weeks about being surprised by the British attacking in such force as to carry the American defenses. Knowing the weakness of his own army and suspecting that it might not be able to withstand such an attack, he asked himself and others why the British were not coming out of Boston to destroy the American force. This worry also led him to strengthen his outposts, usually a small contingent of soldiers (and sometimes only a soldier or two) stationed in front of
the American positions. These men, sometimes close enough to talk to British soldiers in outposts of their own, were intended to give warning to the main forces should the British emerge in a surprise assault. The American sentries sometimes left their outposts before being relieved, simply taking off to attend to their own purposes, heedless of the damage their desertion might inflict. Washington believed that some means of tying these soldiers to responsible action might be found by assigning such duty only to men “Native of this Country,” that is of New England. He added that a man who “has a Wife, or Family in it, to whom he is known to be attached” would be acceptable. Whether such choices were always reliable is doubtful; what is clear is that Washington also complained about men who obviously lived near Boston and went home on occasion to visit wives and families.
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Washington’s uneasiness about his enemy’s intentions never left him, though there were moments when he speculated that Howe’s army might actually fear their American opponents. He was close to being right in this opinion, for under Gage (who was relieved of his command on September 26) and then William Howe, who took over from Gage, the army regarded the Americans with a concern that bordered on fear. Gage and Howe both believed that their soldiers constituted a force better than the Americans, but a large-scale attack against their enemy would inevitably bring heavy losses. The British did not have an army of such size as to allow a costly victory. Their reluctance to engage the Americans was reinforced by their experience at Bunker Hill, where they had traded a thousand casualties for a piece of ground that offered scant protection for the city in which they found themselves.
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These British leaders could not believe that Washington might actually push them out of Boston and felt that nothing much needed to be done until reinforcements from Britain arrived. They did not know that minds no clearer than their own ruled the British government. The king wanted the rebellion to be put down and told his ministers so, but they did not know with any exactness what Gage and Howe had in mind. Uncertainty and even confusion abounded: What, beyond a few noisy radicals, was driving this rebellion? the ministers asked. When they attempted to answer that question, they found themselves appalled by anxious wails from men on the scene: “all is confusion, anarchy, and wretchedness—a whole country in rebellion—for such it
is now.” Washington, historians have often pointed out, had never led an army; the opposition leaders at home in Britain and in the field in America had never faced a major rebellion—in fact, a revolution—in the empire. All of the British generals in America had far more experience of large-scale operations than Washington. But they, like their superiors at home, were puzzled by the problems they faced while sitting in Boston.
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So the two sides sat and watched one another. The British had a spy in Washington’s headquarters, Dr. Benjamin Church, director or surgeon general of the army’s hospitals. Church, who as a boy had attended Boston Latin and Harvard College, was a fiery patriot in the years of protest, giving speeches on behalf of the American cause and indicating his opposition to British measures. In these years he formed friendships with British officers and evidently changed his mind about the grounds of conflict between Britain and America. Someone in General Gage’s command helped along this change of mind by bribing Church. His treachery was discovered when a letter he wrote to friends in the British army was discovered. Washington had Church jailed and then deported, not knowing just how much had been revealed. The intercepted letter had contained intelligence about the army’s size and condition and provided some information about a projected invasion of Canada. Just how much Church had conveyed to Gage before he was discovered is not clear. What is clear is that other spies operated in the American sector. Gage kept a close watch from his lines, but seems never to have learned the true state of the Continental Army.
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Washington was no less assiduous in learning all that he could about the British in Boston, their strength, their activities within the city, the size of their forces, and the extent of their power. He was never able to find out with any certainty what they planned to do. Washington, like his counterpart, attempted to place spies within British lines. He was no more successful than the enemy in their use, but he had other means, including placing observers in the hills and harbor around Boston. Throughout the siege, they informed him of the ships that entered the harbor and reported on troop movements, several of which he pondered as forecasting a major British effort to end the siege.
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To strengthen the army’s fortification, Washington on several occasions ordered attacks of some size. One such action occurred in
late August, when he sent General John Sullivan and 2,500 men to take Ploughed Hill, then unoccupied, in order to prevent a British capture. Ploughed Hill lay just west of the Mystic River, standing near Bunker Hill, and was of obvious tactical importance. The Americans moved onto the hill on August 26 and dug in under the cover of darkness. The British, usually quite attentive to what their enemy was up to, did not notice the changes in the American lines until 9:00
A.M
. Their response was a fairly heavy cannonade that lasted most of the day. The entrenched Americans suffered only light casualties. Washington took satisfaction in this maneuver, but did not gloat.

Rather, he asked questions, which he would repeat throughout the remainder of the siege, until late winter 1776: When will the British come out—or why haven’t they come out, presumably in a full-scale attack? Before long he revised the question to: Shall we attack them? Or, in more urgent terms: Why shouldn’t we attack them?
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He raised this question to his generals in a formal “circular” on September 8, saying that if the British will not come out and fight, why should we not go in? He gave no detailed plans of what he had in mind—no plan of attack that placed his regiments in any sort of formation beyond indicating that he thought that the American move should have two prongs: one on land, up the neck from Roxbury, and the other on the water, by troops carried in boats across the bay from American lines, presumably those at Cambridge and to the north. If he laid out no tactics of attack, he indicated with great clarity the reasons underlying his proposals. These justifications said nothing about the British fortifications, or the troops in them; rather, they all centered on the problems of maintaining the American army in the approaching winter. American soldiers, he reminded his commanders, were badly clad, fed, and housed. They seemingly lacked everything, including pay, firewood, and gunpowder. As if these deficiencies in the army were not enough, the army itself would begin to evaporate as men went home when their enlistments ran out around the beginning of the new year.

All this was reasonable enough and true, but perhaps his most powerful point was one that he did not make much of: his feeling (for feeling it was) that “the expence of supporting this army will so far exceed any Idea that was form’d in Congress of it, that I do not know what will be the consequences [of not attacking the British soon].” In offering
this assessment, he confessed that he wished to have “a speedy finish of the dispute.” He asked his officers to consider all of the circumstances in favor of an assault but not “to loose sight of the difficulties—the hazard—and the loss that may accompany the attempt—nor, what will be the probable consequences of a failure.”
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The council of generals turned him down, “at present at least,” citing the “state” of British lines, meaning the formidable defenses the British army had thrown up. It also noted that “some important Advices from England” were expected, a reference to a rumor then current in the army that the government of Lord North would soon fall, to be replaced apparently by one sympathetic to the American cause. This expectation was of doubtful merit, but it probably helped reconcile the generals to their advice, which smacked of timidity in the face of their commander’s desire to take a chance. Still, the generals had a reason to recommend caution, for Washington gave no argument based on the realities of American fighting qualities. He did not argue that the American troops were better than the British, for he did not believe that they were; he did not suggest that the defensive works around Boston were weak or badly placed. He knew, as everyone did, that the British artillery was better, to say nothing of British infantry; he did not claim that Greene, Ward, Heath, and the others were superior to the likes of Gage, Clinton, and Howe. What he argued concerning the military realities came down to the certainty that his army would soon vanish as its enlistments ran out. Therefore, if the dispute were to end favorably, he must strike immediately and in surprise. The reality he counted on was surprise—as he told his generals, “the Success of the Enterprize (if undertaken) must depend on a great measure upon the suddenness of the stroke.”
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The council of generals advised him not to risk the army and then turned to another reality outlined by Washington: the maintenance of the army at hand. Washington had warned Congress of what faced them, but Congress could provide only limited help. The governors and legislative bodies in the states could do more, and in several respects did. But finding more men and money for Washington’s army remained difficult. Their problem—and, most immediately, Washington’s—was how to persuade men who suffered and struggled to survive and on occasion, in the autumn of 1775, to fight while short of virtually everything, including food and housing, muskets and ammunition. An
attack on Boston that was successful would have made all such problems disappear, and when Washington wrote Hancock of the decision to withhold an attack, he admitted that though he had been advised to give up the idea, he had not “wholly laid it aside.”
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Spoiling for an all-out offensive against the British, he had to settle, three weeks later, for a conference with a committee sent by Congress to see how things were going in the army. Congress, often criticized since the Revolution, had, like its army’s commander, felt frustration at what seemed to be a stalemate in Boston. It did not in its dissatisfaction blame Washington. There were men of great perception in the Congress, men who understood that the provincialism that prevailed in the states made concerted action almost impossible. Others, unable to dismiss their suspicions of a central power, found it difficult to agree that the states should put aside their differences and provide the army with the means to drive the British from Boston. Thus, there were at least two camps in the Congress regarding war policy, with deep roots in the states. All factions, or groupings, in and out of the Congress and in the states, thought, argued, and sat quietly in the darkness of ignorance concerning what the states were doing. Were they taxing themselves in support of the war? Were they raising regiments for Washington’s use? Were they making gunpowder and uniforms or providing other supplies so necessary to the campaign? Not knowing the answers to these questions and uncertain about the national effort—or even if there was one of any promise—the state legislatures moved slowly when they moved at all.
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The Revolution demanded that they create a wartime union—a national state—but they were a collection of provinces accustomed to thinking only of local affairs. In the previous ten years, they had done much in resisting British measures that they thought deprived them of liberty. They had done well, so well that they were on their way to creating a sovereign state. But they had much to overcome in constructing such a state, with its own structure of government, its own army, and a policy regarding the empire of which they had been a loyal part for almost two centuries.

Congress did not send a lightweight committee to confer with Washington. Its three members included Benjamin Franklin, the best-known
American in the world and also surely the most accomplished man in America. Sixty-nine years old, he had rejoined the Congress after a long stay in Britain, during which he had learned much about the ways of the empire and its rulers, military and political. He had lost all hope by this time that the imperial connection could be repaired, though he did not reveal all of his disenchantment even to his colleagues in Congress. He probably knew more about how the political world worked than anyone there, but he was not complacent in this knowledge. He had come to Washington’s camp to listen and, once informed, to help the army find ways to organize and sustain itself. His two fellow members—Thomas Lynch and Benjamin Harrison—were much younger than he, but both were five or six years older than Washington. They, like Franklin, arrived in Cambridge more than well disposed toward Washington.