Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (19 page)

Nonetheless, in the middle of February, he convened his generals once more to seek their approval for a full-scale attack on Boston. He would use this new army—undersize, raw, and undisciplined as it might be—to smash his enemy and, perhaps, end the war. At this time, he still felt “wonder and astonishment” that General Howe had not attacked him. It was a feeling he had entertained for months, and particularly so since the beginning of the year, when soldiers in his original army began to go home. Howe, he speculated many times before, either did not know of the disintegration of Washington’s force or was under orders to delay until reinforcements arrived. What Washington took to be either Howe’s ignorance or his paralysis gave the Americans an opening that they could not ignore.
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Washington’s generals disagreed. The British were too strong, they said—the British had more troops than Washington recognized; they had more artillery, powder that would allow its use, and a fleet in the harbor that would lend its support to the army; and of course everyone knew that they were entrenched in well-prepared fortifications. An attack by the new army, still short some three thousand muskets, would, the generals implied, fail, though they did not use that word. The words they did use were bleak enough, and a little starchy in the context of the cold response they gave.

Washington could not have been surprised, and he did not argue
with these men, though he was clearly disappointed. He was feeling pressure from the world around him when he made his proposal for an attack and received a negative response. Of course, he had received rejections from generals before, but this time he seems to have resented it even more. Reporting to John Hancock about the generals’ advice—and his decision to take it—he halfway confessed that in proposing an attack, he was moved by questions from others in America and in the Congress about why he had not carried the war to the British in Boston. He explained his own thought processes in rather oblique terms:

Perhaps the Irksomeness of my Situation, may have given different Ideas to me, than those which Influenced the Gentlemen I consulted and might have inclined me to put more to the hazard than was consistent with prudence—If it had, I am not sensible to it, as I endeavourd to give all the consideration that a matter of such Importance required.

This reluctant concession to outside influence soon gave way to the admission that he found it hard to ignore the opinions of others,

for to have the Eyes of the whole Continent fixed with anxious expectation of hearing of some great event, & to be restrained in every Military Operation for want of the necessary means of carrying it on, is not very pleasing, especially as the means used to conceal my Weakness from the Enemy conceals it also from our friends, and adds to their Wonder.
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The “wonder” he referred to existed in Congress, along with worry about the consequences of any American attack, successful or failed. Hancock had sent him the resolutions by Congress of December 22, 1775, authorizing an attack even if it resulted in the destruction of the city. It had not reached its conclusion without hesitation and doubt, as Hancock noted of a speech given by John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, with its references to “Cromwell’s massacre at Drogheda” and “Louis XIV burning the Palatinate.” Dickinson had also apparently warned that “we may destroy the town and its people one day, and hear of proposals of accommodation the next.” How much of this sort of thing made its way to the Cambridge camp is unknown, but it is likely that Washington heard accounts suggesting that Congress believed he should get on with the job and others that suggested he should not. Though he was far from being indifferent to civilian casualties and the
destruction of property, he was more pressed by hints that he lacked the will to fight. Such hints came to him through his former aide Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Reed, now a representative in Congress who heard the muttering about failures to act in Cambridge. In January, Washington responded to such news by saying that had he anticipated the refusal of the old army to reenlist—“a backwardness … in the old Soldiers to the Service, all the Generals upon Earth should not have convinced me of the propriety of delaying an Attack upon Boston till this time.” In February, he was resigned to the criticism by “Chimney Corner Hero’s,” but he had not given up the idea of an attack. His cooler moments introduced realism to his thought—he expected “considerable loss” in an attack, but he believed it would succeed “if the Men should behave well.”
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After further consultation with his general officers, the conclusion Washington reached seemed inescapable. There was simply too much weight in the generals’ objections to an assault: There was the persistent shortage of gunpowder; the new troops themselves were at best of unknown quality, and there was not the number needed; and the British remained too strong, in fortified positions. Thus did the generals argue, and Washington gave in to them, though privately—to himself and to Joseph Reed—he still professed certainty “that the Enterprize, if it had been undertaken with resolution must have succeeded.”
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The generals, in their reluctance, were not immune to the notion that defeating the British might end the war. Washington advanced this theory more than once during the siege, and others, perhaps more in hope than certainty, had taken it up. It was an idea based on the feeling that the ministerial government lacked resolution and the will to send another army to America if its force in Boston were destroyed. There seems to have been little discussion in the American army of the British government’s purposes should its army fail. That it would give up its intention to establish a tyranny in America was an agreeable idea, even if there was not evidence in support of it.

If attacking the British would not succeed, why not draw them out in an attack on the Continental Army? This was an idea that Washington and his generals had talked about informally for several weeks while they assessed the possibilities of their own attack on Boston. The means to draw the British out lay in the high ground of Dorchester Heights, which comprised several hills to the south of the town, then
unoccupied by either army. Fortified with heavy cannon and mortars, they would be an ominous presence for the British army in the town and its navy in the southern part of the harbor.

Placing troops on the heights, where they could fight from entrenched positions—simpler fighting than complicated attack—was attractive to the generals for still another reason: It would please Washington, who almost visibly ached for battle and the resolution he thought it might bring. With little additional deliberation, the generals endorsed the idea, while they turned down the proposal for an American offensive. So it would be Dorchester, an offer to the enemy of a fight.
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The American army’s officers expected the British to accept the challenge. Washington used several phrases to describe what he was undertaking—such as “I am preparing to take Post on Dorchester to try if the Enemy will be so kind as to come out to us.” The gallantry embodied in this sentence was typical of eighteenth-century officers. Washington’s succinct name for the combat he expected, the “Rumpus,” was more down-to-earth, but lighthearted and solidly in the officers’ lexicon.
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The name and the language describing the expected combat concealed the careful planning that now began. There were at least two problems to be solved: how to entice the British to come out, and how best to receive them. A bombardment of Boston before troops moved onto the heights would force the British to a decision: either to fight or to run. A second attack across the bay, now clogged with ice, would help in bringing them to destruction as their army, or a part of it, set out to drive the Americans from the hills of Dorchester. For the bombardment, Washington could call on about fifty cannon and mortars recently transported from Fort Ticonderoga by Henry Knox, colonel of artillery. How to meet British regulars coming up the hills aroused greater concern in Washington, for doubts remained about the Continentals’ willingness to stand in place as massed British infantry approached them. Traditional entrenchments, redoubts, and forts could not be dug in deeply frozen ground, and such entrenchments would probably be necessary if the Americans were to hold steady. Lieutenant Colonel Rufus Putnam, cousin of General Israel Putnam, gave the answer to the problem posed by the frozen ground: Fortifications should be set upon the ground, not dug out of it.
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Washington found Putnam’s solution persuasive, and with his staff
of generals he fashioned a plan that included beginning the “Rumpus” with three days of bombardment of British works in Boston, to be followed by an occupation of the heights, with an assault across the bay should the British come out with a heavy attack. This part of the plan required careful coordination of American efforts. Washington appointed Israel Putnam commander of this second force. It had two divisions; the first was headed by Nathanael Greene, who would land south of Barton’s Point, their objective Copps Hill, and then join the second division, under John Sullivan, who would lead eight regiments of five hundred men each. The combined force was to drive to Boston Neck, destroy the British posts there, and open the way for American troops at Roxbury to cross the Neck into the town. This assault on Boston would require precision in timing and movement and would be undertaken only if the British sent a major part of their army against Dorchester Heights. In a real sense, the Americans would slip in behind the British.

Washington set the plan in motion on the night of March 2 with a light bombardment by his batteries of Lechmere Point, Cobble Hill, and Roxbury—British posts in Boston. Only a few shots were fired—the shortage of powder limited the barrage—and to no effect, except on American pride, when “Old Sow,” a heavy mortar, ruptured. The shelling resumed the next night, answered, as on the night before, by the British. The third night, the fourth of March, saw the artillery on both sides open up without restraint, and shortly after 7:00
P.M.
, in darkness, Brigadier General John Thomas took an expedition up the heights—twelve hundred men in a working party—to set up the breastworks and a force of eight hundred men to provide cover. The timber works for the fortifications, called chandeliers, had been made weeks earlier and, as they were emplaced, were filled with gabions, bales of hay, and whatever dirt and stones could be dug up. Barrels filled with dirt and stones were emplaced as well—they had a dual use, to help shield the troops but also to be rolled down the hill on the infantry that would be marching up. Abatis—sharpened stakes and branches—ringed the fortifications.

Most of the work had been accomplished when, the next morning, the British discovered their enemy looking down their throats. Howe muttered something about the rebels doing more work in a night than his entire army could do in months and resolved to clear
the heights of Americans. The next day was spent in preparing his force, which was to number more than two thousand, and arranging for the navy to transport them to a point on Dorchester peninsula from which an assault up the slopes could be made. Howe’s fast reaction to meet the challenge head-on had been stiffened by the navy’s warning that, should the Americans, with their heavy artillery, be left in place, its ships would have to pull out of the harbor. Howe decided to land troops that night and send them up the heights the next day. A heavy storm made this impossible, and the next day, as the storm continued, he canceled the attack and resolved to evacuate Boston altogether. He had been looking forward to leaving the place for months, and so, apparently, had his officers. The general opinion of these officers held that operations from Boston had very little to recommend them. New York would serve better than any place on the coast, and presumably, once he was reinforced, Howe might begin anew there.
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Washington watched his enemy pack up over the next week, a process marked by destruction of heavy guns and a good many supplies. The actual loading of troops, loyalists, and materials of various sorts was done in a haphazard fashion—the army and navy both wanted to escape before Washington attempted to destroy them in their vulnerability—and when the ships reached the outer harbor, they put down their anchors and shifted cargoes for almost ten days. On March 27, they were done and sailed off for Halifax. Washington did not know where they were going, but he was delighted to see the last of them.
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5

New York

New York was not Boston, but the city presented problems that had plagued Washington in Boston. First, there were the troops. He took many of the New England soldiers with him in April 1776, when he moved his command to New York, but he had to raise others, replacements for those he’d left behind or who had gone home. So his New York army was in several respects new. It was composed largely of militia from New York, though it also included troops from New Jersey, some from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and still others from nearby states. But wherever they were from, they manifested the behavior of the group he had left behind.

Throughout the summer his soldiers, in defiance of all good discipline, left their units, wandering around, apparently visiting friends or going home for short stays. They also found the city alluring for its women of doubtful virtue, no doubt of such attractiveness that stories about them were circulated in nearby towns and villages. One of Washington’s officers, Captain Nathan Peters of the 3rd Massachusetts Continentals, was informed by his wife, Lois, then living in Preston, Connecticut, that a post rider had told her that almost “all” of the soldiers in the army had “a Lady at their Pleasure.” The result was “that allmost the whole of our army was under the Salivation”—that is, in treatment for venereal disease.
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