1776

by David McCullough

  Washington had assigned Lee to command the left wing of the army, Putnam, the center, while Ward was responsible for the right wing, which included Dorchester. As early as July 9, at Washington’s first council of war, it had been proposed that the army take possession of Dorchester Heights, but the idea was unanimously rejected. Ward, however, refused to drop the subject. When in August he again recommended that an effort be made to fortify the Heights, again nothing was done.

  The brigadiers present now were John Thomas and William Heath of Massachusetts, John Sullivan of New Hampshire, Joseph Spencer of Connecticut, and Nathanael Greene. Thomas was a physician in his early fifties, tall and quiet-spoken. Heath, a much younger man, was a fifth-generation Roxbury farmer, age thirty-eight, who would affably describe himself in a memoir as “of middling stature, light complexion, very corpulent, and bald-headed.” Sullivan, a lawyer and politician in his mid-forties, had served with Washington in the Continental Congress, and Spencer, who was older even than Israel Putnam (his troops referred to him as “Granny”), would play almost no part.

  Of these New Englanders, all citizen-soldiers, Washington quickly surmised that Thomas, Sullivan, and Greene were the best he had. Thomas was the most commanding in appearance and had served in the French and Indian War. Earlier, his pride hurt that the less experienced Heath was to outrank him, Thomas had talked of resigning, until Washington sent an urgent plea in which, paraphrasing a line from his favorite playCato, he said that in such a cause as they were engaged, “surely every post ought to be deemed honorable in which a man can serve his country.”

  His council assembled, Washington made the case for an all-out amphibious assault on Boston, by sending troops across the shallow Back Bay in flat-bottomed boats big enough to carry fifty men each. He reminded the generals of what they already knew: that winter was fast approaching and the troops were without barracks and firewood; that men already eager to go home would be extremely difficult to keep on duty once they felt the “severity of a northern winter.” When enlistments expired, the disbanding of one army before another was assembled could mean ruin. Gunpowder was still in short supply, but there was enough at hand to mount an attack. Of course, “the hazard, the loss of men in the attempt and the probable consequences of failure” had also to be considered.

  There was discussion of these and other points, including the enemy’s defenses, after which it was agreed unanimously not to attack, not for the “present at least.”

  It was a sound decision. The “hazard” was far too great, the chance of disastrous failure all too real. Casualties could have been horrendous. Unless they caught the tide exactly right, the men in the boats could have been stranded on mudflats a hundred yards or more from dry ground and forced to struggle through knee-deep muck while under withering fire. The slaughter could have been quite as horrible as that of the British at Bunker Hill.

  In fact, such a headlong attack on their works was exactly what the British generals were hoping for, certain that if the Americans were to be so foolhardy, it would mean the end of the rebellion.

  In restraining Washington, the council had proven its value. For the “present at least,” discretion was truly the better part of valor.

  Washington accepted the decision, but work on the flat-bottomed boats continued, and in a long letter to John Hancock, he made the case for a “decisive stroke,” adding, “I cannot say that I have wholly laid it aside.” Many in Congress, he sensed, were as impatient as he with the stalemate. “The state of inactivity, in which this army has lain for some time, by no means corresponds with my wishes, by some decisive stroke, to relieve my country from the heavy expense its subsistence must create.”

  As Washington also reminded Hancock—and thus Congress—his war chest was empty. The fact that the troops had not been paid for weeks did not help morale or alleviate hardships at home. “The paymaster has not a single dollar in hand.”

  Money at least was on the way. On September 29, $500,000 in Continental bills from Philadelphia were delivered to the headquarters at Cambridge, and in a few days thousands of troops were at last receiving some pay. “I send you eleven dollars,” Lieutenant Joseph Hodgkins wrote to his wife Sarah on October 6. His monthly pay was $13.

  ***

  ASKED WHAT THEY WERE FIGHTING FOR, most of the army—officers and men in the ranks—would until now have said it was in defense of their country and of their rightful liberties as freeborn Englishmen. It was to “defend our common rights” that he went to war, Nathanael Greene had told his wife. The British regulars, the hated redcoats, were the “invaders” and must be repelled. “We are soldiers who devote ourselves to arms not for the invasion of other countries but for the defense of our own, not for the gratification of our own private interest, but for the public security,” Greene had written in another letter to Samuel Ward. Writing to General Thomas, Washington had said the object was “neither glory nor extent of territory, but a defense of all that is dear and valuable in life.”

  Independence was not mentioned. Nor had independence been on the minds of those who fought at Bunker Hill or in Washington’s thoughts when he took command of the army. En route to Cambridge from Philadelphia, he had been quite specific in assuring the New York Provincial Congress that “every exertion of my worthy colleagues and myself will be equally extended to the reestablishment of peace and harmony between the mother country and the colonies.”

  But more and more of late there was talk of independence. The Reverend Belknap, from his visits to the camps, concluded that independence had “become a favorite point in the army.” A “declaration of independence” was heartily wished for, wrote Nathanael Greene, who was one of the first to say it in writing. “We had as good to begin in earnest first as last.”

  ***

  IN LATE SEPTEMBER, the discovery that the surgeon general of the army and head of the hospital at Cambridge, Dr. Benjamin Church, was a spy, the first American traitor, rocked everyone. Church had been one of the local dignitaries who had escorted Washington into Cambridge the day of his arrival. He was as prominent and trustworthy a man as any in the province, it was thought, a member of the Provincial Congress, poet, author, a Harvard classmate of John Hancock, and an outspoken patriot. Yet the whole time he had been secretly corresponding with the British in cipher, and was in their pay.

  His treachery had been discovered quite by chance. A mysterious, enciphered letter carried by a young woman of questionable morals had wound up in the hands of a friend of Nathanael Greene, who brought the letter to Greene, who in turn carried it directly to Washington. When the woman was apprehended, she confessed she had been keeping company with Church and said the letter was his. The letter was deciphered and Church exposed. The whole army, indeed all New England and the Congress at Philadelphia, were stunned. Who could say how many other Dr. Churches there might be?

  Church, who was tried, convicted, and imprisoned, kept insisting he was innocent. Sent into exile, on a ship bound for the West Indies, he disappeared at sea. Only years later did further evidence come to light proving his guilt.

  ***

  ON OCTOBER 18,a raw, gloomy Wednesday, a congressional committee of three, including Benjamin Franklin, gathered by a roaring fire in Washington’s study and, after lengthy deliberations with the commander and his generals, concluded that if an attack on Boston meant the destruction of the town, they could not approve.

  At a meeting of the war council it was decided still again that the risks were too great “under the circumstances,” as said Brigadier General Horatio Gates, who had been absent from the previous meeting. Like Charles Lee, Gates was an experienced, former British officer.

  “Things hereabouts remain in pretty much the same situation,” wrote James Warren, president of the Massachusetts Assembly. “We look at their lines and they view ours…. They want courage to attack us and we want powder to attack them and so there is no attack on either side.”

  On October 24, a post rider from Maine
brought news that British ships had attacked and burned the defenseless town of Falmouth. The townspeople had been given advance warning and consequently no one was killed, but the entire population was without homes on the eve of winter. The attack was decried as an outrage, “proof of the diabolical designs” of the administration in London, as Washington said.

  At the same time, Washington was dealt a further setback when his bright and by-now-indispensable secretary, Joseph Reed, decided he could no longer delay a return to Philadelphia to see to his affairs and look after his family. “You cannot but be sensible of your importance to me…judge you therefore how much I wished for your return,” Washington would tell the absent Reed in one of a string of letters. “I miss you exceedingly; and if an express declaration of this be wanting, to hasten your return, I make it most heartily,” he wrote another day.

  John Adams, who had come to know Reed in Philadelphia, described him as “very sensible.”

  “amiable,” even “tender,” and Washington felt much the same way. To Reed, as to almost no one, he signed his letters not with the standard “Your Obedient Servant,” but “Your Affectionate and Obedient Servant.”

  The days were turning “cold and blustering,” recorded the still uncomplaining Lieutenant Jabez Fitch. The construction of barracks had begun. Washington authorized an order for 10,000 cords of firewood. With epidemic dysentery sweeping through the outlying towns, Dr. Thacher worried over the numbers of ill soldiers in the camps and crowding the hospital. To add further to the miseries of camp life, local farmers were charging ever-higher prices.

  Washington fumed over such absence of patriotism, his dislike of New Englanders compounding by the day. Yet the faith of the local populace and their leaders in him remained high. They understood the adversities he faced and they were depending on him, no less than Congress and patriots everywhere were depending on him. As James Warren wrote to John Adams, “He is certainly the best man for the place he is in, important as it is, that ever lived.”

  Adams, who was acutely sensitive to the differences between New Englanders and Virginians, having experienced firsthand in Congress the distrust many from the middle and southern provinces felt for New Englanders, had become gravely concerned about the damage to the Cause such opinions and prejudices could have should they get out of hand.

  Gentlemen in other colonies have large plantations of slaves, and…are accustomed, habituated to higher notions of themselves and the distinction between them and the common people than we are…. I dread the consequences of this dissimilitude of character, and without the utmost caution on both sides, and the most considerate forbearance with one another and prudent condescension on both sides, they will certainly be fatal.

  Nathanael Greene felt certain that Washington only needed time to make himself “acquainted with the genius” of the New England troops.

  Meanwhile, Washington put increasing trust in Greene, as well as another impressive young New Englander, Henry Knox, to whom he assigned one of the most difficult and crucial missions of the war.

  ***

  COLONEL HENRY KNOX was hard not to notice. Six feet tall, he bulked large, weighing perhaps 250 pounds. He had a booming voice. He was gregarious, jovial, quick of mind, highly energetic—“very fat, but very active”—and all of twenty-five.

  “Town-born” in Boston, in a narrow house on Sea Street facing the harbor, he was seventh of the ten sons of Mary Campbell and William Knox, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. When his father, a shipmaster, disappeared in the West Indies, nine-year-old Henry went to work to help support his mother, and was thus, like Nathanael Greene, almost entirely self-educated. He became a bookseller, eventually opening his own London Book Store on Cornhill Street, offering a “large and very elegant assortment” of the latest books and magazines from London. In the notices he placed in the Boston Gazette, the name Henry Knox always appeared in larger type than the name of the store.

  Though not especially prosperous, the store became “a great resort for British officers and Tory ladies.”

  “a fashionable morning lounge,” and its large, genial proprietor became one of the best-known young men in town. John Adams, a frequent patron, remembered Knox as a youth “of pleasing manners and inquisitive turn of mind.” Another patron was Nathanael Greene, who not only shared Knox’s love of books, but also an interest in “the military art,” and it was thus, on the eve of war, that an important friendship had commenced.

  Knox read all he could on gunnery and tactics, and, as Greene had joined the Rhode Island Kentish Guards, Knox signed up with the new Boston Grenadier Corps, enjoying everything about it, including the eating and drinking that went on.

  At about the same time, Knox suffered an accident which, like Greene’s stiff knee, might have precluded service as an officer. On a bird-hunting expedition on Noddle’s Island in the harbor, his fowling piece exploded, destroying the third and fourth fingers of his left hand. In public thereafter he kept the hand wrapped in a handkerchief.

  To further complicate life, Knox had taken up the patriot cause and fallen in love with the daughter of a prominent Tory. She, too, was a patron of the bookstore, a correspondingly plump, gregarious young woman named Lucy Flucker, whose father, Thomas Flucker, was the royal secretary of the province. “My charmer,” he called her, and neither his maimed hand nor his politics deterred her ardor. Despite the objections of her family, they were married. When Lucy’s father, in an effort to give his new son-in-law added respectability, arranged for Knox to be offered a commission in the British army, Knox declined.

  In the tense days following the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord, the young couple packed what little they could carry and slipped out of Boston in disguise. Lucy was never again to see her mother and father, who would eventually sail for England.

  Having settled Lucy safely in Worcester, Knox reported for service with General Artemus Ward, who assigned him to planning and building fortifications. “Long to see you, which nothing would prevent but the flattering hope of being able to do some little service to my distressed and devoted country,” he wrote to her.

  Washington first met Knox while inspecting the defenses at Roxbury on July 5, only three days after he had taken command of the army, and apparently he was impressed, while Knox thought Washington everything to be wished for in a commander. “General Washington fills his place with vast ease and dignity, and dispenses happiness around him,” Knox wrote. He was called to confer at headquarters, and later, like Nathanael Greene, invited to dine with the general and his guests on several occasions.

  It was Henry Knox who first suggested the idea of going after the cannon at far-off Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, an undertaking so enormous, so fraught with certain difficulties, that many thought it impossible.

  The capture of Fort Ticonderoga from the British by Ethan Allen, Benedict Arnold, and a handful of Green Mountain Boys earlier in May had been sensational news, but the fort and its captured artillery were abandoned. When Knox told Washington he was confident the guns could be retrieved and hauled overland to Boston, Washington agreed at once, and put the young officer in charge of the expedition.

  Like nearly everyone, Washington enjoyed Knox’s company. Probably he also saw something of himself in the large, confident, self-educated young man with the pleasing manners who had lost his father when still a boy and had done so much on his own, and who was so ready to take on a task of such difficulty and potential consequence.

  That such a scheme hatched by a junior officer in his twenties who had had no experience was transmitted so directly to the supreme commander, seriously considered, and acted upon, also marked an important difference between the civilian army of the Americans and that of the British. In an army where nearly everyone was new to the tasks of soldiering and fighting a war, almost anyone’s ideas deserved a hearing.

  By November 16, Knox was on his way, accompanied by his nineteen-year-old brother, William, and with authority to spend as much a
s $1,000. “Don’t be afraid,” he wrote to Lucy. “There is no fighting in the [assignment]. I am upon business only.”

  ***

  WITH THE DAYS GROWING SHORTER and colder, flocks of wild geese overhead grew in such numbers that orders had to be posted to keep the men from firing at them and wasting precious powder. “Every officer that stands an idle spectator, and sees such a wanton waste of powder, and doesn’t do his utmost to suppress the evil, may expect to be reported,” declared Nathanael Greene.

  So great was the need to conserve powder that the morning gun, a camp ritual, was dispensed with. Spears were issued to the troops to be used in the event of a British attack.

  Every colonel or commanding officer of a regiment [read another of Greene’s orders] to appoint thirty men that are active, bold, and resolute to use the spears in the defense of the lines instead of guns.

  The first snow fell on November 21, and in the days to follow it was obvious winter had come to stay, with winds as bitter as January and still more snow. The distress within Boston was reportedly extreme. The British were cutting trees and tearing down old houses for firewood. Supplying the besieged city by sea had become increasingly difficult because of winter storms and American privateers. Food was in desperately short supply. The King’s troops were said to be so hungry that many were ready to desert at first chance. Some of the redcoats said openly that if there were another action and they could “get off under the smoke,” they would choose “the fresh beef side of the question.” Men in their ranks were dying of scurvy. Worse, smallpox raged.