1776

by David McCullough

  Oddly, Howe seems to have had no interest in the man who led the army aligned against him. In all that he and others of the British command wrote at the time, officially and privately, George Washington was rarely ever mentioned except in passing. There was no apparent consideration of what manner of man he was, what his state of mind, his strengths and weaknesses, might be. Or what he might be up to, given the working of his mind. Perhaps this was indifference, perhaps the measure of an overreaching sense of superiority. Washington, by contrast, was constantly trying to fathom Howe’s intentions, his next move. Strange it was that the British commander-in-chief, known for his chronic gambling, seemed to give no thought to how his American opponent might play his hand.

  ***

  ON JANUARY 14, two weeks into the new year, George Washington wrote one of the most forlorn, despairing letters of his life. He had been suffering sleepless nights in the big house by the Charles. “The reflection upon my situation and that of this army produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep,” he told the absent Joseph Reed. “Few people know the predicament we are in.”

  Filling page after page, he enumerated the same troubles and woes he had been reporting persistently to Congress for so long, and that he would report still again to John Hancock that same day. There was too little powder, still no money. (Money was useful in the common affairs of life but in war it was essential, Washington would remind the wealthy Hancock.) So many of the troops who had given up and gone home had, against orders, carried off muskets that were not their own that the supply of arms was depleted to the point where there were not enough for the new recruits. “We have not at this time 100 guns in the stores of all that have been taken in the prize ship [the captured British supply shipNancy ],” he wrote to Reed. On paper his army numbered between 8,000 and 10,000. In reality only half that number were fit for duty.

  It was because he had been unable to attack Boston that things had come to such a pass, he was convinced. The changing of one army to another in the midst of winter, with the enemy so close at hand, was like nothing “in the pages of history.” That the British were so “blind” to what was going on and the true state of his situation he considered nearly miraculous.

  He was downcast and feeling quite sorry for himself. Had he known what he was getting into, he told Reed, he would never have accepted the command.

  I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulders and entered the ranks, or, if I could have justified the measure to posterity, and my own conscience, had retired to the back country, and lived in a wigwam. If I shall be able to rise superior to these, and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it, to blind the eyes of our enemies; for surely if we get well through this month, it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages we labor under.

  Could I have foreseen the difficulties which have come upon us, could I have known that such a backwardness would have been discovered 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.

  To add to his worries—and this he did not tell Reed—Washington had learned through “undoubted intelligence” that the British were fitting out ships in the harbor for the embarkation of troops, which he took to mean, given the season of the year, they could only be bound for a destination to the south, and almost certainly it was New York. Generals Lee and Greene were convinced New York would be of such “vast importance” to the enemy that no time could be lost seeing to its defense. Loyalists were numerous in New York; their support for the Crown was already strong. “If the tide of sentiment gets against us in that province,” Nathanael Greene warned, “it will give a fatal stab to the strength and union of the colonies.” In Greene’s opinion there were but two choices open: defend New York or burn it. General Lee proposed to Washington that he, Lee, be sent immediately to New York to see about defenses.

  Though in agreement that time was of the essence, Washington knew that congressional approval was needed and that there must be no ambiguity over whether his authority extended beyond the immediate theater of war. As he would say, he was not fond of “stretching” his powers, and such sensitivity to and respect for the political ramifications of his command were exactly what made him such an effective political general.

  Fortunately, he was able to obtain an immediate opinion from John Adams, who was on a brief leave from Congress at his home in Braintree. The importance of New York was beyond question, Adams formally assured the commander in a letter of January 6 delivered to Cambridge that day. New York was “a kind of key to the whole continent,” Adams wrote. “No effort to secure it ought to be omitted.” On the matter of Washington’s authority, Adams courageously gave him full, unambiguous approval for taking action in New York or anywhere else, and the issue was never to be raised again.

  “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.’ ”

  Thus, on January 8, Washington had dispatched General Lee to New York to put the city “in the best posture of defense.”

  There was no January thaw in eastern Massachusetts that year, and this meant continued suffering for soldiers without winter clothing, soldiers “sickly” and dying from disease. But with temperatures in the twenties or lower day after day came the increasing likelihood of Back Bay freezing over, and the possibility of an attack on Boston across the ice.

  On January 16, two days after his woeful letter to Reed, Washington convened a council of war with Generals Ward, Putnam, Heath, Spencer, Sullivan, Greene, and Gates present, but also James Warren, head of the Massachusetts Assembly, and John Adams. Washington spoke of the “indispensable necessity of making a bold attempt” on Boston. The council listened, then voiced agreement that a “vigorous attempt” should be made, but only when “practicable.”

  Late the following day, January 17, well after dark, a dispatch rider dismounted at Washington’s headquarters carrying the worst news of the war thus far. It was a letter from General Schuyler at Albany. The army Washington had sent across the Maine wilderness under Benedict Arnold to attack Quebec had been defeated. Arnold was badly wounded. General Richard Montgomery, who, with 300 men, had joined in the assault, attacking from Montreal, had been killed. Help was urgently needed. How many others had been killed or wounded at Quebec, how many taken prisoner, no one yet knew.

  Washington, as he wrote privately, often felt that the eyes of the whole continent were on him, “fixed with anxious expectation.”

  When the council of war convened again the first thing the next morning, it was reluctantly concluded that given the “present feeble state” of the army, no troops could be spared for Quebec.

  The single glimmer of hope was confirmation from Schuyler, on January 18, that the guns from Ticonderoga were on the way. As it happened, Colonel Knox, who had ridden on ahead, reached Cambridge later that same day.

  ***

  KNOX HAD BEEN GONE for two months and he had fulfilled all expectations, despite rough forest roads, freezing lakes, blizzards, thaws, mountain wilderness, and repeated mishaps that would have broken lesser spirits several times over. He had succeeded with his bold, virtually impossible idea and at exactly the right moment, justifying entirely the trust Washington had placed in him. The story of the expedition would be told and retold for weeks within the army and for years to come.

  Departing from Cambridge on horseback on November 16, Knox and his brother William had traveled first to New York City, where they made arrangements for military supplies to be sent back to Boston, then pressed northward up the Hudson Valley, at times making forty miles a day.

  They arrived at Fort Ticonderoga on December 5. Built by the French at
the start of the French and Indian War in 1755, the limestone fort had been taken by the British in 1759, then by the Americans in May of 1775. It stood at the southern end of Lake Champlain, where Lake Champlain meets the northern end of Lake George.

  The guns Knox had come for were mostly French—mortars, 12- and 18-pound cannon (that is, guns that fired cannonballs of 12 and 18 pounds), and one giant brass 24-pounder. Not all were in usable condition. After looking them over, Knox selected 58 mortars and cannon. Three of the mortars weighed a ton each and the 24-pound cannon, more than 5,000 pounds. The whole lot was believed to weigh not less than 120,000 pounds.

  The plan was to transport the guns by boat down Lake George, which was not yet completely frozen over. At the lake’s southern end would begin the long haul overland, south as far as Albany before turning east toward Boston across the Berkshire Mountains. The distance to be covered was nearly three hundred miles. Knox planned to drag the guns on giant sleds and was counting on snow. But thus far only a light dusting covered the ground.

  With the help of local soldiers and hired men, he set immediately to work. Just moving the guns from the fort to the boat landing proved a tremendous task. The passage down Lake George, not quite forty miles, took eight days. Three boats and their immense cargo set sail on December 9, and for the first hour had a fair wind. After that progress came only with “the utmost difficulty.” Indeed, from Knox’s hurried, all-but-illegible diary entries, that first hour on the lake appears to have been the only hour of the entire trek that did not bring “the utmost difficulty.”

  One of the boats, a scow, struck a rock and sank, though close enough to shore to be bailed out, patched up, and set afloat again. Knox recorded days of heavy rowing against unrelenting headwinds—four hours of “rowing exceeding hard” one day, six hours of “excessive hard rowing” on another. In places, the boats had to cut through ice. Knox’s brother William wrote at day’s end, December 14, of “beating all the way against the wind…. God send us a fair wind.” Nights ashore were bitterly cold.

  “It is not easy to conceive the difficulties we have had,” Knox wrote to Washington at the end of the voyage on the lake, in a letter of December 17 that would reach Cambridge only about the time he did.

  On his way north to Ticonderoga, Knox had arranged for heavy sleds or sledges to be rounded up or built, forty-two in all, and to be on hand at Fort George at the southern end of Lake George, about thirty-five miles south of Ticonderoga. (“I most earnestly beg you to spare no trouble or necessary expense in getting these,” he had told a local officer.) With the sleds and eighty yoke of oxen, he was now ready to push on. “Trusting that…we shall have a fine fall of snow…. I hope in sixteen or seventeen days to be able to present your Excellency a noble train of artillery.”

  To his wife, Knox claimed the most difficult part was over, and speculated, “We shall cut no small figure through the country with our cannon.”

  Still there was no snow. Instead, a “cruel thaw” set in, halting progress for several days. The route south to Albany required four crossings of the Hudson. With ice on the river so thin, the heavy caravan could only stand idly by at Fort George and wait for a change in the weather. When the change came, it was a blizzard. Three feet of snow fell, beginning Christmas Day. Determined to go ahead to Albany on his own, Knox nearly froze to death struggling through the snow on foot, until finding horses and a sleigh to take him the rest of the route.

  Eventually, the “precious convoy” pushed off from Fort George. “Our cavalcade was quite imposing,” remembered John Becker, who at age twelve had accompanied his father, one of the drivers on the expedition. They proceeded slowly, laboriously in the heavy snow, passing through the village of Saratoga, then on to Albany, where Knox was busy cutting holes in the frozen Hudson in order to strengthen the ice. (The idea was that water coming up through the holes would spread over the surface of the ice and freeze, thus gradually thickening the ice.)

  On New Year’s Day, the weather turned warm again. Precious time was wasting, he wrote to Lucy. “The thaw has been so grave that I’ve trembled for the consequences, for without snow my very important charge cannot get along.”

  But the temperature plunged again. On January 7, General Schuyler wrote to Washington from his Albany headquarters, “This morning I had the satisfaction to see the first division of sleds with cannon cross the river.”

  They moved cautiously over the ice, and for several hours it appeared that Knox’s holes had done the trick. Nearly a dozen sleds had crossed without mishap, until suddenly one of the largest cannons, an 18-pounder, broke through and sank not far from shore, leaving a hole in the ice fourteen feet in diameter. Undaunted, Knox at once set about retrieving the cannon from the bottom of the river, losing a full day in the effort, but at last succeeding, as he wrote, “owing to the assistance [of] the good people of Albany.”

  On January 9, the expedition pushed on from the eastern shore of the Hudson, with more than a hundred miles still to go. Snow in the Berkshires lay thick, exactly as needed, but the mountains, steep and tumbled and dissected by deep, narrow valleys, posed a challenge as formidable as any. Knox, with no prior experience in such terrain, wrote of climbing peaks “from which we might almost have seen all the kingdoms of the earth.”

  “It appeared to me almost a miracle that people with heavy loads should be able to get up and down such hills,” reads another of his diary entries.

  To slow the descent of the laden sleds down slopes as steep as a roof, check lines were anchored to trees. Brush and drag chains were shoved beneath the runners. When some of his teamsters, fearful of the risks, refused to go any further, Knox spent three hours arguing and pleading until finally they agreed to head on.

  News of the advancing procession raced ahead of the lead sleds, and, as Knox had imagined, people began turning out along the route to see for themselves the procession of the guns from Ticonderoga.

  “Our armament here was a great curiosity,” wrote John Becker of the reception at the town of Westfield. “We found that very few, even among the oldest inhabitants, had ever seen a cannon.” Becker, at age twelve, had never known such excitement.

  We were the great gainers by this curiosity, for while they were employed in remarking upon our guns, we were, with equal pleasure, discussing the qualities of their cider and whiskey. These were generously brought out in great profusion.

  At Springfield, to quicken the pace, Knox changed from oxen to horses, and on the final leg of the journey the number of onlookers grew by the day.

  The halt came at last about twenty miles west of Boston at Framingham. The guns were unloaded, Knox, meantime, having sped on to Cambridge.

  Knox’s “noble train” had arrived intact. Not a gun had been lost. Hundreds of men had taken part and their labors and resilience had been exceptional. But it was the daring and determination of Knox himself that had counted above all. The twenty-five-year-old Boston bookseller had proven himself a leader of remarkable ability, a man not only of enterprising ideas, but with the staying power to carry them out. Immediately, Washington put him in command of the artillery.

  To those who rode out from Cambridge to Framingham to look over the guns, it was clear that the stalemate at Boston was about to change dramatically.

  II

  THERE WAS A PERCEPTIBLE QUICKENING of activity at the big gray house that served as headquarters. The pace of the commander’s correspondence, the numbers of post riders and uniformed officers coming and going, gave evidence of something in the offing. “My business increases very fast…from great changes,” Washington wrote to Joseph Reed without providing details. Reed’s help was needed more than ever. “It is absolutely necessary…to have persons that can think for me as well as execute orders.”

  The strength of the army was still deficient, the situation so serious, Washington confided, that he was “obliged to use art to conceal it,” even from his own officers.

  That he was about to take action
could be read easily enough between the lines of this and other correspondence that went speeding off in the pouches of fast mail riders. The camps were alive with rumors and speculation. “Great activity and animation are observed among our officers and soldiers who manifest an anxious desire to have a conflict with the enemy,” wrote the ever-perceptive Dr. James Thacher, who predicted either a “general assault on the town of Boston, or the erection of works on the Heights of Dorchester, or both.”

  The bitter cold continued. On January 27, the thermometer dropped to 4 degrees; the low on January 28 was 1 degree, then 2 degrees on January 30. Yet cold as it was, there was still no “ice bridge” sufficient to carry an army. Some mornings Washington went to the bay to jump up and down on the ice himself to test its strength.

  He made a personal reconnaissance of the approaches to Dorchester, even to the heights apparently, accompanied by several of his officers, including Henry Knox. According to one possibly apocryphal account, Washington and the others had left their horses and were proceeding on foot when suddenly two mounted British officers coming at a gallop sent them “running and scampering for life.”