1776

by David McCullough

  It was a critical moment in the management of the war, with Clinton and William Howe once more opposed on how best to proceed. Clinton continued to see Washington’s army as the heart of the rebellion, and the envelopment of the army, therefore, as the most expeditious strategy. Howe wanted to keep the Americans on the run, and continue to clear the board, so to speak—to clear New Jersey and Rhode Island of the rebel forces just as he had cleared New York, and by such conquests of vital territory bring the deluded American people and their political leaders to their senses and end their demonstrably futile rebellion.

  Clinton was overruled, and though unconvinced, he departed dutifully for Rhode Island, where his expedition seized Newport without opposition and the predominantly Quaker inhabitants seemed quite happy to live in peace under his protection. But it was a conquest of little importance. As would be said, its effect on the course of the war was about what it would have been had Clinton’s forces occupied the town of Newport on the Isle of Wight.

  Difficulties between Clinton and William Howe, the friction of the two contrasting personalities, had grown steadily worse. At White Plains, in an outburst of frustration and anger, Clinton had told General Cornwallis he could not bear to serve under Howe, and this Cornwallis had chosen to tell Howe. Thus it was with considerable relief that Howe saw Clinton sail off from New York, just as when Clinton had departed Boston for South Carolina.

  In Clinton’s place, Howe put Cornwallis, knowing he had a far more reasonable man to deal with and a highly energetic and effective field commander.

  Like Howe—indeed, like Clinton—Charles Cornwallis was a true eighteenth-century English aristocrat, a shining representative of Britain’s ruling class, born to wealth, position, and influence. Schooled at Eton, he had decided in his youth on a military career, in which he had distinguished himself ever since. At age thirty-seven, he was at his professional prime but, unlike Howe, a man with no bad habits or inclinations to self-indulgence, and if not as intellectually gifted as Clinton, he had no peevish or contrary side.

  Tall and somewhat overweight, as was the fashion, he carried himself well and was considered handsome, except for a cast in one eye. (In fact, he had lost sight in one eye as a result of a boyhood accident.) He was devoted to his ailing wife, whom he missed dreadfully, and devoted to his men—“I love that army,” he had once declared—and their devotion to him was notable. He was the most popular British general serving in America, known to be strict but fair, and genuinely concerned for the well-being of his troops. Repeatedly in the year’s campaign—at Brooklyn, Kips Bay, Fort Washington, and in his stunning surprise capture of Fort Lee—he had shown himself to be enterprising and aggressive. Thus far, he had done everything right.

  On November 23, two days after the capture of Fort Lee, Cornwallis had met there with General Howe (who, having been made a Knight of the Bath by the King, was now Sir William Howe). The two conferred for several hours, going over the map of New Jersey and reviewing plans.

  Howe gave orders to Cornwallis to pursue the rebels as far as New Brunswick, or Brunswick as it was then known, another fifty miles south of Newark, on the Raritan River, and stop there until further orders.

  On November 25, after the rains subsided, Cornwallis and an army now numbering 10,000 set off, determined to catch Washington, Cornwallis said, as a hunter bags a fox. But on the rain-drenched roads, in muck ankle-deep or worse, the long columns of redcoats and Hessians with their heavy baggage trains and artillery moved slower even than the Americans had. They were three days reaching Newark.

  At nine o’clock on the morning of November 28, the British engineering officer, Captain Archibald Robertson, recorded, “All the army marched in two columns towards Newark, where it was said the rebels would stand.” About one o’clock, the British advanced on the town in force, only to find it empty.

  Washington had pressed on toward Brunswick and the Raritan. “The enemy gave us not the least interruption upon our march,” he wrote to General Heath.

  There was word at last from Charles Lee, but only to report his own tribulations with foul weather and men without shoes. He was still at North Castle and made no mention of plans to leave.

  Washington replied at once. “My former letters were so full and explicit as to the necessity of your marching as early as possible…that I confess I expected you would have been sooner in motion,” he said sharply. Yet he was still reluctant to issue a clear order to Lee.

  By the time he reached Brunswick the morning of November 29, Washington had been joined by the dauntless Lord Stirling and more than 1,000 reinforcements. They were a first glimmer of hope, though hardly enough. Numbers of Stirling’s men, too, were shoeless and without coats or even shirts, and the December 1 expiration of enlistments, when twice that number would be free to leave, was only two days away.

  ***

  ON NOVEMBER 30 AT BRUNSWICK, a sealed letter from General Lee to Joseph Reed arrived by express rider. With Reed still absent, Washington tore it open thinking it might be news that Lee and his men were at last on the way. The letter was dated November 24. “My dear Reed,” it began.

  I received your most obliging, flattering letter—lament with you that fatal indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even want of personal courage. Accident may put a decisive blunder in the right, but eternal defeat and miscarriage must attend the men of the best parts if cursed with indecision.

  Lee went on to explain why he had not started for New Jersey as Washington wished, and apparently he did not intend to do so.

  What Washington thought or felt as he read the letter, or how many times he may have reread its first paragraph, no one knows. Clearly Reed, his trusted confidant and supposed friend, and Lee, his second-in-command, had both lost faith in him.

  Washington resealed the letter and sent it off to Reed with a note of explanation.

  The enclosed was put into my hands by an express [rider]…. Having no idea of its being a private letter…I opened it…. This, as it is the truth, must be my excuse for seeing the contents of a letter which neither inclinationor intention would have prompted me to.

  He thanked Reed for the “trouble and fatigue” of his journey to Burlington and wished him success in his mission. And that was all.

  Possibly, Washington was more hurt than angry. Later he would tell Reed, “I was hurt not because I thought my judgment wronged by the expressions contained in it [the letter], but because the same sentiments were not communicated immediately to myself.” Possibly the charge of “fatal indecision of mind” also hurt deeply, because Washington knew it to be true.

  Above all, he must have felt profoundly alone, as alone as he had ever been. First Greene had let him down, now Reed. And who was to say what Lee had in mind, or might do?

  At Philadelphia many of the Congress were ill or exhausted or absent. All three of the principle contributors to the Declaration of Independence were no longer present. Thomas Jefferson had gone home to Virginia in September. John Adams was at Braintree. Benjamin Franklin had departed on a mission to France. At times there were not enough delegates for a quorum, and as the news from New Jersey became more bleak, and the British army drew nearer, Philadelphia was beset by an extreme outbreak of the jitters.

  The Pennsylvania Journal announced “very good intelligence that the British intend to make a push for Philadelphia,” and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, among others, reported “much alarm” in the city and in Congress. Delegate William Hooper of North Carolina, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, described a prevailing “torpor” in Congress. Hooper, however, had no patience with those blaming Washington for every misfortune.

  Oh how I feel for Washington, that best of men [he wrote]. The difficulties which he has now to encounter are beyond the power of language to describe, but to be unfortunate is to be wrong and there are men…who are villains enough to brand him. There are some long faces here.

  Once, durin
g the Siege of Boston, when almost nothing was going right and General Schuyler had written from Albany to bemoan his troubles, Washington had replied that he understood but that “we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.” It was such resolve and an acceptance of mankind and circumstances as they were, not as he wished them to be, that continued to carry Washington through. “I will not however despair,” he now wrote to Governor William Livingston.

  ***

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, December 1, with British and Hessian columns advancing on Brunswick, 2,000 of Washington’s troops, New Jersey and Maryland militia, their enlistments up, walked away from the war, and without apology. “Two brigades left us at Brunswick,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “notwithstanding the enemy are within two hours march and coming on.”

  Washington sent off still another urgent summons to Lee to come with all speed, “or your arrival may be too late to answer any valuable purpose.”

  “The enemy are fast advancing,” he reported in a hurried dispatch to John Hancock, noting that the time was half past one. “Some of them are in sight.”

  He ordered the only bridge over the Raritan at Brunswick destroyed, and this had been largely accomplished. But the river was fordable—in some places only knee-deep—and as he also told Hancock, mincing no words, his present force was “totally inadequate” to stop the enemy.

  The first of the British artillery arrived at the river, and by late afternoon British and American cannon were exchanging fire, the American guns commanded by young Captain Alexander Hamilton. But again, as at Newark, when the British troops pressed on to the town the next morning, they found that the Americans had taken off.

  Washington had decided what must be done. He was heading for Trenton. “It being impossible to oppose them with our present force with the least possible prospect of success,” he informed Congress, “we shall retreat to the west bank of the Delaware.”

  “When we left Brunswick,” wrote Nathanael Greene, “we had not 3,000 men—a very pitiful army to trust the liberties of America on.” The hour had never looked darker.

  The post road, or King’s Highway, from Brunswick to Trenton, the main thoroughfare between New York and Philadelphia, was as straight and flat and fine a thirty-mile stretch of road as any in the country, and the retreating army made good time. The retreat was not at a run. It was a forced march, not a rout, as sometimes portrayed. Washington and the main body of the army, marching through the night, reached Trenton on the Delaware the morning of December 2, having left Lord Stirling and two brigades as a rear guard at the little college town of Princeton.

  Orders were issued to round up all boats along the east bank of the Delaware and to destroy any that could not be used, to keep them out of enemy hands.

  Among the delegates to Congress, the distances from Brunswick to Trenton and Trenton to Philadelphia were well known, and so if Cornwallis was at Brunswick, then he and his army were a mere sixty miles from Philadelphia. “The inhabitants of Princeton and Trenton…are evacuated,” wrote Massachusetts delegate Robert Treat Paine. “The people left them on Sunday night with panic and precipitation.” People in Philadelphia were getting out, too, many taking all the possessions they could carry. “Numbers of families loading wagons,” a citizen recorded. “All shops ordered shut…people in confusion, of all ranks.”

  The great question on everyone’s mind was where were Lee and his men. It was said they were not far, “close in the rear of the enemy.” But no one knew. “I have not heard a word from General Lee since the 26th of last month,” John Hancock read in a letter from Washington dated December 3.

  II

  WITH HIS BROTHER Sir William’s campaign succeeding splendidly in New Jersey, and the war rapidly losing support among the people there, David McCullough Admiral Lord Howe decided to make yet another appeal for conciliation. Signed also by Sir William, the new proclamation was their boldest, most generous gesture thus far, they felt. It was issued in the spirit of their obligation, as commissioned by the King, to serve as peace negotiators as well as military commanders, but also because Lord Howe genuinely believed that a negotiated settlement with the Americans was yet possible and vastly preferable to a long-drawn-out conflict. He had no desire to lose any more British lives or to inflict any more destruction and suffering on the Americans than necessary.

  The proclamation, dated November 30, was an immediate success. It offered all who, within sixty days, would come forth and take an oath of allegiance to the King—and pledge their “peaceable obedience”—a “free and general pardon,” and that they would

  reap the benefit of his Majesty’s paternal goodness, in the preservation of their property, the restoration of their commerce, and the security of their most valuable rights, under the just and most moderate authority of the crown and Parliament of Britain.

  Hundreds, eventually thousands, in New Jersey flocked to the British camps to declare their loyalty. Considering the way the war was going, the size and might of the British army, and the pathetic state of Washington’s meager band, it seemed the prudent thing to do. As a farmer near Brunswick named John Bray wrote to a kinsman:

  You can come down and receive protection and return home without molestation on the part of the King’s troops and you best know the situation of the provincial army. Do advise Cousin Johnny and Thomas and Cousin Thomas Jones, for if they do stay out to the last, they will undoubtedly fare the worst.

  ***

  HAVING CROSSED THE RARITAN and occupied Brunswick on December 1, Cornwallis called a halt, as he had been ordered by General Howe. For six days—six merciful days for Washington and his army—the British and Hessians made no move, a decision that puzzled, even infuriated many of the British and local Loyalists who saw no reason to let up on the chase.

  Called on to explain later, Cornwallis would say his troops were exhausted, footsore, hungry, and in need of rest. More important, it had not seemed at the time that excessive haste was wise or necessary. There were dangers in too rapid a pursuit. He worried about General Lee, who was variously reported just ahead or coming up from behind. But had it looked like he could catch Washington, Cornwallis said, he would have kept going, whatever the risks, no matter the orders.

  Some would see the pause as a horrendous blunder and blame William Howe. Captain Charles Stedman, one of Cornwallis’s own officers and the earliest British historian of the war, would speculate that had Cornwallis been allowed “to act at his own discretion…he would have pursued the weakened and alarmed enemy to the Delaware, over which, without falling into his hands, they never could have passed.” But this assumed that Washington and the army could not have escaped down the east side of the river, which seems unreasonable.

  The Hessian officer Johann Ewald, an intelligent and experienced soldier, concluded that Cornwallis had no desire to put his valuable troops in needless jeopardy. On the night of the capture of Fort Lee, when Ewald and his jaegers had started after a column of rebels retreating in “a cloud of dust,” Cornwallis had ordered them back. “Let them go, my dear Ewald, and stay here,” Cornwallis had said. “We do not want to lose any men. One jaeger is worth more than ten rebels.” By the time of the halt at Brunswick, Ewald wrote, the hope of the whole British command was “of ending the war amicably, without shedding the blood of the King’s subjects in a needless way.”

  Others would say it was for political reasons related to the latest peace move that Cornwallis intentionally let Washington get away. No one would ever prove this, and it seems unlikely, especially since General Howe, sensing that a final blow might now indeed be struck, arrived at Brunswick on December 6 with an additional brigade commanded by General Grant, and ordered the advance to continue at once.

  The weather had turned unseasonably warm, ideal for campaigning. A Loyalist newspaper in New York had already set the scene in a report published the day before:

  It is said by some persons who have lately seen th
e rebel forces that they are the most pitiable collection of ragged, dispirited mortals that ever pretended to the name of an army…and that if the weather continues fair but a little longer, there is no visible impediment to His Majesty’s troops in completing a march to the capitol of Pennsylvania.

  Everything seemed to the advantage of the conquering army, all was going as wished except for one vexing problem that had been growing steadily worse for several weeks. Marauding and pillaging by redcoats and Hessians had gotten out of hand. “Scandalous behavior for British troops,” wrote Major Stephen Kemble, the Loyalist serving with the British army, “and the Hessians outrageously licentious, and cruel to such a degree as to threaten with death all such as dare obstruct them in their depredations.” Kemble had recorded this in his diary in early November, before the capture of Fort Washington. “[I] shudder for New Jersey,” he had written.