A German engraving of the burning of New York, September 20, 1776, shows great drama but little knowledge of what the city looked like. The British blamed the fire on “lurking” American villains. Washington wrote, “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”
A British flotilla, led byPhoenix andRoebuck, defies the American guns of Fort Lee and Fort Washington to sail up the Hudson on October 9, 1776. The painting by a French marine artist, Dominic Serres, makes the Hudson look narrower—and thus the ships larger—than in reality.
One of the most revealing of the many diaries kept by American soldiers in 1776 was that of Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, a Connecticut farmer who recorded his experiences through one ordeal after another, including his time as a prisoner of war. The page at left, from August 28, records how, unexpectedly, the British general James Grant gave the famished prisoners “two quarters of mutton well cooked,” and, from August 29, that the prisoners are to be put aboard a ship.
Captured Americans by the thousands were crowded aboard rotting British prison ships anchored in New York Harbor, where they were to perish by the thousands, mostly from disease.
Grossly fat and contemptuous of Americans, the British general James Grant was also capable of small kindnesses to prisoners like Jabez Fitch (see diary at left) and wrote particularly vivid letters describing the campaign of 1776 from the British point of view.
British troops commanded by General Cornwallis scaled the Hudson River Palisades November 20, 1776, in a watercolor attributed to Lord Rawdon. In fact, this daring British move on New Jersey took place in the dead of night, not in daylight as shown.
Charles Cornwallis by Thomas Gainsborough. The most popular British general serving in America, Cornwallis had shown himself to be enterprising and aggressive. On November 25, 1776, with 10,000 men, he set off across New Jersey determined, he said, to catch Washington as a hunter bags a fox. The one looming uncertainty was the whereabouts of Charles Lee, the eccentric British general turned American patriot who was thought to be a more adroit and dangerous foe than Washington. a caricature of Lee with one of his numerous dogs.
A war of words came to a crescendo during the long retreat of Washington’s battered army across New Jersey. A Proclamation issued by Admiral Lord Richard Howe on November 30, 1776, offered pardon to all Americans who would take an allegiance to the King, and throngs in New Jersey flocked to British camps to sign their names. By contrast, Thomas Paine’sThe American Crisis, which appeared on December 23, was a powerful summons to American patriotism second only to hisCommon Sense . Page one with its immortal opening lines is shown at left.
The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, New Jersey, 26 December 1776by John Trumbull. Though the ceremony portrayed in Trumbull’s great, stylized painting, with the mortally wounded Hessian commander, Colonel Johann Rall, surrendering before George Washington, never happened, and no one after the battle looked so costume-perfect, the principals are all readily indentifiable (see key below), and the high drama of Trumbull’s scene was considered in the eighteenth century entirely suitable for the American triumph at Trenton, one of the turning points of the war.
A rapid sketch by John Trumbull, one of several preliminary studies, shows General Hugh Mercer being bayonetted in the fury of the Battle of Princeton.
KEY
1. Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall
2. Colonel William Stevens Smith, aide-de-camp to Major General Sullivan
3. Colonel Robert Hanson Harrison, Military Secretary to Washington
4. Captain Tench Tilghman, Military Secretary to Washington
5. General George Washington
6. Major General John Sullivan
7. Major General Nathanael Greene
8. Captain William Washington
9. Brigadier General Henry Knox
Washington at the Battle of Princeton by Charles Willson Peale. Painted in 1779, this full-length portrait became immediately popular, and Peale produced a number of replicas, one of which was ordered as a present for the King of France. The sash Washington wears is the light blue insignia he chose as commander-in-chief beginning with the summer of 1775. Nassau Hall at Princeton is shown on the distant horizon on the left.
As the war continued after 1776, Nathanael Greene wrote prophetically of Washington’s singular place in history as the “deliverer of his country.”
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Copyright © 2005 by David McCullough
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Endpapers:(Front) View of Boston Harbor;(back) the Royal Navy in New York Harbor; both by British Captain Archibald Robertson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCullough, David G.
1776 / David McCullough.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1. United States–History—Revolution, 1775–1783.
I. Title: Seventeen seventy-six. II. Title.
E208.M396 2005
973.3—dc22 2005042505
ISBN: 0-7432-8770-3
Picture Credits
The maps at the end of the color insert are courtesy of the Library of Congress. Other illustrations are courtesy of the following:
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 28, p. 199. Author’s collection: iv. Boston Gazette: 6. British Museum, London, England: 19. The Brooklyn Historical Society: 14. Clements Library, University of Michigan: 1, 5, 18, 35, 36. Emmett Collection, New York Public Library/Art Resource: 3. Frick Art Reference Library, New York: 9. Independence National Historical Park: 10, 22, 24, 25, 27, 30. John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island: 23. Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia: 12. Massachusetts Historical Society: 7. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, 1924: 2. Morristown, New Jersey, National Historical Park: 32. National Portrait Gallery, London, England: 20, 38. Naval Academy Museum, Annapolis, Maryland: 33. Collection of the New-York Historical Society: 8. New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY: front and back endpapers, 4, 11, 15, 16, 34, 37, 39, 40, 41. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Bequest of Mrs. Sarah Harrison, the Joseph Harrison, Jr., Collection: 21; and Gift of Maria McKean Allen and Phebe Warren Downes, through the bequest of their mother, Elizabeth Wharton McKean: 44. Pennsylvania Museum of Art: 29. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York: 45. Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections: 43. R. W. Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport, Louisiana: 13. The Royal Collection, © 2004, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II: 17. Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, lent by the Putnam Phalanx: 26. Winterthur Museum, p. 1. Yale University Art Gallery: 16, 31, 42.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part 1
Chapter One - Sovereign Duty
Chapte
r Two - Rabble in Arms
Section I
Section II
Section III
Chapter Three - Dorchester Heights
Section I
Section II
Section III
Section IV
Part 2
Chapter Four - The Lines are Drawn
Section I
Section II
Section III
Chapter Five - Field of Battle
Section I
Section II
Section III
Section IV
Part 3
Chapter Six - Fortune Frowns
Section I
Section II
Section III
Chapter Seven - Darkest Hour
Section I
Section II
Section III
Other
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Photographs & Maps
Also By David McCullough
Copyright
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1776 Page 40
