The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  The Battle of Bunker Hill had blazed up as he headed toward Boston to take command of the army. The British had marched 2,300 redcoats straight up the hill on June 17, 1775, intending to overawe the Americans by showing “that trained troops are invincible against any numbers or any position of undisciplined rabble,” as General John Burgoyne had brayed. The shock and awe were on the other side, though, because the Americans, whom Colonel William Prescott had ordered not to “fire until you can see the whites of their eyes,” didn’t retreat until they had killed or wounded almost half the British, including 90 officers, compared to 430 American casualties, out of nearly 2,000 men.1 It was a “dear bought victory,” mourned General Sir Henry Clinton; “another such would have ruined us.”2

  When Washington arrived in Massachusetts on July 2, the Continental Army had taken control both of Dorchester Neck, between Boston and the rest of Massachusetts, and Cambridge, across the Charles River to the north, bottling up the sobered redcoats. Trouble was, the Americans had no ammunition for “Months together, with what will scarce be believed—not 30 rounds of Musket Cartridges a Man,” Washington wrote.3 Not only to make the British believe they were in his power but also to keep his own men confident, the General had to pretend—convincingly, twenty-four hours a day, despite his own fear and frustration—that all was well, while he waited, like Mr. Micawber, for something to turn up. “I know that without Men, without Arms, without Ammunition, without any thing that is fit for the accomodation of a Soldier that little is to be done—and, which is mortifying; I know, that I cannot stand justified to the World without exposing my own Weakness & injuring the cause by declaring my wants,” he wrote. “[M]y Situation has been such that I have been obligd to use art to conceal it from my own Officers.”4 All this “produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in Sleep. . . . I have often thought, how much happier I should have been, if . . . I had taken my Musket upon my Shoulder & enterd the Ranks, or . . . had retir’d to the back Country, & lived in a Wig wam—If I should be able to rise superior to these, and many other difficulties, . . . I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it, to blind the Eyes of our Enemys.”5

  Nor was this all. For the first years of the war, Washington endured what his biographer Ron Chernow calls the Sisyphean nightmare of having his whole army evaporate on December 31, when the troops’ one-year hitches ended. By late November 1775, only 3,500 soldiers agreed to stay past their terms, and by year-end a paltry 9,650 untrained new recruits had signed on, half the number needed.6 “It takes you two or three Months to bring New men to any tolerable degree acquainted with their duty,” and even longer to bring independent-minded Americans to “such a subordinate way of thinking as is necessary for a Soldier,” Washington lamented. Then, as the end of their terms approaches, you must “relax your discipline, in order as it were to curry favour with them,” to cajole them to stay longer—meaning that “the latter part of your time is employed in undoing what the first was accomplishing.”7

  Nevertheless, Washington crowed afterward, during those months “we have disbanded one Army & recruited another, within Musket Shot of two and Twenty Regimts, the Flower of the British Army.”8

  MEANWHILE, Congress had written new roles for him and his army, and Washington had to establish them credibly in the eyes of the enemy, including General Thomas Gage, the British commander in chief and royal governor of Massachusetts, who had served with him under General Edward Braddock in the French and Indian War twenty years earlier. A few weeks after taking command, Washington wrote Gage that he had heard that American soldiers captured at Bunker Hill, even “those of the most respectable Rank, when languishing with Wounds and Sickness,” have been “thrown indiscriminately, into a common Gaol appropriated for Felons.” Please know, he wrote, that the Continental Army will treat British POWs just as the redcoats treat Americans. It was for Gage to choose: either “Severity, & Hardship” or “Kindness & Humanity.”9 Gage replied that of course he mixed up officers and enlisted men promiscuously, “for I acknowledge no rank not derived from the king.”10 This was the wrong response, especially to a general who had once resented having to defer to officers with less merit than he but with royal commissions.

  “You affect, Sir, to despise all Rank not derived from the same Source with your own,” Washington thundered back, asserting a new, democratic understanding of legitimacy and worth. “I cannot conceive any more honourable, than that which flows from the uncorrupted Choice of a brave and free People—The purest Source & original Fountain of all Power.” Furthermore, Gage claims to have shown clemency by not hanging American soldiers as rebels. But it remains to be seen “whether our virtuous Citizens whom the Hand of Tyranny has forced into Arms, to defend their Wives, their Children, & their Property; or the mercenary Instruments of lawless Domination, Avarice, and Revenge best deserve the Appellation of Rebels.” A higher authority than Gage would decide. “May that God to whom you then appealed, judge between America & you!”11

  Lord North, the prime minister, got the point: “the war is now grown to such a height,” he noted, “that it must be treated as a foreign war.”12 Others were slower on the uptake, and Washington had to assert his new character sharply at least once more. When Admiral Lord Howe, the British naval commander, and his brother General William Howe, who had led the assault up Bunker Hill and then replaced Gage as commander in chief, wanted to negotiate with Washington in New York in July 1776, they sent an envoy with an invitation addressed to “George Washington Esq., etc. etc.” Washington’s aides wouldn’t take the letter, saying that “there was no such person in the Army,” and indeed “all the world knew who Genl Washington was.” Some days later, the Howes sent another message addressed to “His Excellency, General Washington,” asking him to meet their envoy to discuss a parlay. But when the emissary arrived at the meeting with the original, provocatively misaddressed letter, Washington refused it with frigid politeness, emphasized by inviting the ambassador “to partake of a small collation” before he left.13 “I would not upon any occasion sacrifice Essentials to Punctilio,” Washington reported to John Hancock, president of Congress, “but in this Instance . . . I deemed It a duty to my Country and my appointment to insist upon . . . respect.”14

  GOOD FORTUNE as 1776 dawned finally gave Washington the means to stage a spectacular coup de théâtre in Boston. A month before Bunker Hill, Connecticut militia captain Benedict Arnold, along with Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, had rowed across Lake Champlain to the New York side and seized the lightly manned British Fort Ticonderoga, with its rich cache of arms and ammunition. In an almost superhuman feat, Colonel Henry Knox, a towering, 300-pound, stentorian-voiced Boston bookseller who had taught himself gunnery from his shop’s stock of artillery manuals, had gone to Ticonderoga on Washington’s orders and hauled fifty-five mortars and cannon on ox-drawn sleds across 300 miles of snowy mountains and frozen rivers, presenting them to Washington on January 17. He happily discovered that Washington had acquired 2,000 muskets and two tons of ammunition, separately captured in the meantime.15

  Washington crowned Knox’s feat with a suitably dramatic finale. Across a narrow strip of Boston Harbor, and looking down upon the city from the south, towered Dorchester Heights—sheer cliffs over a hundred feet high (though now leveled and part of South Boston). The British had carelessly failed to occupy this territory, and if Washington could get Knox’s guns up there, he would command Boston in a military checkmate. But how to do it without the British overpowering him in the process?

  Out of tree trunks, poles, baskets of earth, and hay bales, Washington built portable fortifications, like a stage set. On the night of March 2, he began a deafening cannonade of Boston from sites away from Dorchester Heights, and this diversion continued incessantly through the night of the fourth, when—as a bright moon shone on the Heights but unusual warmth swathed harbor and city in fog—oxen dragged the heavy weapons and prefabricated fortifications on straw-
muffled wheels up a slope frozen firm, while the diversionary bombardment masked what little noise the operation made. When the British awoke on the morning of the fifth, they found themselves pinned down under the guns of a fortress instantly conjured up, it seemed to one British officer, by “the Genii belonging to Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp.”16

  Both Washington and General Howe wanted to attack at once, but a fierce rainstorm and prudent second thoughts held them back. Seeing his position now untenable, Howe resolved to leave the city. He too tried the theatrics of a diversionary cannonade, but Washington glimpsed the hurried confusion of his preparations, and he gloated that when the British sailed away on March 17, they left behind an estimated £30,000 to £40,000 worth of cannon and provisions, along with a wilderness of destroyed baggage wagons and gun carriages drifting in the harbor. The town itself “has shared a much better Fate than was expected,” and Washington was pleased to write Hancock that his house had “receiv’d no damage worth mentioning,” and “the family pictures are all left entire and untouch’d.” As for the Boston Loyalists: “no Electric Shock—no sudden Clap of thunder—in a word the last Trump could not have Struck them with greater Consternation” than the thought of facing “their offended Countrymen.” Many fled by any vessel they could find; one or two committed suicide.17

  Those countrymen had universal praise for Washington’s miraculous, morale-boosting achievement. To one who called him “the savior of your country,” the theatrical General replied by paraphrasing his favorite line from Addison’s Cato: “To obtain the applause of deserving men is a heartfelt satisfaction, to merit it is my highest wish.”18 Here is the love of fame at its most refined: we seek the praise of the discerning, not of the mob, and they confer it only for authentic merit and virtue, not appearance.

  CORRECTLY GUESSING that the British had sailed away to New York aiming to seize control of the Hudson River and cut off New England from the rest of the colonies, Washington hurried his army there. He had already sent his second-ranking general, Charles Lee—the beanpole-thin, warily hunched son of a British officer who had bought him the royal commission Washington had never obtained—to get the city ready. A radical who had espoused the American cause and a loner who preferred his many dogs to human company—and whom Washington had disliked when they served together under Braddock—Lee had started fortifying New York and accurately assessed the military challenge: “What to do with the city, I own puzzles me; it is so encircl’d with deep navigable water, that whoever commands the sea must command the town.”19

  The Royal Navy, long the city’s shield, began sailing into the harbor as its invader in late June 1776, and by late August half of all Britain’s warships and two-thirds of its army had arrived. It was an arrogant military, and rightly so; for, despite its by-the-book rigidity, its successes had made it feared around the world. Though its officers were aristocrats who had bought their commissions, they had risen in rank by battlefield achievement; most weren’t upper-class blunderers like the later Crimean War generals. The Howe brothers—their mother was an illegitimate daughter of George I, and they had grown up at court with their cousin and friend George III—were a case in point. The elder, Richard—“Black Dick” to his admiring sailors—became England’s youngest admiral and invented ship-to-ship signaling by flag hoists, a communications revolution. William, the younger—“as brave and cool as Julius Caesar,” his enemies said—rose to the army’s command by his heroism in the final Canadian victories of the French and Indian War and then at Bunker Hill, though after the strange fortune of that battle he became silent, overly cautious, and passionately addicted to games of chance by night. The brothers had long sat in Parliament as prominent Whigs. They loudly opposed the king’s American policy to his face and went to America reluctantly and only because the king had asked them to, while hinting that they might solve the conflict by peaceful negotiation—a hope that colonial secretary Lord George Germain soon dashed.20

  Charles Lee was right, of course: New York was indefensible, especially against the world’s mightiest navy. But Washington worried about how it would look to Congress and his fellow Americans—and to the French whose support Congress wooed—if he just gave up a major city without a shot.21 He knew how crucial morale and public opinion were: citizens had to believe that their cause was just and their army resolute.

  Thomas Paine had given a boost to the first in January 1776 with his best-selling Common Sense, forcefully arguing that while the constitution of England was admirable for the benighted times that produced it, “it is the republican and not the monarchical part of [it] which Englishmen glory in”—and that since George III has proved such a “hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh” who can “composedly sleep with [his American subjects’] blood upon his soul,” he has dispelled the last wisp of monarchy’s mystique of legitimacy, and has made American independence inevitable.22 In July, as the British fleet crowded into New York Harbor, the Declaration of Independence fulfilled Paine’s prophecy and justified the American cause in Jefferson’s eloquent, indignant prose. Washington, who had called Common Sense “sound doctrine” and had foreseen independence ever since Bunker Hill, had the Declaration read to his men on July 9, and told them that each man was “now in the service of a State, possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit, and advance him to the highest Honors of a free Country.”23

  As for proving the army determined, that was his job, and he set about strengthening the defenses Charles Lee had begun, putting barricades at the water’s edge, placing cannon, sinking wrecks in the rivers to obstruct British warships, and building twin forts facing each other on either side of the Hudson—Fort Washington and Fort Lee—to bar the Royal Navy from control of the river. But on July 12, to show the futility of these flimsy shields, two warships—the Phoenix and the Rose—blew through them effortlessly before “a brisk Wind & strong tide,” Washington reported, strafing the city for two hours with ceaseless cannon fire. As round shot rocketed down the smoke-filled streets and smashed through houses, New Yorkers panicked. The “Shrieks and Cries of these poor creatures running every way was truly distressing and I fear will have an unhappy effect on the Ears and Minds of our young and inexperienced Soldiery,” the General soberly wrote. Almost untouched by the American return fire—a British sailor tauntingly sat at one masthead the entire time—the two ships then anchored in the Tappan Zee, beyond American cannon range.24

  Now followed three months of cat and mouse all around New York, as the British stalked and pounced, and the Americans scurried wildly just out of reach (for the most part). On August 22, General Howe’s troops came ashore at Brooklyn’s Gravesend Bay, at the southwestern tip of Long Island, whose farm produce the British needed. Wrongly judging the maneuver a feint and expecting the main thrust against Manhattan, Washington countered the combined 22,000-man force of British regulars and Hessian mercenaries with 6,000 of his 19,000-man army, whom he stationed along Brooklyn Heights, at Long Island’s northwestern tip. When he realized his mistake, the novice commander in chief sent only 3,000 more men to Brooklyn, whom his subordinates ordered to hold the Heights of Guana (Gowanus Heights), a ridge farther south.

  Splitting their army into three parts, the British sent two north and the third, about 10,000 strong, on a long flanking loop to the northeast through the negligently unguarded Jamaica Pass. Surrounding the Americans on the ridge on August 27, the redcoats put them to flight when they burst out of the woods seemingly from everywhere, killing the rebels in cold blood and spitting some to trees with their bayonets. Four out of five Americans managed to sprint to Brooklyn Heights, though. With the rebels now squeezed up against the East River, and the Royal Navy poised to sail up behind them, General Howe thought the battle as good as won and, with what became habitual hesitation, decided to start tightening his siege in the morning and pluck his prize.25

  But as Howe dug his trenches closer, the weather changed. The wind backed to the northeast, barring his brother the admiral from
sailing into position behind the Americans. A cold rain began on the night of the twenty-eighth, soaking the soldiers to the skin and spreading illness to one American in four. Worried that dividing his force had imprudently left his 10,000 men in Manhattan also vulnerable, Washington decided to act fast. On the twenty-ninth, as the storm, now a fierce nor’easter, howled down the river, he moved to get his men out of Brooklyn, in secret and silence.26

  The Continental Army had some vividly colorful units. There were the Baltimore Independent Cadets, “composed of gentlemen of honour, family and fortune” (their commander wrote), who dressed themselves in “the most macaroni cocked hat” and scarlet coat with buff facings and gold buttons, but stripped down to fringed Indian hunting shirts when it came time to fight. There were the Philadelphia Associators, a quintessentially American, purely voluntary, self-financed militia, which Franklin had organized in 1747 to finesse Quaker Pennsylvania’s religious objection to an official military force. Mustered only in wartime and composed of all classes, they voted a uniform costing no more than ten shillings, to “level all distinctions,” and chose their officers by secret ballot, electing one of Philadelphia’s richest merchants, Colonel John Cadwalader, their commander, and painter Charles Willson Peale a company captain. But perhaps the most memorable unit of all was the Fourteenth Massachusetts, a regiment of oilskin-clad Marblehead fishermen and seamen—some of them Indians, some blacks (who ultimately composed 5 percent of the army). Under the taut command of their ship-owning colonel, John Glover, it was they who got Washington’s men to safety.27

  With Washington, on horseback, directing every moment of the embarkation, the troops mustered in strict silence on the Brooklyn shore after nightfall, communicating by hand signals as they filed into a motley fleet of boats gathered under pretense to preserve secrecy. Myriad campfires blazed on Brooklyn Heights, a piece of theater aimed at making the army appear settled in for the night. With craft laden almost to the gunwales, Glover’s mariners struggled with muffled oars against the tricky currents and strong wind, making up to a dozen crossings each of the river, some two-thirds of a mile wide at that point. As dawn neared on the thirtieth, “a very dense fog began to rise,” one officer recalled, so thick you could “scarcely discern a man at six yards’ distance”—a “providential occurrence,” the New Englanders concluded, shrouding the operation in invisibility until Washington stepped into the last boat and followed his 9,000 men to the safety of Manhattan. So ended the Battle of Long Island, the first battle he had fought in fourteen months as commander.28