by Ron Chernow
Until reinforcements arrived, Washington was woefully shorthanded. He had fewer than 9,000 men, with 2,000 too sick to enter combat. Meanwhile, he steeled himself for the advent of 17,000 German mercenaries who would form part of a gigantic expeditionary force—the largest of the eighteenth century—that might total 30,000 soldiers. When this first wave of ships grew visible from Manhattan, an armada of 110 warships and transport boats, the sight was impressive, almost dreamlike, to behold. “I could not believe my eyes,” Private Daniel McCurtin wrote after peering at the panoply of British power. “Keeping my eyes fixed at the very spot, judge you of my surprise when, in about ten minutes, the whole bay was full of shipping . . . I declare that I thought all London was afloat.”8
These were the same ships that had evacuated Boston in March and marked time in Halifax before sailing south to New York. Fortunately for Washington, this advance guard under Major General William Howe, his former nemesis from the siege, decided not to force the issue. Some British ships dropped anchor off Gravesend, Long Island, and newly arrived British soldiers camped on Staten Island, but no offensive action materialized. General Howe was biding his time until the bulk of the fleet, sailing from England under the command of his brother Richard, Admiral Viscount Howe, joined him in New York.
In general orders for July 2, Washington tried to rouse his untried men with impassioned words. He had a genius for exalting the mission of his army and enabling the men to see themselves, not as lowly grunts, but as actors on the stage of history. “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves . . . The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage . . . of this army.”9 That same morning an alarming incident occurred when five British men-of-war passed through the Narrows and seemed on course to attack patriot forts. Confronting this threat, the Continental Army reacted with notable esprit de corps. Colonel Samuel Blachley Webb wrote in his diary that “never did I see men more cheerful. They seem to wish the enemies’ approach.”10 Despite his uneasiness, Washington was encouraged by this spirited response, telling Hancock that “if the enemy make an attack, they will meet with a repulse as . . . an agreeable spirit and willingness for action seem to animate . . . the whole of our troops.”11 In the end the British ships approached no closer, and Washington concluded that General Howe had deferred action until his brother’s arrival. Thus far Washington had commanded the Continental Army for an entire year without engaging in a single battle, but he knew he would shortly experience his first decisive test.
AN UNWAVERING ADVOCATE of independence, Washington thought his compatriots would eventually come to share his belief. “My countrymen, I know, from their form of government and steady attachment heretofore to royalty, will come reluctantly into the idea of independency,” he wrote that spring. “But time and persecution brings many wonderful things to pass.”12 In May, to his delight, the Virginia Convention in Williamsburg favored independence, and his neighbor at Gunston Hall, George Mason, drew up an eloquent Declaration of Rights that featured the lines “That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights . . . among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”13 Thomas Jefferson would prune and shape these words to famous effect. Still another Virginian, Richard Henry Lee, introduced a congressional resolution on June 7 declaring “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.”14 On July 2 Congress approved Lee’s resolution, then spent the next two days haggling over the precise wording of the Declaration of Independence. The final text was approved on July 4. Congress had two hundred broadsides printed up and disseminated throughout the colonies.
On July 6 Hancock sent Washington a copy and asked him to have it read aloud to his army. The Declaration made the rebels’ treason official and reminded them of the unspeakable punishments the British government meted out for this offense. Only recently a British judge had handed down this grisly sentence to Irish revolutionaries: “You are to be drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, where you are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, for while you are still living your bodies are to be taken down, your bowels torn out and burned before your faces, your heads then cut off, and your bodies divided each into four quarters. ”15 The British proved more lenient to captured American officers, but Washington knew that treason was a capital crime and that he had passed the point of no return. Employing a vivid metaphor, he later said that he and his colleagues had fought “with halters about their necks.”16 In the event of defeat, Washington knew, he would be hanged as the chief culprit; he decided that he would “neither ask for nor expect any favor from his most gracious Majesty.”17 He contrived a plan to flee, if necessary, to lands he owned in the Ohio Country, telling Burwell Bassett that “in the worst event, they will serve for an asylum.”18
On July 8 Washington held in his hands a broadside of the Declaration of Independence for the first time and ordered his troops to gather on the common at six P.M. the next evening to hear it read aloud. In general orders for July 9, he previewed its contents by noting that Congress had declared “the United Colonies of North America” to be “free and independent states.”19 Lest this sound abstract, he underscored the practical significance for the average soldier, pointing out that each 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.”20 Among other things, Congress could now coin money and devise other lucrative incentives.
The troops rejoiced upon hearing the document. “The Declaration was read at the head of each brigade,” wrote Samuel Blachley Webb, “and was received with three huzzas by the troops.”21 Washington was gratified by the “hearty assent” of his men and their “warmest approbation” of independence.22 News of the Declaration elicited snide rebukes from the British side, one officer saying that it served to highlight “the villainy and the madness of these deluded people.”23
Reading of the document led to such uproarious enthusiasm that soldiers sprinted down Broadway afterward and committed an act of vandalism: they toppled the equestrian statue of George III at Bowling Green, decapitating it, then parading the head around town to the lilting beat of fifes and drums. The patriots made excellent use of the four thousand pounds of gilded lead in the statue, which were melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets. Washington was appalled by the disorder. Ever the strict parent, he told his men that while he understood their high spirits, their behavior had “so much the appearance of riot and want of order in the army” that he disapproved their actions and urged that in future they should be left to the “proper authority.”24 His reproach might have sounded priggish, but Washington wanted this revolution to be an orderly one, with due respect for property, and he refused to abide even the desecration of the king’s statue. He sounded rejuvenated by the Declaration, writing defiantly to Hancock on July 10 that should the British mount an attack, “they will have to wade through much blood and slaughter before they can carry any part of our works.”25
Such bravado proved premature. On the afternoon of July 12, propelled by a stiff breeze and a powerful tide, five British ships—the forty-gun Phoenix and the twenty-gun Rose, along with a schooner and two tenders—sailed toward the Battery. In their first test, American defenses failed miserably. Only half the artillerists manned their guns, and hundreds of gaping soldiers stood onshore transfixed by the enemy ships, as if attending a sporting regatta. It was an ominous sign for the still-amateurish Continental Army. Six patriots were killed in an artillery company under Captain Alexander Hamilton when their cannon exploded, possibly from defective training or from mishandling by intoxicated gunners.
Unscathed by steady fire from the Manhattan and New Jersey shores, the Phoenix and the Rose streamed up the Hudson River and pounded the urban population of New York with a terrif
ying two-hour cannonade that shrouded the city in smoke and panicked its occupants. The episode demonstrated the vulnerability to British warships of a town encircled by water. Attuned to the psychology of war, Washington saw with dismay that his soldiers were unnerved by the plight of overwrought civilians. Since his own early combat experience had been in frontier locations, this urban chaos was something altogether new for him. “When the men-of-war passed up the river,” Washington observed, “the shrieks and cries” of the women and children were “truly distressing and I fear will have an unhappy effect on the ears and minds of our young and inexperienced soldiery.”26 Afterward Washington tried to clear the city of remaining civilians to avoid a repetition of the episode. He was especially indignant at soldiers who had stood hypnotized by British ships bombarding the town. The next day Washington chastised them unsparingly: “Such unsoldierly conduct must grieve every good officer and give the enemy a mean opinion of the army . . . a weak curiosity at such a time makes a man look mean and contemptible.”27 Just as Washington feared, the British ships’ foray in the Hudson severed communications between New York and Albany and the strategically located upstate lakes.
Washington had gotten his first unforgettable taste of British sea power. Because of their speed and mobility, enemy ships could disappear, then surface anywhere, and they would keep him in suspense for the next seven years. As he would complain, “The amazing advantage the enemy derive from their ships and the command of the water keeps us in a state of constant perplexity.”28 On the evening of the Phoenix and Rose episode, Washington and his officers noticed that the appearance of a new ship, the Eagle, triggered delirious cheers from British soldiers aboard ships and encamped on Staten Island, and they deduced correctly that Admiral Richard Howe had arrived.
The Howe brothers, whose grandfather had been elevated to the peerage by King William III, boasted a blue-blooded pedigree that the young George Washington might have envied. Educated at Eton, befriended by King George III, they had become moderate Whig members of Parliament. Tall, well built, and graceful, the pleasure-loving General William Howe, forty-seven, had bold eyebrows, full lips, and a dusky complexion. He had fought bravely at Quebec in the French and Indian War and exposed himself to danger at Bunker Hill. He indulged the vices common to his class, especially gambling and whoring, and saw no reason why the American war should dampen his escapades. He took as his North American mistress the fetching Boston-born Elizabeth Lloyd Loring and made her husband, Joshua Loring, Jr., a commissary of prisoners. This opportunistic husband, content to be cuckolded, played the bawd for his wife, who became notorious as “the Sultana of the British army.”29 As one Loyalist writer said cynically, “Joshua had no objections. He fingered the cash, the general enjoyed madam.”30 Admiral Richard Howe, fifty, less of a bon vivant than his younger brother, had earned the nickname “Black Dick,” which referred to both his complexion and to his downcast nature. He was a somber man, thin-faced and tight-lipped, with a cool, somewhat forbidding gaze. So marked was his reticence that Horace Walpole described him as “silent as a rock.”31 For all that, he was a superb seaman, renowned for his courage, fighting spirit, and ethical standards.
As convinced believers in the British Empire and sympathetic to colonial grievances, the Howe brothers didn’t want to crush the patriots in a total war of annihilation. Still hopeful that their misguided American cousins could be restored to their senses, they came to North America bearing both peace and a sword. In the coming campaign, they would plot strategy with political as well as military considerations in mind.
On July 14, in their capacity as peace commissioners, the Howe brothers sent Lieutenant Philip Brown with a message for Washington. Backed by the intimidating presence of the British fleet, Richard Howe requested, in polite terms, a parley: “The situation in which you are placed and the acknowledged liberality of your sentiments, induce me very much to wish for an opportunity to converse with you on the subject of the commission with which I have the honor to be charged.”32 Washington tended to be skeptical of peace overtures as ruses used to “distract, divide, and create as much confusion as possible,” as he characterized them in the spring when he first heard that Britain might send commissioners.33
Lieutenant Brown’s boat was intercepted between Governors Island and Staten Island by three American boats, whose crews demanded to know his business. When Brown said that he had a letter for Washington, the Americans instructed him to stay put while they sought instructions onshore. The three American officers who came out to handle the situation—Henry Knox, Joseph Reed, and Samuel Blachley Webb—had been well coached by Washington. They told Brown that they refused to touch the letter until he told them to whom it was addressed. When Brown retorted that it was addressed to “George Washington Esq., etc. etc.,” they said no such person existed and they couldn’t receive it. Somewhat mystified, Brown asked to whom it should be addressed, and his interlocutors replied that “all the world knew who Gen[era]l Washington was since the transactions of last summer.”34 Brown tried to strike a conciliatory tone. “I am sure Lord Howe will lament exceedingly this affair, as the letter is quite of a civil nature and not a military one.”35 Thus ended the initial standoff.
Washington knew that this exchange involved much more than the fine points of decorum. He was now the de facto head of state of a newly minted country, and his treatment reflected the perceived legitimacy of his authority. “I would not upon any occasion sacrifice essentials to punctilio,” Washington explained to Hancock, “but in this instance . . . I deemed it a duty to my country . . . to insist upon that respect which in any other than a public view I would willingly have waived.”36 Lord Howe’s secretary, Ambrose Serle, grew hopping mad at Washington’s rebuff. “So high is the vanity and the insolence of these men! . . . There now seems no alternative but war and bloodshed, which must lay at the door of these unhappy people.”37
Washington suspected that the British would renew their entreaty, and on July 16 he spurned another letter addressed to “George Washington, Esq.” Serle again gnashed his teeth, remarking that the letter “was refused for the same idle and insolent reasons as were given before.”38 His remark shows the condescending attitude of at least some British commanders toward Washington. Referring to him as if he were still a youthful subaltern in the French and Indian War, Serle sneered that “it seems to be beneath a little paltry colonel of militia at the head of banditti or rebels to treat with the representative of his lawful sovereign because ’tis impossible for him to give all the titles which the poor creature requires.”39 Washington planned to teach the British a lesson. They finally sent him a letter on July 17, addressed to “His Excellency, General Washington,” with a request that he meet with Lieutenant Colonel James Paterson, the smooth-talking adjutant general of General William Howe. Believing that protocol had been satisfied, Washington agreed to meet with the British officer on July 20. He chose as his venue Henry Knox’s headquarters at 1 Broadway, near the water; if a spot deeper inside the city had been chosen, he would have needed to blindfold Paterson, and he didn’t care to demean him in that manner.
At noon on July 20 a barge arrived at the Battery with Colonel Paterson. Washington wanted to impress upon the British emissary that, as commander in chief of a sovereign nation, he should be treated with all due dignity. His personal guard lined up in crisp formation at the entrance, and Washington appeared in full battlefield regalia, leading Knox to tell his wife that the general was “very handsomely dressed and made a most elegant appearance.”40 The stagecraft had the desired effect upon Paterson, who “appeared awestruck, as if he was before something supernatural,” wrote Knox. “Indeed, I don’t wonder at it. He was before a great man indeed.”41 Paterson groveled considerably and prefaced every sentence with “May it please your Excellency” or “If your Excellency so pleases.”42 Washington exacted revenge for previous indignities. When Paterson laid on the table the original letter from Richard Howe, addressed to “George Washi
ngton Esq. etc. etc.,” Washington wouldn’t pick it up and balked at the et ceteras. Paterson explained that the et ceteras implied everything that might follow. To which Washington retorted, “It does so—and anything! ”43 He was suavely implacable before Paterson’s studied servility.
At this point Paterson launched into a prepared speech about how the goodness and benevolence of the king had induced him to send the Howe brothers to reach an accommodation with the unhappy colonists, this meeting being the first step. Washington denied that he was vested with powers to negotiate a settlement. Then he showed what a deft diplomat he could be. According to Joseph Reed’s memo, he argued that the Howe brothers had only the power “to grant pardons; that those who had committed no fault wanted no pardon; that we were only defending what we deemed our indisputable rights.”44 Paterson acknowledged that this opened a wide field for discussion. Washington remained polite, treating him with impeccable courtesy and even inviting him “to partake of a small collation” before he returned to his ship.45 He was always careful to separate the personal from the political, the man from the mission. If the British had hoped to mollify Washington, their diplomatic overture failed. The same day that he received Colonel Paterson, Washington wrote to Colonel Adam Stephen and decried “the vile machinations of still viler ministerial agents.”46 Two days later he dismissed the peace efforts of the Howe brothers as a mere propaganda exercise calculated expressly “to deceive and unguard, not only the good people of our own country, but those of the English nation that were averse to the proceedings of the king and ministry.”47 Once Washington had set his sights on independence, his vision was unblinking, and his consistency proved one of his most compelling qualities.
