Washington's General

by Terry Golway

  The new army was designed to be more stable and more professional than the undependable collection of militia that had borne the fight thus far. The one-year enlistment assured the generals that their regiments would not slip away one night or walk away from camp with weapons in hand. It went without saying that there would be problems on New Year’s Eve, 1776, when the new enlistments were up, but Washington, Greene, and the other generals had their sights set on more immediate problems.

  Greene continued to enforce strict discipline at the most minute level. He banned card games, which must have seemed like cruel and unusual punishment for bored soldiers working the interminable siege. His reasoning was simple: “[Playing cards] brings on a Habit of Drinking; and the Habit of Drinking [leads to] Disputes and Quarrels, disorder and Confusion which disturbs the Peace and Tranquility of the Camp, and often proves fatal to Individuals.” The last phrase suggests that Greene’s rigid discipline was necessary in a camp filled with well-armed men with little to do.

  His days were spent among the men, his nights at his desk writing letters long and short to friends and colleagues. Greene had been in camp since April, and the effects of hard work, fatigue, and camp life were beginning to show. His stomach was constantly upset, and in late January he developed jaundice. He asked Washington for permission to return home to recuperate, but his request was denied. Washington once again was pressing his generals for their consent in an attack on Boston, before spring allowed the British to reinforce their garrison. So, instead of submitting himself to the comfort of his now very pregnant wife in Coventry, Greene rested, or tried to rest, in his quarters on Prospect Hill. “I am as yellow as saffron, my appetite all gone, and my flesh too,” he told his brother Jacob. “I am so weak that I can scarcely walk across the room.” When Caty got wind of her husband’s illness, she immediately left Rhode Island and set out for camp on Feburary 20. While the precise date isn’t known, she had just recently given birth to their first child, a boy they named George Washington Greene.

  Caty had been to camp at least once before little George was born, so she was used to the sights and smells of an army of thousands camped in open fields. She had met, or would soon meet, some of the army’s leading commanders, including His Excellency, the commander in chief. Not one to turn away from a pretty face, Washington teased young Caty about her “Quaker-preacher” husband and seemed completely charmed. Other officers were similarly taken with Caty’s looks, high spirits, and almost scandalous preference for the company of men–and not, save for Martha Washington, the wives of other generals. The women in camp took note that General Greene never seemed to go to church when his wife was in camp, and wasn’t that so very interesting?

  Under Caty’s care, Greene recovered quickly, and soon the yellow drained from his face. The American army was recovering, too. Troop strength approached eighteen thousand, but its hue was unchanged. Still green, Washington’s new troops were about to attack Boston, or at least that was the plan until more cautious generals advised against it. An exasperated Washington devised another plan: if he couldn’t attack the British, he could at least make the British attack him. Artillery from New York’s Fort Ticonderoga soon rolled, a miracle made possible by Henry Knox’s men. Washington decided to put the artillery to immediate use: the Americans would seize Dorchester Heights, overlooking the British positions from the south. General Howe would have no choice but to attack, a prospect Washington welcomed. Greene and his fellow generals Israel Putnam, John Sullivan, and Horatio Gates were ordered to devise a plan to take the heights.

  On the night of March 4, American artillery opened fire on Boston for the third night in a row. Amid the smoke and sound, some two thousand American troops moved on Dorchester Heights, spending the overnight hours digging and fortifying. By dawn on March 5, Washing-ton’s men had built two forts and four well-armed strongholds. The British position in Boston was no longer tenable–the Americans could bombard them at will.

  Howe had spent the last few weeks making plans to end the siege unilaterally by evacuating the smallpox-ridden city. But Washington’s display of aggression infuriated him, and he ordered his troops to prepare to storm the heights. Before they could, however, a late-winter storm blew in, and Howe changed his mind. After negotiations with Washington carried out under a flag of truce, the British began their leave-taking, sailing out of Boston in mid-March, with the last troops leaving on March 17. The long siege was over; the Americans were victorious.

  Washington entered the city on March 18, and two days later, he named his youngest general, Nathanael Greene, as military commander of the city. Showing that he certainly had learned practical lessons about military life during his short career as a general, Greene ordered the deputy quartermasters to “draw Beer for the Troops.” Nathanael Greene’s first campaign was over.

  5 The Dark Part of Night

  There was little time to savor the recovery of battered Boston. Those thousands of British troops who had sailed out of the harbor in mid-March were heading somewhere, and Nathanael Greene believed he knew the final destination: New York City.

  It was a hunch, but it made sense. A glance at a map was all the evidence Greene needed. An army in control of New York could control the Hudson River–or, as it was called at the time, the North River–the most strategic waterway in the thirteen colonies. An army that mastered the Hudson could master America, because the river neatly divided New England, the seat of the rebellion, from the remaining colonies. Months earlier, Greene anticipated that the British eventually would make a move on the city. New York, he wrote, was of “Vast Importance to the Enimy” because it allowed the British waterborne access to Canada via Lake George and Lake Champlain in northern New York. For that reason, Greene said, keeping New York out of British hands was vital to the “General success of our Arms.”

  So Greene knew his command in Boston would be short-lived. But for a few days at least, he allowed himself a few distractions. Caty still was with him, after rushing to camp when he was ill with jaundice. The couple dined with several prominent Bostonians in late March and joined Washington and the other American generals for a banquet at the Bunch of Grapes–a famous patriot gathering spot–on March 28. Life suddenly was a good deal more pleasant that it had been in the hills overlooking the city, and Caty delighted in the socializing and the attention of His Excellency and all the other Continental officers in their fine dress uniforms. The parties and dinners offered Caty a fleeting glimpse of life as it might have been, before the war, before her husband left home for the battlefield. Reality, however, was just outside the door. The suffering city of Boston, ravaged by smallpox, occupation, and siege, stared at Caty with hollow eyes.

  Her husband would make sure that his troops did not add to the city’s burdens, as he once again showed that he had little patience with disorder and lack of discipline. On March 27, he issued a sternly worded order promising to punish not only those troops found guilty of plundering the city but even those who condoned such misbehavior with their silence or inaction: “If any should be base enough to commit any Acts of Plunder and attempt to conceal the Effects, their messmates . . . will be considered an accessary to the Crime and . . . will be punished accordingly.” Greene also lectured the troops–not for the first time–about indecent language, “it being ungenerous, unmanly and unsoldier like.” Victory had added a swagger to the step of the American soldiers, and they deployed all manner of colorful phrases to harass Bostonians who had remained in the city during the siege. Many of them were Tories or neutral, and Greene saw them not as enemies but as fellow Americans, however misguided. He forbade his soldiers to insult “any of the Inhabitants with the Odious Epithets of Tory.” Such sensitivity would become a hallmark of Greene’s relations with loyalist or neutral civilians.

  His tenure as Boston’s commander ended on March 29, when Washington ordered him to march toward New York at sunrise on April 1 with a brigade of five regiments. Washington was determined to get to New
York before the British did, and when he received word from Rhode Island governor Nicholas Cooke that the British fleet had been spotted off Newport, he told Greene to move as quickly and as unencumbered as possible. Greene dutifully dispatched word to his troops that no “Tables, Chairs, or Useless Luggage is to Go on board the Waggons that may Impede” the march.

  The urgency was not necessary; Cooke’s information was wrong. The fleet carrying Howe’s troops actually was sailing to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to refit. Cooke’s informant had thought he saw sails in the distance off Newport; in fact, he saw rolling banks of clouds and fog. Armed with the new, and correct, intelligence, Greene slowed the pace of his march, arriving in Providence on April 4. The following day, Greene’s brigade turned out to welcome and salute General Washington as he passed through the city on his way to New York. Greene’s troops were conspicuously well dressed and well groomed for the occasion; Greene had instructed them “to be Washed . . . [with] their hair combd and powdered, and their arms Cleand.” Greene rode beside the commander in chief as the citizens of Providence cheered the troops and their generals.

  After delivering Caty to Coventry, Greene resumed his journey to New York, boarding a troopship in New London that took him to Long Island on April 17. The British were nowhere in sight; the Americans had won the race for the city. Now, however, they would have to defend it. A few weeks after their arrival, Washington showed just how impressed he was with the young general from Rhode Island. He named Greene as commander of the American forces on Long Island, across the East River from Manhattan. With barely a year’s experience in uniform, Greene was given the task of preparing for an invasion they all knew was coming. It was a telling display of Washington’s confidence in him.

  Greene inherited a series of fortifications laid out earlier in the year by his eccentric friend Charles Lee, whom Washington had sent to Long Island even before Boston fell. The hills in the area of modern-day Brooklyn Heights offered a commanding position over the East River and New York City, concentrated then in what is now downtown Manhattan. Properly fortified, that position would be the key to protecting the city. An invasion from the west, from the Hudson River, was unlikely because the shoreline’s rocky palisades would make a landing difficult. Even if the British were to run the gauntlet of American defenses on the heights and take possession of Manhattan, Lee wrote, “they will find it almost impossible to subsist” if the Americans continued to possess Long Island.

  Still, even the usually confident Lee found himself at wit’s end trying to defend an area so vulnerable to naval assault. “What to do with the city, I own, puzzles me,” he told Washington. “It is so encircled with deep, navigable water, that whoever commands the sea must command the town.” Left unsaid was the sad but undeniable fact that the Americans had no navy to speak of.

  Before he could complete the works, Lee was transferred to Charleston, South Carolina, the target of an early British thrust in the South. Lee believed the civilians in Congress had sent him in the wrong direction; he was, he told Washington, better suited to the ongoing American effort in Canada. After all, he noted, “[I am] the only General Officer on the Continent who can speak and think in French.”

  Another eccentric American officer, Colonel William Alexander, replaced Lee and continued the work until Greene took over. Alexander was a debt-ridden aristocrat from New Jersey who preferred to be called by another, decidedly unrepublican name: Lord Stirling. Years before, Alexander had claimed the title through his father, a lawyer from Scotland. Ironically, the British House of Lords refused to recognize Alexander’s claim to an earldom. His friends in the American army, however, were happy to accord him the title, and so he was referred to as Lord Stirling in all army correspondence.

  The American defensive line on Long Island extended from Red Hook to Brooklyn Heights, looking out on Flatbush and much of today’s south Brooklyn. To the rear was the East River, and across the river on Manhattan was Washington’s headquarters. Thrilled to be given such weighty responsibility, Greene immersed himself in the details of his new command. His orders during the early weeks of May reflected the array of responsibilities that went beyond merely supervising the work of building trenches and fortifications. The mastery of detail that would serve him well throughout the war was evident in the flow of paper from his headquarters. He instructed his quartermaster to find more straw for the troops’ bedding; he ordered three hundred spears and a grindstone (the spears were handed out to men whose weapons were under repair); he reminded the troops to observe a day of fasting and prayer on May 16 in accordance with the will of Congress; and he ordered that when his men gave the day’s password to sentries, they should do so “softly,” as if “the Enemy was Encamped in this Neighbourhood.” The enemy was nowhere near the neighborhood, of course, but Greene noted that such discipline was necessary in order to avoid “bad habits” when the invasion finally took place.

  Added to these time-consuming but necessary responsibilities was the never-ending chore of maintaining order in camp. Local residents complained to Greene that the troops were ruining their “Meadow Grounds” in their search for food, and so the general told his men to “gather Greens” elsewhere. Even more provocative were civilian complaints that Greene’s men were often spotted swimming nude in a nearby pond. Greene dictated an order so filled with prudish rage it’s hard to imagine that he wasn’t smiling as he spoke.

  Complaints Having Been made . . . that Some of the Soldiers . . . Come out of the Water and Run up Naked to the Houses with a Design to Insult and Wound the Modesty of female decency . . . the General finds Himself under the Disagreeable Necessity of Expressing His disapprobation of such a Beastly Conduct. . . . Where is the Modesty, Virtue and Sobriety of the New England People for which they have been so Remarkable? Have the Troops Come Abroad for No Other Purpose than to Render themselves both Obnoxious and [Ridiculous]?

  Greene was not one to take civilian opinion lightly–in a previous order, he had told the men to “behave themselves toward the Inhabitants”–but if he never followed up on the complaints of naked soldiers offending female decency, it may have been with intent. Many of the civilians on Long Island were suspected of loyalist sympathies so their sensitivities would not have been Greene’s top priority. That was true in New York as well; in fact, Greene’s friend Henry Knox had made note of the city’s political views during a visit there several months before. In a letter to his wife, Lucy, Knox condemned not only the “profaneness” of New Yorkers (it was “intolerable,” he said) but also “their Toryism, which is insufferable, and for which they must repent in dust and ashes.” The royal governor of New York, William Tryon, still commanded the loyalties of many influential New Yorkers.

  What a contrast between the citizens of New York and those of Greene’s native state. On May 4, the Rhode Island legislature and Governor Cooke renounced their allegiance to King George. Although the lawmakers did not necessarily declare Rhode Island independent of Britain, that is how many people, Greene included, interpreted their action. To Governor Cooke, Greene wrote: “Tis nobly done. God prosper you, and crown your endeavours with success.”

  New York was not an easily defended city. There were enemies within, including the city’s mayor, who was implicated in a Tory plot to assassinate Washington. And before long, the Americans could expect to see a mighty armada sailing into New York Harbor, with ships filled with thousands of His Majesty’s best troops. It was hard to believe the Americans could somehow prevail. Nevertheless, Washington and his generals, along with the civilian leadership in Congress, agreed that such a vital city could not simply be conceded to the enemy.

  Greene continued to fortify Brooklyn, supervising construction of five forts along the line. One of them, on the American left flank, was christened Fort Greene, a Brooklyn place-name that has survived to this day. In early June, Greene crossed the East River by ferry to join Henry Knox for a tour of northern Manhattan to inspect the army’s prospective line of retreat. G
reene and Knox, already friendly, grew closer during these weeks of frantic preparation. Their wives joined them in New York, and the two couples spent several evenings in each other’s company, often at Knox’s headquarters at the southern end of Broadway in Manhattan or in the uptown quarters of George and Martha Washington. There were times when Knox must have wondered what his friend Greene saw in Caty, other than her undeniable beauty. A man of books who was as devoted to self-improvement as Greene, Knox had trouble hiding his distaste for his friend’s twenty-one-year-old wife, who seemed unserious and light. It’s less certain how Lucy Knox felt about her frequent companion; their relationship apparently blew hot and cold through the years of war and winter camps. Lucy was nearly as portly as her stout husband, in contrast to Caty, whose beauty and figure continued to beguile Greene’s colleagues.

  If Caty noticed Knox’s disapproving glances, she didn’t let it interfere with her fun. The drudgery of domestic life and her suffocating in-laws were miles away, and that suited her just fine. She was very much at ease in this highly masculine world, all smiles and light patter, an incorrigible and vivacious flirt. Other wives whispered about her disregard for convention–who did she think she was, daring to flirt with His Excellency? But her husband stood by her, enjoying her company as much as she did his (and that of his friends). One afternoon in mid-June, Greene brought Caty along for a tour of the Long Island shore, where they looked through a telescope out into the vast reaches of New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean. One day soon, the horizon would be filled with masts and sails, and it would be time for Caty to leave.