by Logan Beirne
Washington was ardent in the defense of his men. He made it clear that if the British continued to abuse Allen and carry out their plans to hang him, Prescott would suffer for it. And this more extreme stance likely saved Allen’s life: although the British repeatedly threatened to hang Allen without trial, when rumors reached England that Prescott was being dreadfully abused and would likely be killed if they executed Allen, King George III took notice. He ordered that Allen be sent back for a fair trial.6 After Allen arrived in America, Washington secured his release in exchange for a captured British colonel, and he commended Allen for his fortitude and “enthusiastic zeal.”7
General Washington’s hard-line view on the treatment of enemy captives was not reserved for captured British troops. At a time when American courts were sentencing Tories to brandings and Continental Army troops purportedly executed surrendering Loyalist soldiers, Washington also condoned at least some of this conduct.8 After word reached New York City that the Americans’ invasion of Canada had been repelled, there was a great uptick in the “bitterness of feeling already shown towards the loyalists.”9 Tensions boiled over one balmy June night when patriots hauled Tories into the streets “with candles forced to be held by them, or pushed in their faces, and their heads burned.”10 By Wednesday of that same week, the riots continued in broad daylight throughout downtown Manhattan.
Pastor Shewkirk, viewing the pandemonium from his Moravian Church, chronicled the “unhappy and shocking scenes” in his diary. He reported witnessing several Tories being made to “ride the rails,” a practice in which a victim was forced to straddle a sharp metal rail that was hoisted onto patriots’ shoulders. They paraded through the streets, the victim wincing as the rail cut into his legs and groin. “Some were stripped naked and dreadfully abused.”11
Israel Putnam, a stout, burly American major general affectionately called “Old Put” by his troops, confronted one such procession. Known for his reckless courage and fighting spirit, he was nevertheless appalled by the abuse and would not stand for it. The rotund leader condemned his fellow patriots’ behavior and dispersed the angry mob. Surprisingly, however, Washington reprimanded Old Put for doing so.
While the commander would not order that Loyalists be abused—they were Americans, after all—he would not necessarily stop others from doing so. Washington scolded Old Put, arguing that “to discourage such proceedings was to injure the cause of liberty in which they were engaged, and that nobody would attempt it but an enemy of his country.”12 Washington’s arguments justifying abuse sharpened further as the war went on and the Americans’ desperation increased.
Following the standstill at Boston, the British evacuated. In what was perhaps the most memorable Boston Saint Patrick’s Day parade, the redcoats marched down the city’s streets on March 17, 1776, and onto their cannon-laden ships. Howe retreated to Canada and the Americans rejoiced. Spontaneous celebrations erupted. Rum spilled into the streets of Boston to the sound of fife and drum.
But Washington knew better. He foresaw darker days ahead. Like many others, he predicted that New York City would be Howe’s next target. In light of Britain’s naval supremacy, the location was indefensible from the American military’s perspective. “What to do with the city?” asked Washington and his officers. “. . . It is so encircled with deep navigable waters that whoever commands the sea must command the town.”13 While the British had over one hundred men-of-war in their worldwide armada, the Americans had zero. These were not good statistics for defending an island. But America and its political leaders expected a defense of the city, and the commander obliged. He marched with the Continental Army for over two hundred miles down from Boston to occupy Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Washington began to brace for the impending attack, ordering that his troops erect elaborate forts and dig trenches throughout the area. After months of toil, the Americans watched in dread as the British armada approached the city. But with his army in good health and good spirits, Washington tried to stay optimistic. Having chased the British from Boston, he hoped that he could repel their superior firepower and numbers again. He believed that the righteousness of the revolutionary cause would make the Americans formidable fighters even if they lacked experience and training. “Let us therefore animate and encourage each other,” he declared, “and show the whole world that a freeman, contending for his liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.”14 America was drunk with confidence.
It was at this time, July 1776, that America was officially born. At the outset of hostilities in Massachusetts a year earlier, only the radicals had wanted independence while most of the colonists hoped for reunification. But after a year of fighting, reconciliation became impossible in the face of the British atrocities and America’s surging patriotism. Thomas Paine, a recent immigrant from Britain, wrote a stunning essay calling for an American republic to break from the British monarchy. This bestselling pamphlet, Common Sense, galvanized public support for independence and convinced the colonists that “The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth” than their revolution.15 In response, the congressmen decided to do something of which they became rather fond: they appointed a committee.
This five-man committee was tasked with drafting a statement justifying the colonies’ break from their mother country. Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant thirty-three-year-old attorney from Virginia, took the lead. He was a man of striking contrasts. Born into one of Virginia’s most distinguished families, he could be rather elitist at times but nevertheless fancied himself fiercely egalitarian and even sneered at the mention of aristocratic blood.16 He took obsessive notes, including each day’s barometric pressure and the minute details of his vegetable garden, but somehow lost track of his own debts to his wine distributor. He was a rather humorless intellectual, yet one of his favorite books was Don Quixote.17
Jefferson enjoyed the privilege of a classical liberal education, studying philosophy, language, science, history, law, and the classics. He loved to learn almost any subject, although he complained while studying ethics and metaphysics.18 After his formal schooling ended, he read ravenously throughout his life. His genius was seemingly limitless: besides being a lawyer and statesman, he was also an architect, geographer, scientist, inventor, naturalist, agriculturalist, fiddler, and philologist—to name just a few of his “hobbies.”19 Although his looks improved with age, as a youth he was described as “certainly not handsome, and in order to establish his social attractiveness, his friends f[e]ll back on ‘his countenance, so highly expressive of intelligence and benevolence.’”20 With his freckles, sandy hair, long gangly limbs, and soft-spoken demeanor, Jefferson appeared to his fellow congressmen as more of a nerdy youth than a powerful politician. But whatever he lacked in public presence, he more than compensated with his mighty pen.
With only a couple of weeks and a busy schedule, Jefferson pretty much threw the Declaration of Independence together. Downplaying his masterpiece, he later wrote, “Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind.”21 His Declaration eloquently outlined America’s grievances against King and Parliament, making a rousing case for the colonies’ natural right to throw off the bonds of tyranny. But the Continental Congress decided to table it.
Fierce debate ensued, with multiple colonies initially rejecting the call for immediate independence. But Congress finally voted in favor of officially breaking from the British Empire on July 2, 1776. One delegate prophesied: “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. . . . It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”22 But the fastidious delegates wanted to make some edits to Jefferson’s draft, so they did not adopt the Declaration of Independence until two days later. And hence,
even though July 2 marked the day of the official vote for independence, July 4 stuck in the national consciousness as the United States’ birthday.
The nation was born into the jaws of an angry lion. The British were not as pleased with the Declaration of Independence as the Americans were. They saw it as outrageously treasonous and were determined to squash the rebellion. They invaded.
Howe’s troops landed in Brooklyn in the heat of late August 1776. He faced the scattered American force, which was little more than a mob, untrained and underequipped. Most had “nothing but a wretched farmer’s costume and a weapon.”23 In contrast, the British troops were well equipped and had five or six times as much military experience. Typically in their late twenties, they were about five years older on average than America’s army of “beardless boys.”24 The British promptly routed the Americans, sending them recoiling back to the banks of the East River. Here, lacking a navy, the Americans were trapped with no avenue of retreat. The Revolution was nearly ended right then, as Washington’s Continental Army stared in the face of annihilation.
In a fortuitous twist, the prevailing winds shifted. Unusually for August, a large storm brought strong northerly winds that made it impossible for Howe’s ships to sail up the East River. But Howe was patient, perhaps overly so. The British troops in Brooklyn set up camp for the night, fully confident that they would destroy Washington’s forces when the winds shifted again in the morning. The Americans hunkered down in their trenches, miserable in the pouring rain, dreading the inevitable bloodbath. Ominous booms of thunder mingled with those of British mortars in signaling the doom of the coming onslaught. Washington, with hardly any sleep in days, must have been gut-wrenchingly distressed by his army’s plight, but he did not show it. He maintained his outwardly cool composure and made his rounds to assess the situation. After much deliberation, he decided he had no option but to retreat.
In a bold maneuver, Washington ordered his men to commandeer every small ship they could find for a stealthy withdrawal across the river. But his plan quickly went awry when the sailors determined that the waters were too choppy to ferry the men and equipment across. And so the stoic general waited in Brooklyn, hoping for a break in the storm. When one of Washington’s officers reported that retreat would be impossible that night, all seemed lost. But in another bizarre turn of fate that many would later call divine intervention, the winds suddenly shifted at around eleven that night, allowing passage.
Washington rode his horse through the downcast camps, instructing his regiments on the clandestine mission. “All orders were given from officer to officer,” one soldier explained, “and communicated to the men in whispers.”25 The soldiers, “strictly enjoined not to speak, or even cough,” silently filed into the boats.26 Washington’s team of Massachusetts fishermen and sailors put their experience navigating New England’s perilous waters to amazing use, as the makeshift armada silently ferried thousands of men across the rough river all night. 27 The howling winds and choppy seas masked the sounds of their escape from the unsuspecting British crouched in their trenches nearby.
But as the sun rose, Washington feared his time was up. He had left hundreds of his men at the front line so as not to alert the British to the withdrawal. These decoys had no backup nor any means of escape should the British pounce in the morning light. But in a final “peculiar providential occurrence . . . a very dense fog began to rise, and it seemed to settle in a peculiar manner over both encampments” in Brooklyn while miraculously leaving much of the river and Manhattan clear for the Americans to escape.28 Under this cover of fog, Washington remained in Brooklyn, fearlessly rounding up the last troops onto the boats. The fog lifted and the winds shifted later that morning, allowing the British ships to complete their trap. But they were too late: their prey had escaped.
Although Washington’s main force had slipped away, the British were not left empty-handed. From the Battle of Brooklyn and subsequent victories, Howe greedily collected thousands of captives. The British now had plenty of hapless American prisoners at their disposal, on whom they “took a most cruel revenge. Out of over 2600 prisoners taken on [one] day, in two months & four days 1900 were killed in the infamous sugar houses and other prisons in the city, [perishing] of hunger, cold, infection, and in some cases, actual poison.”29 This mass slaughter was overseen by a sadistic Loyalist named William Cunningham.
Howe appointed Captain Cunningham, a man “whose cruelty and wickedness [were] almost inconceivable,”30 to serve as provost marshal in command of Britain’s prisons in the area. Described as “a man of great physical powers, and of fine personal appearance,”31 Cunningham was placed in the post as a reward for his “blatant toryism.”32
This native of the Ninety-Six District in the backwoods of South Carolina possessed quite a vicious streak. A “scaw-banker” by trade, Cunningham had made his living by “enticing mechanics and rustics to ship to America, on promise of having their fortunes made in that country; and then by artful practices, produced their indentures as servants, in consequence of which on their arrival in America they were sold.”33 After his return from the seas, his “fiend-like disposition” only intensified. Once, upon receiving word that a man had insulted his elderly father, Cunningham walked nearly four hundred miles from Florida back home to South Carolina with a rifle on his shoulder and “his blood on fire.” Arriving at the offender’s house, Cunningham barged in and shot him in front of his own family. It was here that he “first tasted blood; and like the tiger, the taste created a thirst which could never be quenched.” Cunningham formed a band of merciless Tory “blood-hounds” who roamed the South, massacring any patriots they could find, even torturing those who had retired to civilian life.34
Once he was promoted to the command of the prison camps in New York City, “Bloody Bill” Cunningham’s cruelty and bloodlust knew no bounds. The tortures he inflicted on the American prisoners became infamous throughout the colonies.35 In order to “gratify his bloodthirsty instincts,”36 Cunningham made his captives suffer horribly. One such prisoner described finding himself “among the collection of the most wretched and disgusting looking objects that I ever beheld in human form . . . surrounded with the horrors of sickness, and death. Here thought I, must I linger . . . til death should terminate my sufferings.” 37 And Cunningham was happy to assist with the dying part.
Bloody Bill openly confessed to being an accessory to thousands of murders as provost marshal, “both with and without orders from Government.” He admitted that “there were more than two thousand prisoners starved . . . by stopping their rations,” which he sold for his own profit.38 He used this ill-gotten profit to pay for the “drunken orgies that usually terminated his dinners.”39 For those prisoners who were able to subsist on the meager nourishment left over after Cunningham’s greed was satiated, many “fell victim to his murderous violence.”40
Cunningham’s “hatred of Americans found vent in torture by searing irons and secret scourges to those who fell under the ban of his displeasure.”41 Others “were hanged in the gloom of night without trial”42 while their “ferocious murderer” indulged in “the pleasure of hearing their shrieks of agony at the gallows.”43 The bodies were either buried in ditches or simply dumped into the harbor.
So grotesque were the accounts that Washington commissioned a special envoy to investigate their truthfulness. When questioned, Cunningham put his hands on his hips and “with great insolence answered every word was true.”44 Washington felt powerless to stop his countrymen’s suffering, and confided to his brother, “I am wearied almost to death with the retrograde Motions of things.”45 With the American cause on the brink of defeat, Washington lashed out.
He swiftly shot off a warning to General Howe:I am again under the necessity of remonstrating to you upon the Treatment which our prisoners continue to receive in New York. Those, who have lately been sent out, give the most shocking Accounts of their barbarous usage, which their Miserable, emaciated Countenances confi
rm. . . . [I]f you are determined to make Captivity as distressing as possible, to those whose Lot it is to fall into it, let me know it, that we may be upon equal terms, for your Conduct must and shall mark mine.46
Washington was going to protect his compatriots, and if that meant threatening—and potentially applying—Cunningham’s own gruesome tactics, so be it.
11
Fully Justifiable
The tension over prisoner treatment escalated when Washington’s jealous second-in-command,1 Major General Charles Lee, was captured by the British. Sloppy in appearance and crude in manner, Lee was reputed to have a sex life “of the transient kind.”2 And it played right into British hands: Lee was caught after leaving his army behind for an evening of “female sociability” at Widow White’s Tavern in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.3
The eccentric Charles Lee was born into an unhappy home in Cheshire, England. The son of a British officer, he served in his father’s regiment starting at the shockingly young age of eleven.4 Although he was never properly socialized, he grew into a shrewd tactician as he fought for the British all over the world. Unlike Washington, he distinguished himself enough in the Seven Years’ War to warrant promotion in the British ranks. Returning to Europe, he continued his successful military career in wars from Portugal to Poland.
Lee was a man who made enemies quickly. On one such occasion, he took umbrage at an Italian officer’s comments, grabbed his gun, and challenged the offender to a duel. In the end, he lost two fingers and killed the Italian.5 Lee’s “warmth of temper” resulted in many similar encounters while he battled his way across the continent.6
As the colonists and Britain headed down their collision course during the early 1770s, Lee grew ever more sympathetic to the patriots’ loudening calls for liberty. He left the battles of Europe behind and returned to America in 1773 to set up a farm in Virginia. But his quiet life as a farmer was short. When war broke out in 1775, Lee leapt into the fray. He was not one to shy away from a fight.
