by Jack Kelly
* * *
Commanding Forts Lee and Washington, which straddled the Hudson at the north end of Manhattan, Nathanael Greene had anticipated his superior’s concern. He had directed his men to establish a string of supply depots on the road to Philadelphia, which ran south through Newark to Brunswick, then straight across the state to Trenton, which lay a day’s march from the capital. It was the type of initiative and foresight that heightened Washington’s confidence in the young general.
That confidence was about to be put to the test. The British had proven they could run ships up the Hudson past the guns overlooking the river. Howe’s army was now ranging north of Manhattan. Yet Greene still insisted that Fort Washington be held. He figured the British would never dare to thrust into New Jersey with an armed post at their rear. If they besieged Fort Washington, it would take them until December at the earliest to prevail against its high dirt walls and guns. If worse came to worst, Greene could easily ferry the garrison across the river.
Washington was not so sure. When more British ships slipped up the river in early November, he wrote to Greene, “If we cannot prevent vessels passing up, and the Enemy are possessed of the surrounding country, what valuable purpose can it answer” to hold the fort? Then he conceded, “But, as you are on the Spot, I leave it to you.” Greene was confident. “I can not conceive the garrison to be in any great danger,” he wrote back. “The men may be brought off at any time.”12
Within days, Howe was massing fourteen thousand troops around upper Manhattan. In response, Greene sent more men across the river from New Jersey, bringing the total American force around Fort Washington to 2,800. This was reckless folly, but Greene could not see it. The immediate commander of the fort, Colonel Robert Magaw encouraged Greene in his error. “We have labored like Horses and completed a Fort said to be one of the Strongest in America,” he boasted.13 A thirty-five-year-old bachelor lawyer from the Pennsylvania frontier, Magaw loved to fight. But like Greene, he had only been soldiering for a year. Both men consulted wishes rather than reality in assessing the situation.
On November 13, Washington arrived to look over the terrain in person. He would later speak of “warfare in my mind,” but he did not countermand Greene’s strategy. Two days later, catching up on paperwork at his headquarters in Hackensack, the commander received an urgent message. The British, under a flag of truce, had delivered Magaw a demand to surrender Fort Washington in two hours. If he refused, all the defenders would be put to the sword. Such threats were traditional intimidation tactics in sieges and were allowed under the customs of war.
Washington galloped the five miles to Fort Lee. He was starting to cross the river under a darkening sky when he met Generals Greene and Putnam returning. Magaw had refused to surrender. “Activated by the most glorious cause that mankind ever fought in,” the fort’s commander had written to Howe, “I am determined to defend this post to the last extremity.” There was nothing to do for the moment.
The next morning, Washington went over to the fort named for him, accompanied by Greene, Putnam, and Hugh Mercer. The fifty-year-old Mercer, a Scottish immigrant and physician, was a fellow Virginian and close friend of Washington, a comrade during the French and Indian War. While the generals were taking stock of the situation, the British began to attack American positions from three sides.
Four thousand infantrymen approached the American lines from the south. The loud, contemptuous Hessian colonel Johann Rall led a five-hundred-man regiment of grenadiers up the precipitous north slope of the heights on which the fort stood. Scottish Highland troops attacked from the east.
The four American generals had made their way to the Morris House, Washington’s former headquarters south of the fort. “There we all stood in a very awkward situation,” Greene later recorded. “As the disposition was made, and the enemy advancing, we durst not attempt to make any new disposition; indeed we saw nothing amiss.”14
Suddenly, enemy troops came rattling through the woods. The generals had to get Washington away instantly. Fifteen minutes later, the Morris House was in British hands.
At the north end of the heights, a regiment of Pennsylvania riflemen fired down at the German grenadiers who were scrambling up the steep cliff. They were backed by the fire of two cannon. A gunner’s mate named John Corbin stepped in front of the barrel to ram home a cartridge. The Germans fired their own guns from a nearby hill and killed him. Corbin’s wife, Margaret, who had celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday a few days earlier, stepped up to take his place. She was a child of the frontier, her father having been killed and her mother kidnapped in the raids that followed Braddock’s defeat on the Monongahela. Knowing the routine of the gunners, she helped service the piece until canister shot ripped into her breast and shattered her arm. Captured, she would survive her wound and receive a soldier’s pension.
As Corbin lay wounded, she watched the German grenadiers begin to emerge over the lip of the heights, driving the riflemen before them. Colonel Rall was known as “The Lion” for his ferocity. The Germans had suffered many casualties during the climb and were in a mood for revenge. The Americans ran for the fort. There an eighteen-year-old Connecticut soldier was moving down a passage with two comrades to defend an outer breastworks. “There came a ball,” he noted, “and took off both their heads, the contents of which besmeared my face pretty well.”15
Soon a white flag appeared over Fort Washington. All the defenders, 2,800 soldiers from Washington’s rapidly dwindling army, became prisoners. The British were surprised to see that many of them were old men and boys younger than fifteen. All were filthy and lacked military bearing. “Their odd figures frequently excited the laughter of our soldiers.”
Their fate was no laughing matter. Like other American captives, most would die in British hands. Some starved to death in excrement-layered New York churches and warehouses. The rest were packed into the hell of black ship holds and sent to Gravesend Bay, off Long Island, where disease and exposure finished them off.
* * *
“I feel mad, vext, sick, and sorry,” Nathanael Greene wrote to Henry Knox after the surrender. “Never did I need the consoling voice of a friend more than now.”16 Insecure by nature, he pressed Knox for news of how the loss was seen by other officers. Would Greene be sacked?
Washington was certainly upset. Some said he wept as he watched from the New Jersey shore. An aide recorded that he “hesitated more than I ever knew him on any other occasion.”17
“I am wearied almost to death with the retrograde motions of things,” he wrote to his brother Jack. “What adds to my mortification is, that this post after the last ships went past it, was held contrary to my wishes and opinions.”18
What? It was Washington who had approved the dispositions of his inexperienced subordinate. A military leader does not express himself in wishes and opinions. He gives orders. His Excellency was still learning.
Having taken Fort Washington, General Howe moved with uncustomary dispatch. On a rainy night three days after the surrender, he sent five thousand men rowing across the Hudson River on flatboats. It was the first independent command for Lord Cornwallis, the most enterprising officer in England. This thirty-eight-year-old son of privilege had joined his majesty’s army at seventeen and was prized for his competence. He landed his force at the base of the sheer Palisade cliffs on the west side of the river. His men trudged up a steep, four-foot-wide trail, expecting a fight at the top. General Greene had neglected to station guards there. The British winched eight field guns up the cliff. They were not discovered until daylight.
Fort Lee, more of an armed camp than a fortification, was doomed. All Greene could do was to order an instant retreat. The British marched into the fort to find fires burning, cooking pots bubbling. They found hundreds of tents, cases of entrenching tools, and scores of cannon. When a German officer recommended a spirited attack against the fleeing A
mericans, Cornwallis replied, “Let them go.” The beaten, disintegrating army of rebels was not even worth pursuing.
* * *
Now came the great retreat that Washington had feared. First to Newark. Then to Brunswick, near the southern tip of Staten Island. Then across the narrow waist of New Jersey toward Trenton. Washington’s iron determination became the army’s backbone. “A deportment so firm, so dignified, but yet so modest and composed,” wrote eighteen-year-old James Monroe, “I have never seen in any other person.”19
Cornwallis, under orders from Howe, followed Washington across the state without trying to crush his force. Washington called upon General Lee, still camped near White Plains, to bring his troops and help defend Philadelphia. Lee, who claimed he “foresaw, predicted, all that has happened,” failed to respond.20 In the midst of the army’s worst catastrophe, Washington now faced a crisis of leadership. His second in command, who led more troops than Washington himself, was heeding his own notions about the proper way to execute the war.
Lee’s resistance to Washington was based on more than mere vanity. He was concerned about his troops, many of whom lacked shoes. Politically more radical than most of the other military leaders, Lee believed in a war fought by militia drawn from an “active vigorous yeomanry.” He was sure that “a plan of Defense, harrassing and impeding can alone Succeed.” The army, he thought, should keep a presence in New Jersey to rally local militia and reinforce their efforts. If Washington abandoned the state, loyalists would reign.
Others were hinting that Lee, not Washington, should be in charge. On November 21, Washington’s secretary and aide Joseph Reed wrote to Lee, “I do not mean to flatter nor praise you at the Expense of any other, but I confess I do think that it is entirely owing to you that this Army & the Liberties of America . . . are not totally cut off. . . . You have Decision, a Quality often wanting in Minds otherwise valuable.”21
Washington continued to urge Lee to hurry forward with his men. In deference to the style of the day and to Lee’s superior military experience, he did not issue a flat-out order. Lee continued to resist.
A week later, Washington accidentally opened a letter from Lee to Reed. “I . . . lament with you that fatal indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity,” Lee wrote. He listed some excuses for his failure to comply with Washington’s request. He asserted that he would set his troops in motion when ready because “I really think our Chief will do better with me than without me.”
The word “indecision” must have bitten Washington as deeply as the evidence that his trusted secretary had criticized him behind his back. Indecision, his indecision, had cost the army at every step.
The recalcitrant Lee was writing in private letters that “the present crisis” required a “brave, virtuous kind of treason.”22 He stationed his force in Morristown, directly west of New York and fifty miles from Washington, who was now at Trenton. General Horatio Gates, freed from danger by Arnold’s sacrificial battle at Valcour Island, had brought some of his troops to reinforce Washington’s men. He received an invitation from Lee to join forces and “reconquer . . . the Jerseys.” It was Gates, his former comrade in the British army, who had urged Lee to come to America. Like Lee, Gates thought highly of militia. He was not, however, prepared to subvert the chain of command.
On December 8, Washington sent Lee an unambiguous order to advance. “The Militia in this part of the Province seem sanguine,” Lee replied three days later. “If they could be assured of an army remaining amongst ’em, I believe they would raise a considerable number.”23
The situation in New Jersey was actually deteriorating. On November 30, the Howe brothers had offered a “full and free pardon” to anyone who would take an oath of allegiance to the king. Thousands, afraid of losing their property, hurried forth to swear. Loyalists began to take reprisals on patriot neighbors.
British and German troops contributed their own savagery. Nathanael Greene, in a letter to Caty, claimed that “the brutes often ravish the mothers and daughters and compel the fathers and sons to behold their brutality.” The rape of girls as young as ten was reported.
The news grew even darker. Howe had sent General Henry Clinton to Providence to secure that important port against rebel privateers. He had taken the city easily and now dominated Rhode Island. During the first week in December, Washington, ceding New Jersey, transferred his army to a defensive position on the west bank of the Delaware River, which divided that state from Pennsylvania.
Prospects were bad. Two thousand of Washington’s troops, their enlistments having run out, had limped off toward home. Another three thousand men were too sick to report for duty. At the end of the month, when almost all enlistments would expire, the Continental Army would effectively dissolve.
On December 13, General Lee was still refusing to join Washington. That morning, ensconced with a small guard at an inn several miles from his camp, he was finishing up some paperwork. In a letter to Gates, he facetiously referred to “the ingenious manoeuvre of Fort Washington.” He went on: “Entre nous, a certain great man is damnably deficient. He has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties.”24
Suddenly, a squadron of British cavalry came pounding up to surround the inn. One of their officers, a twenty-two-year-old subaltern and military prodigy named Banastre Tarleton, threatened to burn the building and those in it if Lee refused to come out. Lee, still in his slippers and night clothes, surrendered.
Lee’s capture delighted the enemy. A Hessian officer said that Lee was the only rebel general they had reason to fear. “This is a most miraculous event,” Tarleton wrote home to his mother. “It appears like a dream.” He was sure his coup would put an end to the campaign.25
For Washington, the surprising turn of events may not have been entirely unwelcome. “Unhappy man!” he wrote, “taken by his own Imprudence.” His back against the wall, he had little time to dwell on the loss.
Nathanael Greene, who had spent the autumn learning the hard, bloody lessons of being a general, clung to a shred of optimism. “I hope this is the dark part of the night,” he wrote home to Caty, “which generally is just before day.”26
Washington also dared to hope. Perhaps the British were a bit too overconfident. Perhaps his men could still pull off a counterstroke. Perhaps he could then hold out long enough to recruit a new army. Perhaps. If not, he wrote to Lund, “I think the game will be pretty well up.”27
Nine
He That Stands by It Now
1776
As the dwindling Continental Army limped across New Jersey, a Connecticut officer wrote: “Never was finer lads at a retreat than we are.”1 They had reached Trenton and were preparing to cross the Delaware River. New Jersey was lost. In the heat of the previous August, the eight hundred men of Colonel John Haslet’s crack Delaware regiment had faced British cannon on Long Island. Now only one hundred shivering soldiers remained to clamber into boats for the escape.
Howe and his redcoats barged into the shabby riverfront village soon after the Americans scrambled ashore on the Pennsylvania side. Washington deployed his troops along the west bank of the Delaware, expecting the British to pursue. “I tremble for Philadelphia,” his Excellency wrote on December 11. The members of Congress were not going to stay to see what happened. They decamped to Baltimore the next day, leaving Washington to act as dictator during the crisis.
The short, dark days whispered of winter. British scouts reported that the east side of the river had been stripped of boats. General Howe decided to end the year’s campaign. He would quarter his troops through central and western New Jersey, where the army could forage, discourage patriot recruiting, and maintain a solid base from which to continue the war in the spring—assuming the rebel army did not collapse over the winter.
Three Hessian regiments squeezed into Trenton,
only a mile from Washington’s headquarters on the opposite bank. Their commander was Colonel Johann Rall, the “Lion” whose tough grenadiers had scaled the heights and taken Fort Washington in November. Howe returned to a warm life of ease with his mistress in New York.
An exhausted Washington contemplated the expiration of his men’s enlistments at month’s end. He wrote Congress about how poorly clothed his troops were, “many of ’em being entirely naked and most so thinly clad as to be unfit for service.” He admitted, “I am almost led to despair.”2
Almost. He still yearned to take the offensive. He hoped, he wrote to Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull, “to attempt a Stroke upon the Forces of the Enemy, who lay a good deal scattered.” He was sure that “a lucky Blow . . . would most certainly raise the Spirits of the People, which are quite sunk by our late misfortunes.”3
Since mid-December, Washington had been receiving encouraging reports from units of Pennsylvania and New Jersey militia who were harassing the Hessian occupiers. Familiar with the terrain, they ventured back and forth across the river to skirmish with patrols and foraging parties.
On December 20, Generals Sullivan and Gates rode into camp with four undermanned regiments from the north. They found officers and men reading a tract called The Crisis, which had been published the day before in the Philadelphia Journal. It was an exhortation by Thomas Paine, well known author of the pamphlet Common Sense, published a year earlier. Paine, an English corset maker turned journalist, had accompanied the army during the long retreat, serving as a volunteer aide to his friend Nathanael Greene.
