Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

by Joseph J. Ellis

  But the letter could not be delivered. Howe’s courier and Joseph Reed met in rowboats between Staten Island and Governors Island. After pleasantries were shouted over the wind and waves, Reed refused to accept the letter because it was addressed to “George Washington Esq. &c, &c, &c.” No such person existed in the Continental Army, Reed declared, adding that “all the World knew who Genl. Washington was since the transactions of last summer,” presumably referring to Washington’s appointment as commander in chief of the Continental Army. Reed’s legal training served him well during this diplomatic exchange, emboldening him to reject any solicitation that failed to acknowledge the legal status of his client.23

  So the courier returned the letter undelivered, prompting a tantrum from Ambrose Serle, Lord Howe’s secretary. “So high is the Vanity and Insolence of these Men,” Serle recorded in his journal, “they Dare to rebut Lord Howe, whose Bravery & Honor are So well known…[and] they pretend (or rather have pretended) to seek Peace, and yet renounce it.” Washington wrote to Hancock the next day to justify Reed’s conduct during the interview, explaining that the decision to reject Howe’s letter involved more than mere etiquette. “I would not upon any occasion sacrifice Essentials to Punctilio,” Washington observed, “but in this Instance … I deemed it a duty to my Countrymen and my appointment to insist upon that respect which in any other than a public view I would willingly have waived.”24

  In truth, Lord Howe’s inability to address Washington by rank, though only symbolic, captured the essence of the diplomatic impasse, for Germain’s instructions explicitly prohibited Howe from treating the Americans as equals or even from negotiating at all until after the rebels threw down their arms and surrendered. Both Howe brothers would have preferred a more roving mandate, but both had been forced to come to terms with Germain’s narrow restrictions, and they had reluctantly concluded that any peace initiative could occur only after inflicting a decisive defeat on Washington’s army.

  Apparently, Lord Howe had decided to make one bold effort before the battle. Perhaps he thought that the very sight of the massive invasion force might weaken Washington’s resolve. And it is possible, though pure speculation, that Howe dispatched the two warships up the Hudson in order to demonstrate to Washington the hopelessness of his military situation. Whatever Howe’s motives, they had no effect on Washington’s resolute posture of defiance, nor on his long-standing conviction that the whole business of peace commissioners was a political ploy designed to give false hope to die-hard reconciliationists: “Lord Howe is arrived,” Washington informed General Horatio Gates, currently trying to impose some semblance of discipline on the northern detachment of the Continental Army. “He & the Genl his Brother are appointed Commissioners to dispense Pardons to Repenting Sinners.”25

  Lord Howe was obviously exasperated, on the one hand by the short leash that Germain had allowed him, and on the other by the apparent obliviousness of Washington, who was rejecting the opportunity to avert what was most assuredly going to be a military catastrophe. He decided to make one final attempt a week later, this time sending his adjutant general, James Patterson, with the same letter, plus a generous proposal about prisoner exchange. Reed determined that the prisoner issue afforded a pretext for a face-to-face interview with Washington, so Patterson was led, blindfolded, to Washington’s headquarters on Manhattan. Patterson had been briefed to address Washington as “His Excellency,” to treat him with the utmost respect, and to assure him that the Howes had been granted great powers to effect an accommodation. This was demonstrably untrue, as Washington was quick to point out, observing that George III’s vaunted generosity lay on the other side of American capitulation, so all the Howes had to offer were pardons, “and that those who had committed no Fault, wanted no Pardon.” Patterson conveyed Lord Howe’s deep disappointment that matters could not move past this initial sticking point, reiterated the regret of both Howes about not recognizing the rank of a man whose “Person & Character they held in the highest Esteem,” then bowed himself out the door, “Sociable and Chatty all the way.”26

  The chasm between the British and American positions was now exposed more fully than ever before. From the British side of the divide, all assumptions remained resolutely imperial. Despite over ten years of political conflict during which the colonies challenged Parliament’s sovereignty and called for some kind of semiautonomous American presence within the British Empire, then fifteen months of bloodletting that raised the stakes for both sides, George III and his ministers continued to insist that the colonists were subjects, not citizens, and that Parliament’s sovereignty was nonnegotiable. No compromise was possible because nothing less than the survival of the British Empire in North America was at stake. And no compromise was necessary because the British army and navy, so conspicuously poised on Staten Island, were invincible.

  Only within this imperial context was George III prepared to be charitable, not because he was required to do so but because, so the Howes claimed, he retained a benevolent sense of affection for his American subjects and wished to envelop them once again within the protective folds of his kingship. That meant that he was prepared to issue a blanket pardon to the vast majority of American colonists once they relinquished their misguided claim to independence, disbanded their army, and disavowed those radical ringleaders in the Continental Congress and Continental Army who had generated so much of the recent mischief. These were the true culprits, who must, of course, be rounded up, be tried for treason, and suffer the consequences. After the old order was restored, George III was prepared to listen to fresh proposals for some sensible framework of political reform designed to keep his subjects happy.

  The view from the American side of the divide was most eloquently expressed by Benjamin Franklin, who knew Richard Howe from their days together in London, when they were both vainly seeking a political compromise that avoided an open break. Writing from Philadelphia on July 20, Franklin commiserated with Lord Richard’s predicament, lamenting that he was precluded from offering any peace terms other than “Offers of Pardon upon submission; which I was sorry to find, as it must give your Lordship Pain to be sent so far on so hopeless a Business.”

  No other delegate—indeed, no other American—could have written such words, which deftly reversed the British and American roles, commiserating with Lord Richard for the hopelessness of his position. The style came naturally to Franklin, who had been practicing it for nearly fifty years, first as the folksy Poor Richard with his arsenal of witty maxims (e.g., “Let all men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly”), most recently in a devastating satire of British statecraft, Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One (1773).

  Franklin was, in fact, a latecomer to the cause of American independence. For most of the last two decades he had lived in London, lobbying for a royal charter for Pennsylvania, receiving the accolades of the Royal Society for his pioneering work on electricity, and rubbing elbows with the leading figures of British society, Lord Richard included. He presumed that the British Empire was really an Anglo-American empire of partners, bound together by mutual consent and common interest. When the recently crowned George III and a succession of British ministries began to tighten restrictions on colonial trade, impose new taxes, and station a standing army in America, Franklin regarded these changes as a temporary aberration. Only a pack of fools would seek to destroy an imperial relationship that worked so smoothly and boded so well for both sides as members of an emerging global power.

  By 1773 he was beginning to conclude that the British government no longer knew its own interest. The clinching moment came in January 1774, when he was required to sit silently in the House of Lords while he was pilloried and personally insulted for advocating his vision of a British Empire based on the principle of mutual consent. This searing experience prompted a conversion to the goal of American independence. He returned to America in 1775, was immediately elected to the Continental Congress, and never looked
back. If John Adams was the hands-on architect of the movement for independence in the congress, Franklin was the acknowledged elder statesman, a generation or two older than most other delegates, who brought the resolve of a recent convert, the weight of his reputation, and even the status of a celebrity to the deliberations. If Washington was the new American hero, Franklin was the most familiar and famous American of the century.27

  His message to Lord Richard Howe, then, carried a special resonance that could not be dismissed, even though it undermined everything that Lord Richard hoped to accomplish. The notion that the British government was prepared to pardon the recalcitrant colonists was preposterously presumptive, Franklin observed, since that very government “had behaved with the most wanton Barbarity and Cruelty, burnt our defenseless Towns in the midst of winter, excited the Savages to massacre our farmers … and is even now bringing foreign Mercenaries to deluge our Settlements with Blood.” The moral leverage to grant pardons belonged to the American side, “since it is not possible for you (I mean the British Nation) to forgive the People you have so heavily injured.”

  If Lord Richard had carried proposals for peace between two sovereign powers currently at war, Franklin continued, then perhaps negotiations would be possible. “But I am persuaded you have no such Powers,” he observed, because Britain could not recognize the separate and independent existence of her former colonies as equal states without abandoning her presumed supremacy. And if that supremacy then took a military form, as it was now doing, it only exposed the hypocrisy of all British claims of generosity. It did not help the good lord’s cause that he was simultaneously a peace commissioner and co-leader of an invasion.

  Whatever the outcome of the current contest at New York, Franklin predicted that Britain’s war against America would prove unwinnable and “so destructive both of Lives and Treasure, that must prove as pernicious to her in the End as the Croisades [Crusades] formerly were to most of the Nations of Europe.” Like all his former predictions, this one, Franklin realized, would not be believed “till the Event shall verify it.” Rather than invincible, British arms would prove inadequate.

  Franklin concluded with a piece of unsolicited advice to Howe. It pained him to find his former friend prosecuting a war destined to go down in history as unnecessary, unwise, and unjust. “Posterity will condemn to Infamy those who advised it,” he warned, “and that not even Success will save from some degree of Dishnour, those who voluntarily engaged to conduct it.” Franklin was prepared to grant that Howe’s “great Motive in coming hither was the Hope of being instrumental in a Reconciliation.” Now that it was clear that reconciliation was impossible on the terms Lord Richard was permitted to propose, he should “relinquish so odious a Command and return to a more honourable private station.”28

  Of course, Lord Richard could hardly hear Franklin’s advice, much less take it. A few weeks later he wrote Germain: “The interview [with Washington] was more polite than interesting; however it induced me to change my subscription for the attainment of an end desirable.” This was his elliptical way of acknowledging that no peace was possible until the Americans had been taught a painful and bloody lesson, which would now become his chief task.29

  At Franklin’s urging, the Continental Congress forwarded Lord Richard’s peace proposals to several major newspapers, in order to expose his limited powers and dash any false hopes that still lingered in the ever-dwindling number of moderate minds. If there ever had been a middle position, a bridge over the chasm, it was now completely gone.30

  IN EARLY AUGUST, the gathering storm continued to gather. On August 1, Greene reported the arrival of thirty ships at Sandy Hook, which he took to be the German mercenaries but turned out to be generals Clinton and Cornwallis coming up from South Carolina. Another small fleet arrived a week later, containing the first wave of Hessians and several regiments of Scottish Highlanders. The main body of Hessians, 8,000 strong, landed on August 12. All in all, the Howe brothers now commanded a strike force of 42,000 soldiers, marines, and sailors, by far the largest military operation ever mounted in North America.31

  Back in Philadelphia, Adams concluded that Lord Howe’s peace initiative had always been a delaying tactic: “He has let the cat out of the Bag…, throwing out his Barrells to amuse Leviathan until his Reinforcements shall arrive.”32 This was not really correct. Lord Richard’s last-minute diplomatic effort was utterly sincere, though equally hopeless. The more prosaic truth was that William Howe, fully aware that Germain had spent a small fortune to acquire the Hessian mercenaries, saw no reason to launch his attack before they arrived. And given the tactical and manpower advantages that he enjoyed, he felt no pressure to move according to any schedule but his own.

  For his part, Washington might be forgiven for regarding each new arrival of British and Hessian troops as nails in the proverbial coffin. He wrote in a nostalgic tone to a fellow veteran of earlier campaigns in the French and Indian War, recalling their providential escapes at “the Meadows [Fort Necessity] and on the Banks of the Monongahela.” Since both of these battles had been crushing defeats, they were strange memories to be conjuring up on the eve of the looming battle. Watching the British buildup enhanced his fear that the forces at his disposal were going to be seriously overmatched. He confessed that “I cannot help but feeling very anxious Apprehensions.”33

  Part of his problem was that he did not know for sure how many troops he had at his disposal. Under the implicit “balloon theory,” the size of the Continental Army would be slightly more than doubled if and when militia units from Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey arrived, bringing his total force to about 25,000. But it was harvesttime, so many of the farmer-soldiers were late to the task or did not show up at all. Washington dashed off last-minute exhortations to state governors and militia officers to have the troops come on, leaving the crops to rot in the field if necessary, emphasizing the historical urgency of the current crisis. “The Deficiency of Regiments … is far short of its intended Compliments,” he warned. “Since the Settlement of these Colonies there has never been such just occasion of Alarm or such an Appearance of an Enemy both by Sea and Land.”34

  Moreover, he did not know how many of his troops already present were fit for duty. Contaminated water supplies had produced widespread dysentery on Manhattan, and Greene reported an outbreak of smallpox on Long Island in late July. Within the week, Washington estimated that 20 percent of his army was too sick to fight.

  Adams broke into a frenzy when he heard about the smallpox epidemic: “The small Pox has done us more harm than British Armies, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Hannoverians, Hessians, and all the rest.” The disease was on his mind for personal reasons as well, since Abigail and their four young children were currently undergoing inoculation up in Boston at that very same time. He was juggling his responsibilities as statesman and his obligations as husband and father, in the same letter expressing guilt about being distant while his family was in danger, then adding that “our Army is also rather sickly at N. York.”35

  The General Orders emanating from headquarters continued to sound an upbeat note, despite the overwhelming British superiority in numbers. “The enemy will endeavor to intimidate by show and appearance, but remember how they have been repulsed on various occasions, by a few brave men,” read the order for August 13. “Their Cause is bad; their men are conscious of it, and if opposed with firmness, and coolness … Victory is most assuredly ours.”36

  Washington did not really believe these words, though he did believe that he was personally and professionally obliged to write them. He was more candid with Hancock, cataloging the manpower and sickness problems, acknowledging that it was unlikely that he could prevent the Howes from capturing New York. But he found final refuge in the Bunker Hill scenario, in effect another ruinous British victory: “These considerations lead me to think, that though the Appeal may not terminate so happily in our favor as I could wish, that they will not succeed in their views without c
onsiderable loss. Any advantage they may get, I trust will cost them dear.” Left unsaid was how many men he could afford to lose in order to produce a Pyrrhic British victory.37

  Not yet sure how his family had made it through the inoculation process, Adams assured his recovering Abigail that his every thought was with her. But at least one eye was looking north: “We are in daily expectation of some decisive strike at New York.”38

  5

  After Virtue

  Thus we are sowing the Seeds of Ignorance, Corruption, and Injustice, in the fairest Field of Liberty ever appeared upon Earth, even in the first attempts to cultivate it.

  —JOHN ADAMS TO JOSEPH HAWLEY, August 25, 1776

  Back in the spring, John Adams had on several occasions outlined the political steps the Continental Congress should take in order to manage the movement toward American independence responsibly. His primary concern had been to create a stable political platform of confederated states before launching the movement for American independence.

  The central flaw in this wholly logical scheme—apart from the assumption that a political earthquake could be managed—was the belief that you could set the stage for an independent government before you knew for sure that there would be an independent America to govern. After the decisive vote of July 2 provided that assurance, the delegates then decided to proceed without pause to address the ambitious political agenda that Adams had outlined earlier, albeit in a different order than he had envisioned.