Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

by Joseph J. Ellis

  He urged them “to judge for themselves whether it be more consistent with their honor and happiness to offer up their lives as a sacrifice to the unjust and precarious cause in which they are engaged.” (After Kip’s Bay, that cause was presumably even more precarious.) If they would only abandon their pretense of independence and “return to their old allegiance,” the unnecessary bloodletting would stop, and they would enjoy “the blessings of peace … and the full enjoyment of their liberty and property.” Whether or not this message was more credible in the wake of the Kip’s Bay disaster can never be known, since only the loyalist press in New York and New Jersey saw fit to publish it. Washington dismissed Lord Howe’s appeal as old wine in old bottles, in effect requiring total submission “after which His Majesty would consider whether or who should be hung.”35

  HARLEM HEIGHTS WAS A rocky plateau running across Manhattan just north of what is now 125th Street. Its southern border was protected by a line of steep bluffs, some sixty feet tall, creating a ridgeline that resembled a natural fortress. If there was a rough equivalent to Bunker Hill on the island, this was it.36

  For that very reason, it was selected as the rallying point in the American evacuation, as the Continental Army moved all its troops and equipment to the northern end of Manhattan. By the evening of September 15, the traumatized survivors of Kip’s Bay had reached the safe haven of Harlem Heights, as had the exhausted troops under “Old Put,” who had somehow eluded the British on their forced march up the western side of Manhattan.

  It had not been a good day for the American cause. About 60 troops had been killed or wounded, another 300 taken prisoner. As on Long Island, the only conspicuous talent the Continental Army had demonstrated was its impressive skill at running away.

  From his new headquarters (now the Jumel Mansion, on the brink of Coogan’s Bluff at 161st Street), Washington enjoyed a panoramic view of the entire island. His focus was south, where he presumed Howe was preparing an attack on Harlem Heights. In fact, Howe was establishing his own headquarters in New York City, where the bulk of the residents were greeting the British Army as liberators. Indeed, a frontal assault on the formidable defenses at Harlem Heights never occurred to Howe, for the same reason that he had refused to attack Brooklyn Heights. He was unwilling to risk the casualties.

  Washington’s mood was somber, verging on fatalistic. A letter to Lund Washington, his cousin and manager at Mount Vernon, conveyed his sense that the end was near:

  In short, such is my situation that if I were to wish the bitterest curse to an enemy on this side of the grave, I should put him in my stead with my feelings.… In confidence I will tell you that I was never in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.… If I fall, it may not be amiss that these circumstances be known, and declaration made to the justice of my character. And if the men will stand by me (which by the by I despair of), I am resolved not to be forced from this ground while I have life.37

  In preparation for what he seemed to regard as Washington’s last stand, he ordered the bulk of the troops to begin digging trenches and constructing redoubts. But in order to discover the disposition of British troops to the south, he also ordered a reconnaissance by a recently organized elite unit of Connecticut rangers led by Colonel Thomas Knowlton.

  Knowlton was a thirty-six-year-old veteran of the French and Indian War whose heroics at Bunker Hill had already become legendary. (John Trumbull saw fit to make Knowlton the central figure in his depiction of the battle, which currently hangs in the Capitol Rotunda.) In the postmortem after the Kip’s Bay fiasco, there was a consensus that a lack of leadership within the officer corps had been a major source of the failure, but Knowlton embodied the highest combat leadership standard in the Continental Army. Aaron Burr had been heard to remark that “it was impossible to promote such a man too rapidly.”38

  About a half mile south of Harlem Heights (near the present juncture of 107th Street and Riverside Drive), Knowlton’s 120 men encountered a British infantry regiment of 400 regulars. A fierce skirmish ensued, with the Americans firing to excellent effect from behind a stone wall. But then a regiment of Scottish Highlanders, the renowned Black Watch, appeared, and Knowlton, now badly outnumbered, retreated toward Harlem Heights. The British were so accustomed to seeing American troops in flight that a bugler sounded the signal used in foxhunts at the end of the chase when the fox is trapped.

  This enraged Washington and his staff, who also recognized that the roughly 1,000 British and Scottish troops, in their exuberance, had overextended themselves and were walking into a trap, enveloped by an American force ten times their size. Washington sent Joseph Reed to the scene with orders for Knowlton, reinforced by Virginia Continentals under the command of Major Andrew Leitch, to flank the British and get behind them while several American regiments came down from Harlem Heights to engage them at the front. This envelopment tactic failed when the Virginia troops fired on the British before they were behind them. In the firefight that ensued, both sides took heavy casualties, including Leitch and Knowlton, who was hit in the lower back while exhorting his men from an exposed ledge. His purported last words, duly reported within weeks in most American newspapers, were the stuff of martyrdom: “I do not value my life if we do but get this day.”39

  Both sides then threw more men into the action, transforming a skirmish into the Battle of Harlem Heights. The British made a stand in a wheat field just south of the present Grant’s Tomb and, after two hours of ferocious fighting, were forced to withdraw, having suffered 270 killed or wounded to 60 for the Americans, who had to be restrained from pursuing the fleeing redcoats. It was the first occasion in the battle for New York in which the British Army experienced defeat. Although it was not a major battle—at its high point, about 2,000 troops were engaged on each side—Harlem Heights had a significant psychological impact on the morale of the Continental Army, which until then had good reason to doubt its ability to hold its own against British professionals.40

  In his General Orders for the following day, Washington saw fit to underline that very point: “The Behavior of Yesterday was such a Contrast to that of some Troops before, as must show what may be done, when Officers & soldiers will exert themselves.” He had been searching for a way, as he put it, “to strike some stroke” that would not only bolster the confidence of his troops but also send a signal to the American population as a whole that “The Cause” was alive and well. The latter goal was reinforced by coverage in most American newspapers, which neglected to mention the Kip’s Bay disaster but featured Harlem Heights as a glorious American victory and Thomas Knowlton as the newest American martyr-hero. Though the strategic predicament facing the Continental Army had not really changed, at least for the moment, the defeatist mood had subsided. It remained to be seen, however, whether the army could get off the island.41

  8

  A Long War

  Give me leave to say, Sir, that your Affairs are in a more unpromising way than you seem to apprehend.

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON TO JOHN HANCOCK, October 4, 1776

  One might have thought that the victory at Harlem Heights, small though it was, would serve as the stroke that Washington had been hoping to deliver. Having scored that important point, he was now free to evacuate the Continental Army off Manhattan, honor intact, before General Howe could block his exit.

  But instead he ordered his troops to dig more trenches, in anticipation of a major British assault from the south. He had finally found the ideal defensive position that perfectly embodied his entire strategic plan for defending New York, and he intended to use the rocky elevation at Harlem Heights to inflict maximum casualties on the British Army before beating his retreat. It was a bold but dangerous decision, since he was putting the survival of the Continental Army at risk in order to deliver one more telling blow in behalf of “The Cause.”1

  On the evening of September 20, as he scanned the sky to the south, looking for Howe’s approaching army, the horizon became ablaz
e from the fires consuming more than one-third of New York City. The Continental Congress had given strict orders not to torch the city upon evacuation, reasoning that one day it would be recaptured—a palpable measure of the confidence still dominating the deliberations in Philadelphia.2

  What came to be called the “Great Fire” was probably the work of arsonists, most likely self-styled American patriots who were now a beleaguered minority in the city. Two suspects were summarily dispatched, one thrown into the flames, the other hanged on a lamppost. Washington apprised Hancock that the fire was not his doing and was probably an accident. But privately he confided to Lund Washington that “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we can do for ourselves.” Whatever the cause, for the remainder of the war the occupying British Army lived among the ashes of all the homes, churches, and buildings west of Broadway.3

  MEANWHILE, AS WASHINGTON awaited Howe’s frontal assault of Harlem Heights, which never materialized, the Continental Congress was attempting to digest the full implications of the Kip’s Bay disaster. Unlike the American populace as a whole, the delegates in Philadelphia were fully apprised of the humiliation.

  Caesar Rodney, for example, provided his fellow delegates from Delaware with a full narrative of the debacle, taking care to absolve Washington of any responsibility and casting blame on “the beardless boys” he commanded. “I have wrote on the Subject till I am in ill Humour,” Rodney concluded, “and the only Comfort is that by the time you have read it you’ll be as Angry as I am.” William Hooper of South Carolina believed it was time to take off the patriotic blinders. “It becomes our duty to see things as they really are[,] divested of all disguise,” he urged, “and when the happiness of the present age and Millions yet unborn depends upon a reformation of them, we ought to spare no pains to effect so desirable a purpose.” Washington, in fact, had been trying to tell Hancock for several weeks that the Continental Congress did not seem to fathom the deplorable condition of the army. After Kip’s Bay, the delegates finally got the message and voted to send a three-man committee to confer with Washington and his staff at Harlem Heights. They met for five days, from September 20 to September 24.4

  No record of the deliberations was kept, but the problems addressed and solutions proposed were clearly outlined in the committee’s report to the Continental Congress two weeks later. The underlying conclusion was that the Continental Army was really not much of an army at all. To the extent that a quick victory was no longer tenable and that therefore success in the war for American independence depended on a fighting force that could compete on equal terms with the British Army, there needed to be a “New Model” or “New Establishment.” In effect, the committee recommended all the reforms that the congress had already tried and failed to implement a month earlier, this time with a greater sense of urgency and comprehension.

  First, the Continental Army needed to expand to at least 60,000 troops, with a majority committed to serving “for the duration.” This would eliminate the need for militia, since the New York campaign had demonstrated that dependence on “Minutemen” had proved to be one of those glorious presumptions that produce only inglorious consequences. And one-year enlistments had proven equivalently problematic, since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had begun to internalize the discipline of military service and became reliable soldiers.

  Second, the organizational infrastructure of an effective army did not exist. The quartermaster corps, the commissary, and the hospital units were all fly-by-night improvisations. The troops were poorly clothed, poorly fed, and poorly cared for if wounded or incapacitated by disease. The prevailing assumption that it was going to be a short war had allowed the Continental Army to function in this ad hoc fashion. Now that the assumption had changed—it was clearly going to be a protracted conflict—organizational reforms had to be institutionalized along lines modeled on the British Army, precisely what Washington had been urging for months.

  Third, the officer corps at both the senior and the junior levels was woefully inadequate. After-action reports on the collapse of discipline at Gowanus Heights and Kip’s Bay placed the blame on inexperienced officers. Poorly led troops became mere gangs. On the other hand, when a natural leader like Lord Stirling or Thomas Knowlton was commanding, the troops fought well. Nathanael Greene even thought that, properly led, American troops were a match for British regulars. “If the officers were as good as the men,” Greene claimed, “America might bid defiance to the whole world.”5

  The visiting committee endorsed all the reforms that Washington and his staff suggested. The New York campaign had been a painful learning experience, so the only sensible thing to do was to fix the glaring problems in order to make the Continental Army an effective fighting force worthy of its name. The problems were clear, so the solutions were obvious—in fact, the solutions had been bandied about in the congress for several weeks. Now, with greater resolve, the full congress embraced all the recommendations for a “New Establishment” during the first week of October.6

  But it was one thing to endorse the recommendations, another to implement them. Once again it became clear that the Continental Congress lacked the authority to enforce troop levies in the states, so the proposed enlargement of the Continental Army to 60,000 was a political, economic, and logistical impossibility, which in turn meant that Washington would remain dependent on the militias for the foreseeable future. Even offering enhanced incentives for volunteers who signed up “for the duration” made little appreciable difference. One-year enlistments remained the norm. Only a mandatory draft could have solved the problem, and that was out of the question. The manpower for a much enlarged Continental Army was undoubtedly available, and the political will to draw on it was present in the Continental Congress, but that will did not extend to the state legislatures, whose vision remained local rather than national.

  Moreover, the necessary organizational reform could not be effected merely by drafting new procedural guidelines for the different branches of the army. The regulations had to be enforced up and down the chain of command by men with little or no military experience, then internalized until routinized. This was not a natural act for the kind of men in the Continental Army. The truth was that a “New Establishment” could not be created overnight except on paper. The fact that the war was going to be long meant that the army would have time, on a trial-and-error basis, to work out the all-important details. The Continental Army, it would seem, was destined to be a permanent work in progress. And that more limited projection of a national army was all that could be justified within a republican framework.

  The recommendation for an improved officers corps caught John Adams’s attention, in part because it confirmed battlefield reports from New York, in part because he had been reading histories of the Roman army in order to educate himself as head of the Board of War and Ordnance. He discovered that Polybius had concluded that most Roman defeats were not the fault of troops but “always the Fault of the officers.” This same failure of leadership haunted the Continental Army, but Adams believed there was no swift cure for the problem: “The true Cause of the want of good officers in the army is because … such officers in sufficient Numbers are not in America. Without Materials the best Workman can do nothing. Time, Study, and Experience alone must make a sufficient Number of officers.”7

  What he meant was that America lacked the kind of British aristocracy that encouraged military careers in the manner of the Howe brothers. And lacking such a tradition, the Continental Army would have to manufacture officers the republican way, by recognizing and promoting merit on the battlefield. (Henry Knox, Nathanael Greene, and the much-missed Thomas Knowlton were all excellent examples of this slow but sure process, and a young artillery captain named Alexander Hamilton was a looming discovery.) In the long run, America needed a military academy to produce competent officers, and Adams was prepared to recommend such an institution after the war was won.
For now, however, demand vastly exceeded supply, and since there was no immediate solution, the very act of talking about the problem only advertised a congenital weakness in the Continental Army. “Concealing it is the way to cure it,” Adams concluded, “not publishing it,” meaning that the unsolvable problem should be conveniently obscured.8

  As the summer turned to fall, then, two conclusions were clear: first, on all matters related to the war effort, the Continental Congress continued to function as a provisional national government prepared to give Washington everything he asked for; and second, while there was the will, there was no way to translate that rhetorical support into reality, in part because the congress lacked authority over the state legislatures, in part because many of the ills affecting the Continental Army had no immediate cure.

  Washington fully grasped this unpleasant but intractable reality. In a long letter to Hancock on October 4, he expressed his appreciation for the endorsement of all his recommendations by the visiting committee but added that “there is a natural difference between voting for Battalions and raising of Men.” For the foreseeable future, he would command an army of unqualified officers, wholly undependable militia, and short-term enlisted troops. As his newest aide, Tench Tilghman, put it, it would take a miracle to “stop the career of Monsi Howe with the finest army that ever appeared in America,” while Washington commanded “as bad a one as ever appeared in any part of the Globe.”9

  At bottom, Washington concluded, what was militarily essential was politically impossible. Nothing less than a permanent standing army on the British model could win the war, but there was “such a distrust & jealousy of Military power, that the Commander in Chief has not an opportunity … to give the least assurance of success.” To be sure, “The Cause” was glorious, but the Continental Army, as currently constituted, was an inherently problematic improvisation.10