Patriots (45 page)

While he was making his social rounds, Washington also moved quickly to strengthen the army’s defenses. It wasn’t the first time he had been put in charge of undisciplined men, but he was forced to depend on them to prevent the British from breaking out of Boston and into the countryside. Washington estimated that the numbers favored him. General Gage’s forces now totaled about twelve thousand against Washington’s sixteen thousand, including the sick and the missing. But Washington had to maintain a circle around Boston of eight or nine miles, which the British could push and test at any weak point. He believed strongly in reliable intelligence reports and overcame his natural frugality to pay well for them. From agents he heard that the British were running out of food and were slaughtering their milk cows for beef. The number of Tories who had stayed in Boston or had taken refuge there was only about sixty-five hundred; fourteen thousand Bostonians had fled to the countryside. The Tories worried that as soon as the last patriot escaped from Boston the American Army would set fire to the town, and they persuaded Gage to go back on an earlier promise and stop anyone else from leaving.

George Robert Twelvetrees Hewes, the veteran of the Tea Party, had to go fishing for the British for several weeks before he and his friends could slip away to the town of Lynn and then to Cambridge. Washington came out to the yard of his headquarters to hear about their adventure. The men took off their hats in respect, but Washington told them to put them back. He was only
a man, he said, smiling. When Hewes finished his rollicking story, he found that Washington “didn’t laugh, to be sure, but looked
amazing good natured.”

Privately, the commander was less genial about the character of his New England soldiers. In a letter to Virginia, he described them as
“exceedingly dirty and nasty people.” Samuel Adams wouldn’t have disagreed. He had heard that some of his colony’s officers and men were disgracing the name of Massachusetts, and he wanted to improve the army’s public reputation. He suggested that whenever a man of real merit appeared, every anecdote about him should be touched up and widely circulated. Any exaggerations, he added, should go only so far as decency permitted.

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When Washington heard a full account of the battle of Breed’s Hill, he sided with the survivors who claimed that the Americans might have won had the men been led properly. He authorized eight courts-martial for cowardice and corruption, and Samuel Gerrish was among those tried. Joseph Matthews, who was found guilty of selling a gun that his town had issued to him, was sentenced to ten lashes on his bare back. On Washington’s order, Matthews was flogged in front of his company.

Over a lifetime of dealing with slaves, Washington had developed his own rules and penalties. He had encouraged them to marry, be faithful and attend church, although he expressed his own faith more comfortably out of doors. When slaves had become troublesome or run away, Washington sold or traded them, sometimes for rum or limes. He did not allow them to be whipped. Soldiers were treated differently. They were also expected to avoid profanity and drunkenness; Washington signed orders that any cider that came into the camp would be confiscated. His soldiers were not to be bawdy. A man named Daniel Davids was confined for the exhibition he had made while he was bathing.

“The general does not mean to discourage the practice of bathing while the weather is warm enough to continue it,” one of Washington’s orders explained, “but he expressly forbids it at or near the bridge in Cambridge, where it has been observed and complained of that many men, lost to all sense of decency and common modesty, are running about, naked, upon the bridge whilst passengers, and even ladies of the first fashion in the neighborhood, are passing over it, as if they meant to glory in their shame.”

Washington believed that, by enlisting, the soldiers had made a commitment and should be held to it. He asked the Continental Congress for the same right to hang deserters that he had sought from the Burgesses twenty years before. Permission was slow in coming, and as he worked to improve discipline, Washington’s aides told him that the men wanted the right to decide which officers to serve under and were insisting that the officers come from their own colony.

The Continental Congress had been sensitive to those regional loyalties and had been guided by political considerations in picking Washington’s subordinates. Philip Schuyler, a delegate to the Congress from New York, was also a rich man with military experience. Artemas Ward and Israel Putnam were kept on to reassure New England. Charles Lee had become a favorite of both Samuel Adams and John Adams because he was a former British officer who had become fervent about America’s cause. Lee delivered mesmerizing accounts of his past exploits and tended to behave rudely with civilians. James Warren had once met him in Massachusetts and had written to John Adams with misgivings. Adams reassured him that Lee’s oddities were merely those of a great man.
“He is a queer creature,” Adams admitted, “but you must love his dogs if you love him, and forgive a thousand whims for the sake of the soldier and the scholar.” One of those whims was that Charles Lee knew far more about waging war than George Washington did.

Washington’s most pressing problem, however, was the shortage of supplies. He was consulting with his generals when aides interrupted with an urgent private message: Someone had miscalculated the army’s reserve of gunpowder. Washington had been told there were four hundred and thirty barrels when there were only thirty-eight. Each of his men had fewer than nine rounds of ammunition to keep the British blockaded in Boston. When he had heard the report, Washington sat for half an hour without saying a word. Then he wrote immediately to the Congress appealing for more powder. But Washington didn’t even tell his generals how desperate the situation was. He feared spies. Early in October 1775 one of those spies was unmasked, and his identity astonished everyone.

In Newport, Rhode Island, a woman called on a man named Wainwood shortly after the battle at Lexington. She had a letter addressed to a British major on General Gage’s staff and asked
Wainwood to deliver it to friends who would then forward it to the major. Wainwood agreed, but he wanted no trouble. When the woman left, he opened her letter. It was written in code. He puzzled over the message and put it aside. But when the woman wrote asking anxiously whether Wainwood had delivered it, he went to Cambridge and requested a meeting with General Washington.

Washington heard the story and sent for the woman that same night. Although he coaxed and threatened her, she would say nothing until Washington ordered her confined to jail, when she broke down and told her story. She was being kept by Dr. Benjamin Church, the newly appointed surgeon general of the American Army, and now she was pregnant by him. Dr. Church had written the coded letter.

Because Washington was new to Massachusetts, the disclosure struck him as less preposterous than it did the many patriots who had served with Church for years on every crucial committee. To them, Church was the deacon’s son who had studied medicine at the London Medical College and returned home to give free inoculations to the poor during the smallpox epidemics. Now in his early forties, Church had been a charter member of the Long Room Club over the Edes and Gill print shop and had written the scathing attack on Francis Bernard that began “Fop, witling, favorite stampman, tyrant tool . . .” Church had examined the bleeding body of Crispus Attucks, and he and Dr. Joseph Warren had been among Samuel Adams’ favorite protégés. Adams had chosen him only two years earlier to speak at the anniversary of the Massacre.

Washington summoned Church and at the same time sent men to seize his papers. Church had given a decade of service to the patriots and believed that his explanation would be accepted. He admitted writing the letter but said it was meant for his brother. When it was deciphered, General Washington would see for himself that there was nothing criminal about it. Washington’s aides returned to say they had found nothing incriminating at his house. Over and over, Dr. Church protested his innocence.

A clergyman and a militia colonel each tried to break the code by counting its symbols and assigning to each one the letter that turned up equally often in English. Both amateur cryptographers came up with the same result: the note was filled with valuable
military data. Its last line read, “Make use of every precaution
or I perish.”

George Washington conducted Church’s court-martial himself. Now patriots began to recall that Church had built a lavish country house at Raynham. How could he afford it? And his love affairs had been well known even before he took up with this latest expensive mistress. As another link,
Church’s sister was married to John Fleeming, the Tory bookseller who had been John Mein’s partner. Paul Revere had watched disapprovingly as Church often dined with a British captain and one of the customs officials. But Revere felt he couldn’t question Dr. Church about that peculiar friendship, and Church told other patriots that he was gleaning military intelligence the British unwittingly let drop. Now Revere understood Church’s hasty flight into Boston immediately after the battle at Lexington. He felt he had been duped when the doctor pointed to the blood on his stockings. Revere had assumed that any man who would risk his life must be a friend to the cause. But a Boston clergyman told him that he had happened to see Church the day he left General Gage’s house and that the doctor and the general had parted like old friends.

Whether he was driven by his debt or by doubt that the patriots could win, Church had apparently begun his spying in 1771, while Samuel Adams was struggling to keep the cause alive. The next year, Thomas Hutchinson had passed along gratifying news to Francis Bernard in London that the man who had written insultingly against Bernard had come over to the government’s side. As a trusted member of the Provincial Congress and its Committee of Safety, Church had reported regularly to General Gage on the patriots’ supply of powder and arms. When he had brought messages to the Continental Congress the previous spring, Church had lingered in Philadelphia to pick up information and had informed Gage about the debates over financing the new army.

Despite his protests that he loved America, the evidence against Church was too strong to doubt. Washington’s court-martial found him guilty of holding criminal correspondence with the enemy. There were fewer supporting documents than the panel had expected, because a confederate had got to Church’s papers before they could be confiscated. The court left the terms of Church’s punishment to the provincial congress at Watertown, which ordered him confined to a jail in Connecticut. Washington had asked
Congress to let him hang men for far lesser offenses, but in jail Church was denied only the use of pen and paper. On pleasant evenings he was allowed to ride through the countryside with a trustworthy guard. That concession was one sign of New England’s embarrassment that America’s first convicted spy was also one of her most illustrious patriots.

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With autumn ending, Washington faced a problem more grave than the lack of gunpowder. The men who had flocked to Cambridge after the excitement of Lexington had enlisted in the army for six months and now wanted to go home. Thomas Hutchinson had once predicted that the colonists would always be farmers before they were soldiers and would return to their land for planting and harvest. With the British poised to break through Washington’s thin defensive line at any moment, he had to recruit a whole new army.

The money he could offer wasn’t much inducement. Privates and drummers were given tents or barracks, their daily meals and a monthly pay of six and two thirds of a new currency called the American dollar. A civilian bachelor living simply would spend nine times that amount and not face British guns every day. All thirteen colonies had pledged to raise men, for his army. Yet he couldn’t, with a total population of two and a half million, recruit fifteen thousand men. On the last day of December the old army disbanded, and fewer than ten thousand replacements had signed up for the new year. A thousand of them were holdovers away on the furlough they had demanded in exchange for re-enlisting.

Every day Washington could expect the twenty British regiments to overrun his sparse defenses. But every day his luck held. The reason was that Thomas Gage’s bloody victory at Breed’s Hill had destroyed his career. Because of the stalemate in Boston, George III called him
“the mild general,” and in late September—about the time of the Benjamin Church scandal—Gage learned that he had been relieved of command. When he sailed from Boston two weeks later, few regretted his departure. The Tories were convinced that his replacement, General Howe, would strike where Gage had hesitated.

But something about Boston seemed to sap the spirit, and William Howe had never wanted to fight in America. In fact, he had
written home to tell those Nottingham voters who had sent him to Parliament that moderate Americans were in the majority here and would drop their resistance and obey Britain’s laws. And Howe had private reasons for lingering in Boston. He had taken a woman named Elizabeth Loring as his mistress. Her husband was a loyalist who cared nothing about being cuckolded so long as he was well paid, and Joshua Loring was assured his fortune when Howe named him to head Boston’s prisons. Wives who lent themselves to enriching their husbands were not always condemned, but the affair had provoked a popular verse:

Sir William, he, snug as a flea
,

Lay all this time a-snoring

Nor dreamed of harm, as he lay warm

In bed with Mrs. ———.

When General Howe heard that London was sending enough food and supplies for a proper campaign in the spring, he decided to stay warm in Boston and dream the winter away.