Patriots (48 page)

George Washington heard from a friend that some members of the Continental Congress, particularly New Englanders impatient to see the British run out of Boston, were criticizing him for passivity. But with no resources, Washington could take no action and could not defend himself without calling attention to the army’s precarious situation. He was mortified and had to assure himself often of his integrity. He did have the encouragement of his wife, who had never before traveled outside Virginia but had come to Cambridge to pass the winter with him. By January 1776 the Washingtons had been married for seventeen companionable years. Three years earlier, Sally Fairfax had sailed for England with her husband to settle his estate. Whatever the outcome of the war, it was unlikely that Washington would see her again. Though he might never forget his days with Sally at Belvoir, he now had a wife who was willing to share the privations of camp life and who could disarm New England’s wives. James Otis’ sister, Mercy Warren, was often tart, but she praised Martha Washington’s gentleness and candor and pronounced her exactly the woman to soften a hero’s private hours.

A sergeant in Cambridge got a glimpse of that serenity when he delivered a report to Washington. He found the general sitting with his wife. After the young man repeated his message, Washington asked him what job he held. Assistant adjutant, the sergeant said.

“Indeed,” said Washington. “You are very young to do that duty.”

“I am young,” the sergeant replied, “but I am growing older every day.”

At that, he saw the general turn to Martha Washington and smile with her.

By the end of February 1776, Washington had set in motion a scheme to silence his critics. The young Boston bookseller who had been on the scene for the Massacre, Henry Knox, was portly and heavy-lidded, but he possessed great energy and had traveled to Fort Ticonderoga. Hiring carpenters, Knox built forty-two sleds, rounded up eighty yokes of oxen and dragged loads of British cannon and artillery back to Cambridge through the winter
snow. Washington knew that General Howe was loading his own ordnance onto ships in Boston Harbor. He had received permission from London to abandon Boston and to set up a camp that would be easier to defend, perhaps near New York. Washington couldn’t be sure whether the loading was a ruse to lull him or whether Howe was preparing to sail, but the promise of any action raised his spirits. He wrote to a friend that if he brought off his plan it would
“bring on a rumpus between us and the enemy.”

—

On the night of March 4, 1776, General Washington showed both the British and the Americans how the battle for Bunker Hill should have been waged. He had read newspaper accounts of General Burgoyne’s letter to London about the earlier battle and paid attention to what Burgoyne said about the two heights that commanded all of Boston. Dorchester Heights east of Boston was the one elevation that Howe had neglected to fortify.

Washington now sent out enough men to build a massive breastwork overnight. By that time he knew about the disaster in Canada, and it reminded him of the traditional criticism of Americans as soldiers. They would not march boldly into a battle or keep shooting for long on an exposed plain, but they were good shots. Put them behind a parapet or a wall, and they would do the job.

Since the ground on Dorchester Heights was frozen two feet deep, Washington could not throw up earthen defenses as Colonel Prescott had done on Breed’s Hill. Instead, he sent quantities of chandeliers, raw wooden frames that held bundles of fascines, the long cylinders of wood that stood upright and provided a solid defense. That would give his men their walls. Washington also agreed to a plan that a Boston merchant suggested.
Barrels filled with dirt were brought to the hill and arranged in rows. If the British tried to climb up, the barrels could be rolled down on them.

In the morning, Howe found that Boston was now vulnerable to an attack from Dorchester Heights whenever Washington chose to fire Henry Knox’s cannon. The March rains that drenched the town made Howe’s muskets worthless. As he already had permission to withdraw his men, Howe decided to leave Boston as quickly as he could.

Washington watched the British make their undignified retreat—“in so much hurry, precipitation and confusion as ever troops
did”—and shared his glee with his brother John, home in Virginia. Howe ordered his baggage wagons and artillery carts thrown off the docks, along with several hundred blankets. But in his haste he left behind mortars, cannon and shell. On Sunday, March 17, 1776, the British army and twelve hundred loyalists boarded ships to sail away from Boston.

George Washington won several awards for his victory without a casualty—a gold medal from the Continental Congress, an honorary doctor of laws degree from Harvard. But as he was being congratulated, the patriots returning to Boston were outraged at the way their town had suffered during the British occupation. The stately Old South had been turned into a stable for officers’ horses. One deacon’s pew had been chopped down to provide wood for a pigsty. General Washington spoke for his countrymen when he said of the Tory collaborators that “one or two have done what a great number ought to have done long ago,
committed suicide.”

—

Meanwhile, General Charles Lee had gone south to block an expected British assault in Virginia or the Carolinas. He set up headquarters in the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg even though he was not sure which target the British would strike. “I know not where to turn,” Lee complained. “I am like a
dog in a dancing school.” At last the British fleet was sighted off Cape Fear, and Lee took two thousand men from Virginia and North Carolina to the broad harbor at Charleston, South Carolina.

The previous fall, Patrick Henry had taken command of the Virginia militia, but his longtime civilian opponents had thwarted every military move Henry proposed. In Cambridge, Washington thought that the Congress had made a grave mistake in letting Henry leave the legislature. He wished that Colonel Henry would see his unsuitability as an officer and resign voluntarily. By March 1, 1776, Henry had reached the same conclusion and he left the army.

The episode had been a bitter indignity for Henry, who at age forty was mourning the recent death of his troubled wife. Since military fame had been denied to him, Henry returned to politics. He began to discuss a new constitution for Virginia with George Mason and a young newcomer, James Madison. Charles
Lee would not have to contend with Henry’s inexperience as a soldier combined with his immense popularity.

Lee had arrived in the South with his full complement of dogs; he said that dogs were faithful and men were not. Making his first tour of Charleston, he brought along a Pomeranian as big as a bear. But his passion for dogs was the least of Lee’s oddities. A tall and skinny man of forty-four, he was strikingly ugly, with a bony nose so large that men called him
“Naso.” His nature was a jumble of contradictory quirks. He was vain enough to design his own uniform and have it expensively tailored but then wore it wrinkled and often filthy. He quoted from Plutarch and Shakespeare but as easily lapsed into a coarseness remarkable even in the army. He was an Irishman but had been born in England, sixteen days before George Washington in 1732.

Lee’s father had been a colonel, and by the age of twelve the boy was studying in Switzerland and was already commissioned as an ensign in the British Army. Apart from a deep affection for his sister, Lee was as disillusioned with women as with men and seemed to prefer casual relations with those who followed an army camp. During the French and Indian War, Lee had served under Braddock in America and passed through Mohawk territory, where he married the daughter of a chief named White Thunder in a ceremony Lee did not regard as binding. The Mohawks observed the way Lee strode through their camp, always talking, and named him
“Boiling Water.”

Lee fought during the British siege of Montreal. When peace came in 1763, he went to Poland to become an aide to King Stanislas II, rising to the rank of Polish major general and watching and learning from the rebel brigades that were terrorizing Poland. He carried a message from Stanislas to George III in England and was granted an interview with the king. Lee expected to be rewarded for his services to a British ally. Instead, George began to apologize for having no military position to offer him.

Lee cut the monarch short.
“Sir,” he said, “I will never give Your Majesty an opportunity of breaking your promise to me again.”

By that time, Lee was already allied with the British Whigs who opposed the king, and when he decided to settle in America he took up the patriot cause. Although he was not related directly to the Lees of Virginia, his political opinions endeared him to
Richard Henry Lee, and during a trip to New York he charmed the Northerners as well. John Adams decided that Lee was the only man he had met who had read more military history than he had. That was when he began cautioning friends that they must overlook Lee’s dogs and his violent temper because of his attachment to liberty.

When war with Britain looked inevitable, Lee had traveled to Mount Vernon in December 1774 and spent five days as George Washington’s house guest. Since they were comrades-in-arms from Braddock’s campaign, Lee was not embarrassed to borrow fifteen pounds from Washington as his stay was ending.

The next year, when Lee’s name was put forward for commission as a major general, John Hancock and other Massachusetts delegates strongly challenged his appointment. But both Adamses backed Lee, and George Washington personally requested the appointment. General Lee quickly justified the endorsements. Whenever British artillery probed Lee’s position on the Charlestown peninsula, his men stood firm, and soon Nathanael Greene, the militant Quaker, was writing of Lee’s genius. From Philadelphia, John Adams assured Lee,
“We want you at N. York—We want you at Cambridge—We want you in Virginia—But Canada seems of more importance than any of those places, and therefore you are sent there.” Lee had barely received that letter when Congress decided it wanted him most of all in the South, confronting Sir Henry Clinton, and he went to Charleston.

There he found a town panicked by the sight of the British armada on its horizon. Lee laughed at their fears, even as the local militia were desperately digging lead out of church windows to cast as musket balls. His officers soon came to accept Lee’s rude manners as a fair trade for his apparent skill. He inspected a half-finished fort on Sullivan’s Island fronting the Charleston harbor and found the same fault that had marred the redoubt on Breed’s Hill–there was not space enough for retreat. “A slaughter pen,” Lee called it, far too flimsy to withstand the guns of a British man-of-war.

As Sir Henry Clinton waited in the bay and weighed his next move, he also had reason to recall the day on the hills above Boston. Clinton was thought moody and suspicious, and his experiences in America hadn’t improved his disposition. He had urged the British to pursue the Americans retreating from Breed’s Hill.
When he had recommended fortifying Dorchester Heights, he had been ignored again. And yet Howe, not he, had been given the supreme command in Boston, and Howe had sent Clinton on this expedition, far away from the British headquarters.

For eight days in mid-June 1776, Clinton landed his troops at an undefended point near Charleston called Long Island. He took another twelve days to get his ships in place so that they could begin battering the fort on Sullivan’s Island. On the morning of June 28, scouts in the harbor saw the British men-of-war unfurling their topsails and moving three miles in from where they had been anchored. The first to take up a position in front of the fort was a bomb ketch carrying mortars, the
Thunder.
Its crew threw their shells accurately, but the fort that Lee disparaged had been designed around a deep gorge, and most of the shells fell there and did little damage. Other ships joined the bombardment—the
Active
, the
Friendship
, the
Experiment.

Months earlier, after John Adams had proposed an American navy, the colonies had amassed a haphazard collection of ships. To protect his fleet from any of them, Clinton directed three ships to sail out and cover his western flank, but the ships ran aground. And when Clinton tried to launch a ground attack on Sullivan’s Island from Long Island, he was chagrined to find that an inlet between the two islands was much deeper than he had been told. He expected the water at low tide to drop to eighteen inches, which would let his men wade across. Instead, the water ran seven feet deep, preventing soldiers from reaching the fort. Without troops, Clinton had only his ships to pound Charleston into surrender, and they had to face the fort’s twenty-six big guns.

But those guns were not always firing. The Americans had begun the siege with twenty-eight rounds for each gun. Although they were receiving more throughout the day, they often held their fire to conserve ammunition. As a boiling sun beat down on the fort, the men along the firing platform drank steadily from grog passed along to them in fire buckets. General Lee made only a brief appearance. The Americans were winning the battle and embarrassing the man who had urged that their fort be abandoned. Lee had clashed over that strategy with its commander, Colonel William Moultrie, and had tried to have Moultrie removed from his post. Now Lee simply said,
“Colonel, I see you are doing very
well here. You have no occasion for me. I will go up to town again.”

Firing continued until 9: 30
P.M.
, when silence fell across the harbor. General Clinton had ordered his commodore, Sir Peter Parker, to return the British frigates to anchor three miles away. For the next several days Clinton’s troops were stranded on Long Island, short of supplies and prey to clouds of mosquitoes. General Lee upheld the civilities of war by sending General Clinton fresh supplies at his ship, and Clinton responded with drafts of porter and a good cheese for Lee. At last, Henry Clinton sailed north to rejoin General Howe.

Charles Lee’s victory had not been as bloodless as George Washington’s on Dorchester Heights. Ten men had been killed inside the fort and twenty-four wounded. But Charleston was another undeniable American victory and—to anyone who hadn’t heard Lee’s bad advice to Colonel Moultrie—another reason to forgive General Lee his peculiarities.