Patriots (58 page)

—

Near midnight on September 20, 1776, General Washington was called from his quarters to watch the smoke from a fire as it spread over the southern tip of the island below him. Patriots who had hidden in New York after the British invasion had set three fires along the waterfront. From there they could trust the wind to spread the flames on flakes of burning shingle. The British could not ring the customary alarm, because the Americans had carted off the church bells to melt down for ammunition. Or so they had claimed. New York’s fire engines also were out of commission, which led the British to conclude that the fires had been planned before the evacuation. William Howe suspected that the blaze meant a night attack and refused to let most of his men fight the fire until daylight. But a few British soldiers did patrol the streets, and when they found men in one house with firebrands the soldiers killed them and threw their bodies into the fire. The old and the sick, women and children, ran from house to house, thinking they were safe, and running out again, shrieking, as the fire spread. The tower of Trinity Church made a pyramid of flame, each timber burning separately until the whole spire came crashing down. At 2
A.M.
the wind shifted and the fire stopped a little east of Broadway. By then, five hundred houses had been destroyed. Washington would neither take credit for the blaze nor deplore it.
“Providence,” he said, “or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”

—

The next night the town was still in shock when British soldiers marched into General Howe’s headquarters with a young man
wearing the round broad-brimmed hat of a Dutch schoolmaster. His only identification was a Yale diploma, but the papers he was carrying proved what his mission had been. Nathan Hale had almost finished his drawings of British troop positions when a relative of his from New Hampshire recognized him at a tavern. Samuel Hale, a Tory, reported that Nathan was probably a spy, and the British made the arrest.

In the morning, Nathan Hale confessed frankly that he had been spying for General Washington. William Howe ordered him to be hanged without a trial, and the execution was set for 11
A.M.
in front of the artillery park. A British officer who led Hale to his own tent to wait found the American calm and behaving with a gentle dignity. Asking for pen and paper, he wrote to his mother and to a fellow officer. Hale also asked to see a clergyman, but that request was denied.

When the hour came, Hale was taken to the gallows and the noose thrust around his neck. He addressed the spectators with great composure. It was the duty of every good soldier, Hale said, to obey any order from his commander in chief. He urged the British soldiers gathered around him to be ready to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.

Afterward, those who had heard him praised the way Nathan Hale had met his own death.

O
N
D
ECEMBER
11, 1776, the Congress in Philadelphia recommended that each of the United States set a day of solemn fasting and humiliation. They were instructed to implore the Almighty God to assist in the war against Britain. For George Washington and his men, the three months since the loss of New York had already provided humiliation enough. William Howe had allowed the Americans to dig in further on Harlem Heights until mid-October. Then, with four thousand troops, he had outflanked them and driven Washington and his army on a day-long march north to White Plains. After another delay of ten days, Howe attacked the extreme right of the American line, and Washington pulled the army back to North Castle. William Howe waited ten more days and surrounded Fort Washington on the east side of the Hudson. Nathanael Greene, who commanded the three thousand Americans stationed there, thought they could hold out, even though the British
outnumbered them at least three to one. Washington was less sure, but he didn’t overrule Greene.

On November 16 General Howe demanded that the fort surrender. An American colonel refused, reminding Howe that the Americans had joined “the most glorious cause that mankind ever fought in.” The next day, British and German troops crushed the fort’s defenses on three sides. They lost three hundred men but took the fort and 2,858 American prisoners of war. Four days later, Lord Cornwallis led four thousand men across the Hudson to New Jersey and tried to trap Washington and Greene between the Hudson and Hackensack Rivers. The Americans barely escaped. On November 30, two thousand militiamen from New Jersey and Maryland had come to the end of their enlistments and quit Washington’s ranks as he was rushing his army away from the British advance through a cold rain. There was no question that Cornwallis had the Americans on the run, but Howe ordered him to pause, which gave Washington time to reach Trenton on December 3. When the British arrived five days later, Howe was with them. That same day in Rhode Island, Henry Clinton’s men took possession of Newport unopposed.

George Washington had thrown out several false hints that he was preparing to turn and take a stand. That prospect had made the British cautious in their pursuit across New Jersey, and they had taken nineteen days to travel seventy-four miles. “
They will neither fight nor totally run away,” one of Howe’s officers complained about the Americans. “But they keep at such a distance that we are always above a day’s march from them. We seem to be playing at Bo-Peep.”

By the time General Howe finally entered Trenton, the Americans once again had eluded him. Washington had collected every boat along the Delaware River for seventy miles and had rowed his shattered army across to Pennsylvania. The last of them had been shoving off from the riverbank as Howe and his army arrived on the scene.

For the moment, Washington had saved his troops, although their number had dwindled to five thousand. At any moment he expected another attack by twice that many British soldiers. Washington believed that if the residents of New Jersey had offered him any support he could have made a stand at Hackensack or Brunswick. But the militia had either disbanded officially or simply slunk
away, leaving Washington with no choice but flight. Now Howe would certainly move against Philadelphia. Washington sent Israel Putnam there to fortify the town.

Members of the Congress were aghast that they might be forced to move their deliberations. Indignantly they called upon Washington to guarantee that they would be able to stay in Philadelphia. Until that moment, the Congress had tried not to admit how badly the war was going, but Washington could no longer encourage their optimism. He declined to predict the future, but said the Congress might have to leave. On December 12, 1776, members adjourned in Philadelphia and agreed to convene eight days later in Baltimore, Maryland. Samuel Adams was convinced the move was premature.

—

During those past three months, Thomas Paine had served in Nathanael Greene’s command as a volunteer aide, amusing his commander by his willingness to debate any subject, even mathematics. But when General Horatio Gates probed tactlessly into Paine’s marriage problems, Paine took his questions as an impertinence and broke off their friendship. After the British had taken the forts on the Hudson, Paine marched with the army on its retreat to Newark. He watched as enlistments expired and half the army deserted George Washington, but he never blamed the commander in chief for the dismal state of affairs. He considered Washington another Fabius, Hannibal’s Roman opponent, who had been called the Delayer because of his tactics of waiting and patience. Paine predicted that one day, when the overwhelming odds against the Americans were fully understood, history would regard Washington’s retreat through New Jersey as a glorious military maneuver.

During the day, Paine was consumed by his army work. But by the light of the campfire he began to write another pamphlet, which he called
The Crisis.
When it was done, Washington ordered bands of his downcast soldiers called together, and Paine’s essay was read aloud to them.

“
These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine began. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the
harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: ‘Tis dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.”

When the essay was published, it shamed some militiamen and made others bolder. Numbers of them returned to the fight. American morale badly needed a military victory, but for the moment
The Crisis
was all General Washington had.

—

Charles Lee was finding it impossible not to contrast his success at Charleston with his commander in chief’s blunders and retreats. On his way to rejoin headquarters in October 1776, General Lee ignored the dire events at Harlem Heights and White Plains and stopped instead in Philadelphia. Before he had accepted his commission, Lee had informed the Congress that it must make good the large sums of money he was owed in England. Now, on the crest of his victory, Lee insisted on eleven thousand pounds sterling.

When he arrived finally in New York, Lee was received as something of a savior. His gritty assurance and his enthusiasm for the Continental Army gave the men confidence in their own capacity. For all of his eccentricities—men said he smelled more of the kennel than his hounds did—Lee had been right about George Washington’s strategy on the Hudson. He had written to Joseph Reed, Washington’s adjutant general, that he couldn’t understand why Fort Washington wasn’t evacuated when it clearly could not be held, no matter what Nathanael Greene had said.

But when the British overran the post, Lee was not smug. Instead, he lost all control, railing and shouting that had the wretched place been named for him and not for Washington, it would have been given up long ago. Reed had watched as Washington hesitated and debated with himself over the fort. Then, while Washington rushed through New Jersey, Reed had sent Lee a letter, suggesting that now was the time for a change in the high command. “
I do not mean to flatter nor praise you at the expense of any other,” Reed wrote, “but I confess I do think that it is entirely owing to you that this army, and the liberties of America so far as they are depending on it, are not totally cut off.” Reed added that Lee could be decisive, a quality often lacking in minds that were otherwise valuable.

Lee had remained on the east side of the Hudson with about seven thousand troops from New York and New England when General Washington crossed the river with all of the Southern troops. As his situation worsened throughout November 1776, Washington had called upon Lee to join him, but Lee was reluctant to obey. If he went, he would be second in command. If he waited, the Congress might see Washington’s obvious failures and do what it should have done in the first place—name an experienced British officer to replace an indecisive Virginia planter as commander in chief. Lee stalled and delayed as Washington grew more desperate. But Washington never became peremptory, even though he knew Lee’s low opinion of him. Once, when Joseph Reed was away from headquarters, Washington opened one of Lee’s letters addressed to the adjutant. He returned it to Lee with a mild note of apology for his mistake.

Now, with Philadelphia threatened in early December, Washington was reduced to begging. “Do come on,” he wrote to General Lee. If Lee came quickly, he might save the town, with its symbolic meaning for America. Lee didn’t believe that William Howe intended to attack Philadelphia, and though he consented to cross the Hudson he loitered along, making no determined effort to reach Washington’s camp. The excuses he offered were ones Washington could also claim: Lee’s roster of seven thousand men at White Plains had dropped to fewer than three thousand. With their enlistments about to expire, the troops of an entire New York unit went home just as Lee was preparing to cross into New Jersey. Like Washington’s troops, Lee’s men were badly clothed. Those without shoes were slaughtering cattle and wrapping their feet in the hides. And the people of New Jersey were as indifferent, even hostile, to Lee’s army as they had been to Washington’s. Despite strict orders, some of Lee’s hungry troops had turned to looting. Whenever they came across a sheep, a goose or a turkey, they went through a charade of challenging it to give the day’s countersign. When it didn’t answer, they roasted it for its Tory sympathies.

By December 8, 1776, Lee’s army had traveled fifty miles from its crossing on the Hudson, and he paused to rest at Morristown. He wrote to inform Washington that he could contribute more by raising a number of militia there than by hurrying to headquarters, and he made no attempt to conceal his disdain for the commander in chief. Lee had heard that Washington had towed along a fleet of
heavy boats when he was forced across the Delaware, and he asked, “
I am told you have the gondolas from Philadelphia with you; for Heaven’s sake, what use can they be of?”

John Sullivan had been exchanged for a British officer and had joined Lee’s troops. After a two-day rest at Morristown, General Lee moved his men eight miles to the village of Vealton. There he turned over the men to Sullivan and left camp for an evening of diversion. With a bodyguard of four officers and fifteen men, he rode to Basking Ridge, where an Irish widow named White kept a tavern. Mrs. White also had other women boarding at her establishment; during a long night, one of Lee’s officers was awakened by
female screaming.

The next morning, Friday the thirteenth, General Lee was late coming down for breakfast. In an old blue coat and greasy leather breeches, he sat at the table writing a letter to Horatio Gates, who he knew shared his opinion of George Washington.

“
Entre nous, a certain great man is damnably difficult,” Lee wrote. “He has thrown me into a situation where I may have my choice of difficulties. In short, unless something which I do not expect turns up, we are lost.”