THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE
Then, almost immediately, came the clash of arms. General Gage would
not sit still and see the country round about him made ready for armed
resistance without at least an effort to keep control of it. On the 19th
of April he despatched eight hundred men to seize the military stores
which the provincials had gathered at Concord, and there followed an
instant rising of the country. Riders had sped through the country-side
during the long night which preceded the movement of the troops, to give
warning; and before the troops could finish their errand armed men beset
them at almost every turn of the road, swarming by companies out of every
hamlet and firing upon them from hedge and fence corner and village
street as if they were outlaws running the gauntlet. The untrained
villagers could not stand against them in the open road or upon the
village greens, where at first they mustered, but they could make every
way-side covert a sort of ambush, every narrow bridge a trap in which
to catch them at a disadvantage. Their return to Boston quickened to a
veritable rout, and they left close upon three hundred of their comrades,
dead, wounded, or prisoners, behind them ere they reached the cover of
their lines again. The news of their march and of the attack upon them
had spread everywhere, and in every quarter the roads filled with the
provincial minute men marching upon Boston. Those who had fired upon the
troops and driven them within their lines did not go home again; those
who came too late for the fighting stayed to see that there were no more
sallies from the town; and the morning of the 20th disclosed a small army
set down by the town in a sort of siege.
[Illustration: NOTICE TO MILITIA]
[Illustration: AN ACCOUNT OF THE CONCORD FIGHT]
That same night of the 20th Lord Dunmore, in Virginia, landed a force
of marines from an armed sloop in the river and seized the gunpowder
stored at Williamsburg. There, too, the country rose,—under Mr. Henry
himself as captain. They did not reach the scene soon enough to meet the
marines,—there were no thick-set villages in that country-side to pour
their armed men into the roads at a moment’s summons,—but they forced the
earl, their governor, to pay for the powder he had ordered seized and
taken off.
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF ETHAN ALLEN]
The rude muster at Boston expanded into a motley yeoman army of sixteen
thousand men within the first week of its sudden rally, and settled in
its place to watch the town until the general Congress of the colonies
at Philadelphia should give it countenance, and a commander. On the day
the Congress met (May 10, 1775), Ethan Allen walked into the unguarded
gates of the fort at Ticonderoga, at the head of a little force out of
Vermont, and took possession of the stout place “in the name of the Great
Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” though he held a commission from
neither; and two days later Crown Point, near by, was taken possession
of in the same manner. When the Congress met it found itself no longer a
mere “Congress of Committees,” assembled for conference and protest. Its
appeals for better government, uttered the last autumn, its arguments
for colonial privilege, its protestations of loyalty and its prayers
for redress, had been, one and all, not so much rejected as put by with
contempt by the King and his ministers; and the mere movement of affairs
was hurrying the colonies which it represented into measures which would
presently put the whole matter of its controversy with the government at
home beyond the stage of debate. Its uneasy members did not neglect to
state their rights again, in papers whose moderation and temper of peace
no candid man could overlook or deny; but they prepared for action also
quite as carefully, like practical men who did not deceive themselves
even in the midst of hope.
[Illustration: RUINS OF FORT TICONDEROGA]
Colonel Washington had come to the Congress in his provincial uniform;
and, if no one cared to ask a man with whom it was so obviously difficult
to be familiar why he wore such a habit there, all were free to draw
their own conclusions. It was, no doubt, his instinctive expression
of personal feeling in the midst of all that was happening; and his
service in the Congress was from first to last that of a soldier. Its
committees consulted him almost every day upon some question of military
preparation: the protection of the frontier against the Indians, the
organization of a continental force, the management of a commissariat,
the gathering of munitions, proper means of equipment, feasible plans
of fortification. While they deliberated, his own colony passed openly
into rebellion. The 1st of June saw Virginia’s last House of Burgesses
assemble. By the 8th of the month Dunmore had fled his capital, rather
than see a second time the anger of a Williamsburg mob, and was a
fugitive upon one of his Majesty’s armed vessels lying in the river. The
colony had thenceforth no government save such as it gave itself; and its
delegates at Philadelphia knew that there was for them no turning back.
[Illustration: WATCHING THE FIGHT AT BUNKER HILL]
On the 15th of June, on the motion of Mr. John Adams, the Congress
chose Colonel Washington commander-in-chief of the American forces,
and directed him to repair to Boston and assume command in the field.
Two days later the British and the provincials met in a bloody and
stubborn fight at Bunker Hill. On the 25th of May heavy reinforcements
for General Gage had arrived from over sea which swelled the force of
regulars in Boston to more than eight thousand men, and added three
experienced general officers to Gage’s council: William Howe, Sir Henry
Clinton, and John Burgoyne. The British commanders saw very well, what
was indeed apparent enough to any soldier, that their position in Boston
could be very effectively commanded to the north and south on either
hand by cannon placed upon the heights of Charlestown or Dorchester,
and determined to occupy Charlestown heights at once, the nearer and
more threatening position. But so leisurely did they go about it that
the provincials were beforehand in the project. The early morning light
of the 17th of June disclosed them still at work there on trenches and
redoubts which they had begun at midnight. The British did not stop to
use either the guns of the fleet or any caution of indirect approach to
dislodge them, but at once put three thousand men straight across the
water to take the hill, whose crest the Americans were fortifying, by
direct assault. It cost them a thousand men; and the colonials retired,
outnumbered though they were, only because their powder gave out, not
their pluck or steadfastness. When the thing was done, the British did
not care to take another intrenched position from men who held their fire
till they were within a few score yards of them and then volleyed with
the definite and deadly aim of marksmen.
[Illustration: FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, NO. 1. (LOOKING TOWARDS DORCHESTER
HEIGHTS)]
[Illustration: FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, NO. 2. (LOOKING TOWARDS ROXBURY)]
[Illustration: ORDER OF COMMITTEE OF SAFETY]
Colonel Washington received his formal commission on the 19th, and was
on horseback for the journey northward by the 21st. On the 3d of July
he assumed command at Cambridge. In choosing Washington for the command
of the raw levies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New
Hampshire set down in impromptu siege before Boston, Mr. John Adams and
the other New Englanders who acted with him had meant, not only to secure
the services of the most experienced soldier in America, but also, by
taking a man out of the South, to give obvious proof of the union and
co-operation of the colonies. They had chosen better than they knew. It
was no small matter to have so noticeable a man of honor and breeding at
the head of an army whose enemies deemed it a mere peasant mob and rowdy
assemblage of rebels. Washington himself, with his notions of authority,
his pride of breeding, his schooling in conduct and privilege, was far
from pleased till he began to see below the surface, with the disorderly
array he found of uncouth, intractable plough boys and farmers, one
esteeming himself as good as another, with free-and-easy manners and a
singular, half-indifferent insolence against authority or discipline.
[Illustration: BOSTON AND BUNKER HILL, FROM A PRINT PUBLISHED IN 1781]
“There are some fine fellows come from Virginia,” Joseph Reed, of
Pennsylvania, had written of the Virginian delegates to the Congress at
Philadelphia; “but they are very high. We understand they are the capital
men of the colony.” It was good that one of the masterful group should
ride all the public way from Philadelphia to Boston to take command of
the army, the most conspicuous figure in the colonies, showing every
one of the thousands who crowded to greet or see him as he passed how
splendid a type of self-respecting gentlemen was now to be seen at the
front of affairs, putting himself forward soberly and upon principle.
The leaders of the revolt in Massachusetts were by no means all new men
like John Adams or habitual agitators like Samuel Adams; many a man of
substance and of old lineage had also identified himself with the popular
cause. But new, unseasoned men were very numerous and very prominent
there among those who had turned affairs upside down; a very great
number of the best and oldest families of the colony had promptly ranged
themselves on the side of the government; the revolution now at last on
foot in that quarter could too easily be made to look like an affair of
popular clamor, a mere rising of the country. It was of signal advantage
to have high personal reputation and a strong flavor, as it were, of
aristocratic distinction given it by this fortunate choice the Congress
had made of a commander. It was no light matter to despise a cause which
such men openly espoused and stood ready to fight for.
The British lay still till Washington came, and gave him the rest of
the year, and all the winter till spring returned, in which to get his
rude army into fighting shape,—why, no one could tell, not even their
friends and spokesmen in Parliament. The Americans swarmed busy on
every hand. It proved infinitely difficult for them to get supplies,
particularly arms and ammunition; but slowly, very slowly, they came in.
General Washington was but forty-three, and had an energy which was both
imperative and infectious. His urgent, explicit, businesslike letters
found their way to every man of influence and to every colonial committee
or assembly from whom aid could come. Cannon were dragged all the way
from Ticonderoga for his use. The hardy, danger-loving seamen of the
coasts about him took very cheerfully to privateering; intercepted supply
ships and even transports bound for Boston; brought English merchantmen
into port as prizes; cut ships out from under the very guns of a British
man-of-war here and there in quiet harbors. Food and munitions intended
for the British regiments at Boston frequently found their way to General
Washington’s camps instead, notwithstanding Boston harbor was often full
of armed vessels which might have swept the coasts. The commanders in
Boston felt beset, isolated, and uneasy, and hesitated painfully what to
do.
The country at large was open to the insurgent forces, to move in as
they pleased. In the autumn Colonel Montgomery, the gallant young
Irish soldier who had served under Wolfe at Quebec, led a continental
force northward through the wilderness; took the forts which guarded
the northern approaches to Lake Champlain; and occupied Montreal,
intercepting and taking the little garrison which left the place in boats
to make its way down the river. Meanwhile Colonel Benedict Arnold was at
the gates of Quebec, and Montgomery pushed forward to join him. Colonel
Arnold had forced his way in from the coast through the thick forests
of Maine, along the icy streams of the Kennebec and the Chaudière. The
bitter journey had cost him quite a third of the little force with which
Washington had sent him forth. He had but seven hundred men with whom to
take the all but impregnable place, and Montgomery brought but a scant
five hundred to assist him. But the two young commanders were not to be
daunted. They loved daring, and touched all who followed them with their
own indomitable spirit. In the black darkness of the night which preceded
the last day of the year (December 31, 1775), amidst a blinding storm of
snow, they threw themselves upon the defences of the place, and would
have taken it had not Montgomery lost his life ere his men gained their
final foothold within the walls. The Congress at Philadelphia had at
least the satisfaction of receiving the colors of the Seventh Regiment
of his Majesty’s regulars, taken at Fort Chambly, as a visible token of
Montgomery’s exploits at the northern outlet of Champlain; and every
added operation of the Americans, successful or unsuccessful, added to
the feeling of isolation and uneasiness among the British at Boston.
[Illustration: RICHARD MONTGOMERY]
October 10, 1775, Sir William Howe superseded General Gage as
commander-in-chief in the closely watched and invested town; but the
change of commanders made little difference. Every one except the
sailors, the foragers, the commissaries, the drill sergeants, the writing
clerks, the colonial assemblies, the congressional and local committees,
lay inactive till March came, 1776, and Washington was himself ready to
take the offensive. At last he had such cannon and such tools and stores
and wagons and teams as he had been asking and planning and waiting for
the weary, anxious winter through. On the morning of the 5th of March
the British saw workmen and ordnance and every sign of a strong force
of provincials on Dorchester heights, and were as surprised as they
had been, close upon a year before, to see men and trenches on Bunker
Hill. Washington had done work in the night which it was already too
late for them to undo; a storm beat the waters of the bay as the day
wore on and made it impossible to put troops across to the attack in
boats; Washington had all the day and another night in which to complete
his defences; and by the morning of the 6th the British knew that the
heights could not be taken without a risk and loss they could not afford.
The town was rendered untenable at a stroke. With deep chagrin, Howe
determined upon an immediate evacuation; and by the 17th he was aboard
his ships,—eight thousand troops and more than a thousand loyalists
who dared not stay. The stores and cannon, the ammunition, muskets,
small-arms, gun carriages, and supplies of every kind which he found
himself obliged to leave behind enriched Washington with an equipment
more abundant than he could ever have hoped to see in his economical,
ill-appointed camp at Cambridge.
[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AS A POLITICIAN]
The only British army in America had withdrawn to Halifax: his Majesty’s
troops had nowhere a foothold in the colonies. But that, every one knew,
was only the first act in a struggle which must grow vastly greater
and more tragical before it was ended. Washington knew very well that
there was now no drawing back. Not since the affair at Bunker Hill
had he deemed it possible to draw back; and now this initial success
in arms had made the friends of revolution very bold everywhere. As
spring warmed into summer it was easy to mark the growth in the spirit
of independence. One of the first measures of the Continental Congress,
after coming together for its third annual session in May, 1776, was
to urge the several colonies to provide themselves with regular and
permanent governments as independent states, instead of continuing to
make shift with committees of safety for executives and provisional
“provincial congresses” for legislatures, as they had done since their
government under the crown had fallen to pieces; and they most of them
promptly showed a disposition to take its advice. The resolution in which
the Congress embodied this significant counsel plainly declared “that
the exercise of every kind of authority under the crown ought to be
totally suppressed,” and all the powers of government exercised under
authority from the people of the colonies,—words themselves equivalent
to a declaration for entire separation from Great Britain. Even in the
colonies where loyalists mustered strongest the government of the crown
had in fact almost everywhere been openly thrown off. But by midsummer
it was deemed best to make a formal Declaration of Independence. North
Carolina was the first to instruct her delegates to take that final and
irretrievable step; but most of the other colonies were ready to follow
her lead; and on July 4th Congress adopted the impressive Declaration
which Mr. Jefferson had drawn up in the name of its committee.
[Illustration: R. H. LEE’S RESOLUTION FOR INDEPENDENCE]
[Illustration: STATE HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA, 1778]
Washington himself had urgently prayed that such a step be taken, and
taken at once. It would not change, it would only acknowledge, existing
facts; and it might a little simplify the anxious business he was
about. He had an army which was always making and to be made, because
the struggle had been calculated upon a short scale and the colonies
which were contributing their half-drilled contingents to it were
enlisting their men for only three months at a time. Sometimes the men
would consent to re-enlist, sometimes they would not. They did as they
pleased, of course, and would time and again take themselves off by whole
companies at once when their three months’ term was up. Sir William Howe
would come back, of course, with a force increased, perhaps irresistible:
would come, Washington foresaw, not to Boston, where he could be cooped
up and kept at bay, but to New York, to get control of the broad gateway
of the Hudson, whose long valley had its head close to the waters of
Lake George and Lake Champlain, and constituted an infinitely important
strategic line drawn straight through the heart of the country, between
New England, which was no doubt hopelessly rebellious, and the middle
colonies, in which the crown could count its friends by the thousand. The
Americans must meet him, apparently, with levies as raw and as hastily
equipped as those out of which an army of siege had been improvised at
Boston, each constituent part of which would fall to pieces and have to
be put together again every three months.
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON]
[Illustration: JEFFERSON’S ORIGINAL DRAFT OF THE DECLARATION OF
INDEPENDENCE]
The worst of it was, that the country back of New York had not been,
could not be, purged of active loyalists as the country round about
Boston had been by the local “committees” of one sort or another and
by the very active and masterful young men who had banded themselves
together as “Sons of Liberty,” seeing much rich adventure, and for the
present little responsibility, ahead of them in those days of government
by resolution. Washington transferred his headquarters to New York early
in April and set about his almost hopeless task with characteristic
energy and fertility of resource; but there were spies without number
all about him, and every country-side was full of enemies who waited for
General Howe’s coming to give him trouble. The formal Declaration of
Independence which the Congress adopted in July hardened the face and
stiffened the resolution of every man who had definitely thrown in his
lot with the popular cause, as Washington had foreseen that it would,
just because it made resistance avowed rebellion, and left no way of
retreat or compromise. But it also deeply grieved and alienated many a
man of judgment and good feeling, and made party differences within the
colonies just so much the more bitter and irreconcilable.
[Illustration: REAR VIEW OF INDEPENDENCE HALL]
[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT’S CHAIR IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION]
The first attempt of the British was made against Charleston in the
south. A fleet under Sir Peter Parker came out of England with fresh
troops commanded by the Earl of Cornwallis, was joined by transports and
men-of-war from Halifax, bearing a force under Sir Henry Clinton, and,
as June drew towards its close, delivered a combined attack, by land and
sea, upon the fort on Sullivan’s Island, seeking to win its way past to
the capture of Charleston itself. But they could not force a passage.
Two of the ships,—one of them Sir Peter’s own flag-ship,—never came away
again. Colonel Moultrie and Colonel Thompson beat off both the fleet
and the troops landed from it; and the British went northward again to
concentrate upon New York.
[Illustration: MAP OF SULLIVAN’S ISLAND]
On the 28th of June,—the very day of the attack at Charleston,—Howe’s
transports began to gather in the lower bay. A few days more, and there
were thirty thousand troops waiting to be landed. It was impossible, with
the force Washington had, to prevent their being put ashore at their
commander’s convenience. It was impossible to close the Narrows, to keep
their ships from the inner bay, or even to prevent their passing up the
river as they pleased. Washington could only wait within the exposed town
or within his trenches on Brooklyn heights, which commanded the town
almost as Dorchester and Charlestown heights commanded Boston.
[Illustration: WILLIAM MOULTRIE]
For a month and more Sir William waited, his troops most of them still
upon the ships, until he should first attempt to fulfil his mission
of peace and accommodation. His brother, Admiral Lord Howe, joined
him there in July. They were authorized to offer unconditional pardon,
even now, to all who would submit. The ministers in England could not
have chosen commissioners of peace more acceptable to the Americans
or more likely to be heard than the Howes. Not only were they men of
honor, showing in all that they did the straightforward candor and
the instinctive sense of duty that came with their breeding and their
training in arms, but they were also brothers of that gallant young
soldier who had come over almost twenty years ago to fight the French
with Abercrombie, to be loved by every man who became his comrade, and
to lose his life untimely fighting forward through the forests which lay
about Ticonderoga, a knightly and heroic figure. But they could offer
no concessions,—only pardon for utter submission, and, for all their
honorable persistency, could find no one in authority among the Americans
who would make the too exacting exchange. Their offers of pardon
alternated with the movements of their troops and their steady successes
in arms. Lord Howe issued his first overture of peace, in the form of a
public proclamation offering pardon, immediately upon his arrival with
his fleet at Sandy Hook, and followed it up at once with messages to the
Congress at Philadelphia. Sir William Howe put his troops ashore on the
22d of August, and made ready to dislodge Washington from the heights of
Brooklyn; but on the 23d he too, in his turn, made yet another offer of
general pardon, by proclamation.
[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM HOWE]
On the 27th he drove the American forces on Long Island in on their
defences, and rendered the heights at once practically untenable.
Washington had but eighteen thousand half-disciplined militiamen with
which to hold the town and all the long shores of the open bay and river,
and had put ten thousand of them across the river to hold Long Island
and the defences on the heights. Sir William had put twenty thousand
men ashore for the attack on the heights; and when Washington knew that
his advanced guard was driven in, and saw Sir William, mindful of Bunker
Hill, bestow his troops, not for an assault, but for an investment of the
heights, he perceived at once how easily he might be cut off and trapped
there, armed ships lying at hand which might at any moment completely
command the river. Immediately, and as secretly as quickly, while a
single night held, he withdrew every man and every gun, as suddenly and
as successfully as he had seized the heights at Dorchester.
Again Sir William sent a message of conciliation to the Congress, by
the hands of General Sullivan, his prisoner. On the 11th of September,
before the next movement of arms, Dr. Franklin, Mr. John Adams, and Mr.
Edward Rutledge met Lord Howe and Sir William, as commissioners from the
Congress, to discuss possible terms of accommodation. Dr. Franklin had
been in London until March. During the past winter he had more than once
met Lord Howe in earnest conference about American affairs, the ministers
wishing to find through him some way, if it were possible, of quieting
the colonies. But the ministers had not been willing then to make the
concessions which might have ended the trouble, and their commissioners
were not authorized to make them now; and the conference with the
representatives of the Congress came to nothing, as the conferences in
London had come to nothing.
[Illustration: HOWE’S PROCLAMATION PREPARATORY TO LEAVING BOSTON]
Washington could no more hold Manhattan Island with the forces at his
command than he could hold Brooklyn heights. He had no choice in the end
but to retire. General Howe was cautious, moved slowly, and handled his
forces with little energy or decision; Washington made stand and fought
at every point at which there was the least promise of success. His men
and his commanders were shamefully demoralized by their defeat on Long
Island, but he held them together with singular tact and authority:
repulsed the enemy at Haarlem heights (September 16th), held his own
before them at White Plains (October 28th),—and did not feel obliged
to abandon the island until late in November, after General Greene had
fatally blundered by suffering three thousand of the best trained men of
the scant continental force, with invaluable artillery, small-arms, and
stores, to be trapped and taken at Fort Washington (November 16th).
When he did at last withdraw, and leave Howe in complete control of the
great port and its approaches, the situation was indeed alarming. He had
been unspeakably stung and disquieted, as he withdrew mile by mile up the
island, to see how uncertain his men were in the field,—how sometimes
they would fight and sometimes they would not at the hot crisis of a
critical encounter; and now things seemed to have gone utterly to pieces.
He might at any moment be quite cut off from New England. While he still
faced Howe on Manhattan Island, General Carleton, moving with a British
force out of Canada, had driven Benedict Arnold up Champlain, despite
stubborn and gallant resistance (October 11th and 13th), and on the 14th
of October had occupied Crown Point. There he had stopped; and later news
came that he had withdrawn. But apparently he could strike again almost
when he pleased, and threaten all the long line of the Hudson even to
where Howe lay at New York itself.
[Illustration: EVACUATION OF BROOKLYN HEIGHTS]
It was not mere defeat, however, that put the cast almost of despair upon
affairs as Washington saw them that dismal autumn. His forces seemed
to melt away under his very eyes. Charles Lee, his chief subordinate
in command, too much a soldier of fortune to be a man of honor, obeyed
or disregarded his orders at his own discretion. When once it was
known that General Washington had been obliged to abandon the Hudson,
consternation and defection spread everywhere. On the 30th of November,
when his defeat seemed complete, it might be final, the Howes joined
in a fresh proclamation of pardon, inviting all, once again, to submit
and be forgiven; and it looked for a little as if all who dared would
take advantage of the offer and make their peace with the enemy,—for
Washington now moved in a region where opinion had from the first been
sharply divided. While defection spread he was in full retreat, with
scarcely three thousand men all told in his demoralized force,—that
handful ill-clad and stricken with disease, and dwindling fast by
desertion,—an overwhelming body of the enemy, under Cornwallis, at his
very heels as he went, so that he dared hardly so much as pause for rest
until he had put the broad shelter of the Delaware behind him. “These are
the times that try men’s souls,” cried Thomas Paine (December, 1776);
“the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” were falling away. One
after another, that very summer, the delegates of the several states had
put their names to the Declaration of Independence; but already there
seemed small prospect of making it good. To not a few it already began to
seem a piece of mere bravado, to be repented of.
[Illustration: CIRCULAR OF PHILADELPHIA COUNCIL OF SAFETY]
The real strength and hope of the cause lay in the steadfastness and the
undaunted initiative of the indomitable Virginian whom the Congress had
chosen for the chief command. He proved himself a maker as well as a
commander of armies, struck oftenest when he was deemed most defeated,
could not by any reverse be put out of the fighting. He was now for the
first time to give the British commanders a real taste of his quality.
What there was to be done he did himself. The British stopped at the
Delaware; but their lines reached Burlington, within eighteen miles of
Philadelphia, and from Trenton, which they held in some force, extended
through Princeton to New Brunswick and their headquarters at New York.
Philadelphia was stricken with utter panic. Sick and ragged soldiers
poured in from Washington’s camp, living evidences of what straits he
was in, and had to be succored and taken care of; the country roads were
crowded with vehicles leaving the town laden with women and children and
household goods; the Congress itself incontinently fled the place and
betook itself to Baltimore. Washington’s military stores were in the
town, but he could get no proper protection for them. It was at that very
moment, nevertheless, that he showed all the world with what skill and
audacity he could strike. By dint of every resolute and persistent effort
he had before Christmas brought his little force to a fighting strength
of some six thousand. More than half of these were men enlisted only
until the new year should open, but he moved before that.
[Illustration: OPERATIONS AROUND TRENTON AND PRINCETON. NUMBERS 76
REPRESENT THE CAMPS OF GENERAL CORNWALLIS AND 77 THAT OF GENERAL
KNYPHAUSEN ON THE 23D OF JUNE, 1777]
During the night of Christmas Day, 1776, ferried by doughty fishermen
from far Gloucester and Marblehead,—the same hardy fellows who had
handled his boats the night he abandoned the heights of Brooklyn,—he got
twenty-five hundred men across the river through pitchy darkness and
pounding ice; and in the early light and frost of the next morning he
took Trenton, with its garrison of nine hundred Hessians, at the point of
the bayonet. There he waited,—keeping his unwilling militiamen to their
service past the opening of the year by dint of imperative persuasion
and a pledge of his own private fortune for their pay,—until Cornwallis
came down post-haste out of New York with eight thousand men. Moving only
to change his position a little, he dared to wait until his adversary
was encamped, at nightfall of the 2d of January, 1777, within ear-shot
of his trenches; then slipped northward in the night, easily beat the
British detachment posted at Princeton, as the next day dawned and had
its morning; and could have taken or destroyed Cornwallis’s stores at
New Brunswick had his men been adequately shod to outstrip the British
following hard behind them. As it was, he satisfied himself with having
completely flanked and thwarted his foe, and withdrew safe to the heights
of Morristown. The British had hastily retired from Burlington upon the
taking of Trenton,—so hastily that they took neither their cannon nor
even their heavier baggage away with them. Now they deemed it unsafe
to take post anywhere south of New Brunswick, until spring should come
and they could see what Washington meant to do. Once again, therefore,
the Americans controlled New Jersey; and Washington ordered all who
had accepted General Howe’s offer of pardon either to withdraw to the
British lines or take the oath of allegiance to the United States. Daring
and a touch of genius had turned despair into hope. Americans did not
soon forget that sudden triumph of arms, or that the great Frederick of
Prussia had said that that had been the most brilliant campaign of the
century.
[Illustration: HESSIAN BOOT]
A soldier’s eye could see quickly and plainly enough how the whole aspect
of the war had been changed by those brief, sudden, unexpected strokes at
Trenton and Princeton. Men near at hand, and looking for what a soldier
would deem it no business of his to reckon with, saw that it had not only
radically altered the military situation, but also the very atmosphere of
the times for all concerned. The fighting at Trenton and Princeton had
been of no great consequence in itself, but it had in every way put the
war beyond its experimental stage. It had taught the British commanders
with what sort of spirit and genius they had to deal, and how certain it
was that their task must be carried to a finish not only by conquering
marches and a mere occupation of the country, but by careful strategy
and the long plans of a set campaign. Moreover, they now obviously had a
country, and not an insurgent army merely, to conquer,—and a vast country
at that. That surprising winter had set men’s sinews to what they had
undertaken, on the one side as on the other.
In December (1776) it had looked as if all firmness had been unnerved
and all hope turned to foreboding by the success of the British at New
York and in the Jerseys. Joseph Galloway, of Pennsylvania, when that
crisis came, took advantage of the opportunity to remove within the
British lines and cast in his lot there with those who were ready to
stake everything upon their loyalty and the success of the British arms.
Others followed his example,—some out of panic, but many, it seemed,
not out of fear, but out of principle. Only the other day Mr. Galloway
had been the chief figure in the Congress of Committees which spoke for
the colonies; for many a long day he had been the chief figure in the
politics of his own colony; and many of those who made submission when
he did were of families of the first dignity and consequence. They, like
him, had been champions of colonial rights until it came to the point of
rebellion. They would not follow further. Their example was imitated now,
moreover, in their act of formal submission, by some who had played the
part of patriot more boldly and with less compunction. Mr. Samuel Tucker,
even, who until this untoward month had been president of New Jersey’s
revolutionary committee of safety, made his submission. It seemed hard to
find steadfastness anywhere.
[Illustration: LETTER CONCERNING BRITISH OUTRAGES]
But Washington’s genius and the license of the British soldiery had
turned the tide at last, when it seemed upon the very point of becoming
overwhelming. The occupation of the British, brief as it had been, had
brought upon New York and the Jerseys experiences like those of a country
overrun by a foreign soldiery permitted almost every license of conquest.
When the ministers in England found themselves, in 1774, face to face
with the revolt in the colonies, they could count but 17,547 men all told
in the King’s forces; and when it came to sudden recruiting, they could
obtain very few enlistments. They dared not risk conscription,—English
opinion had never tolerated that, except to meet invasion. They sent to
America, therefore, to reinforce General Howe, not only English soldiers
as many as they could muster, but a great force of German troops as
well, hired by the regiment, their trained officers included, from the
Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel and other German princes, neighbors to the
German dominions of the House of Hannover. It was close upon a thousand
of these “Hessians” (for the colonists knew them all by that single
name) that Washington had taken at Trenton, but not until they and their
comrades had had time to make every country-side from New York to the
Delaware dread and hate them. The British commanders had suffered their
men, whether English or foreign, to plunder houses, insult and outrage
women, destroy fields of grain, and help themselves to what the towns
contained almost as they pleased; and had hardened the faces of ten of
the angry colonists against them for every one who made submission and
sought to put himself on their side, accordingly. Their marauding parties
made little distinction between friend and foe, so they but got what they
wanted. Washington could thank them for doing more to check defections
from the patriotic party than he could possibly do for himself by
carrying out the orders of the Congress to disarm all loyalists and bring
recusants to a sharp reckoning.
[Illustration: RECRUITING POSTER
_Editor’s Note._—The blurred inscription at the bottom of the poster
reads as follows:
That tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, and saturday, at Spotswood, in
Middlesex county, attendance will be given by Lieutenant Reading, with
his music and recruiting party of —— company in Major Shute’s Battalion
of the 11th regiment of infantry, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Aaron
Ogden, for the purpose of receiving the enrollment of such youth of
spirit as may be willing to enter into this honourable service.
The Encouragement, at this time, to enlist is truly liberal and generous,
namely, a bounty of twelve dollars, an annual and fully sufficient supply
of good and handsome cloathing, a daily allowance of a large and ample
ration of provisions, together with sixty dollars a year in gold and
silver money on account of pay, the whole of which the soldier may lay up
for himself and friends, as all articles proper for his subsistence and
comfort are provided by law, without any expence to him.
Those who may favour this recruiting party with their attendance as above
will have an opportunity of hearing and seeing in a more particular
manner the great advantages which these brave men will have who shall
embrace this opportunity of spending a few happy years in viewing the
different parts of this beautiful continent, in the honourable and truly
respectable character of a soldier, after which he may, if he pleases,
return home to his friends, with his pockets full of money and his head
covered with laurels.
GOD SAVE THE UNITED STATES.]
And so the year 1777 dawned like a first year of settled war and
revolution. For a little while, at the outset of the year, the Congress
made Washington practical dictator in every affair that concerned the
prosecution of the war. It authorized long enlistments, moreover,
instead of the makeshift enrolments for three months which had hitherto
kept Washington’s army always a-making and to be made, dissolving and
reforming month by month. The Congress had, it is true, neither the
energy nor the authority it needed. It could get little money to pay the
troops; its agents seriously mismanaged the indispensable business of
supplying the army with stores and clothing; and the men deserted by the
score in disgust. Washington declared, in the summer of 1777, that he
was losing more men by desertion than he was gaining by enlistment, do
what he would. But these were difficulties of administration. In spite
of all dangers and discouragements, it was evident that the continent
was settling to its task. And the end of the year showed the struggle
hopefully set forward another stage.
The military operations of that memorable year were a striking
illustration of the magnitude of the task the British generals were set
to accomplish, and of their singular lack of the energy, decision, and
despatch necessary to accomplish it. They seemed like men who dallied and
dreamed and did not mean to succeed. They planned like men of action,
but then tarried and bungled at the execution of their plans. It was
their purpose that year (1777) to strike from three several directions
along the valley of the Hudson, and break once for all the connection
between the New England colonies and their confederates. General Burgoyne
was to move, with eight thousand men, down Lake Champlain; Colonel St.
Leger, with a small but sufficient force, along a converging line down
the valley of the Mohawk, from Oswego on Ontario; and General Howe was
to meet them from the south, moving in strength up the Hudson. More than
thirty-three thousand men would have effectually swept the whole of that
great central valley, north and south, when their plan was executed. But
it was not executed. The British commanders were to learn that, for their
armies, the interior of the country was impracticable.
[Illustration: JOHN BURGOYNE]
Both St. Leger and Burgoyne were baffled in that vast wilderness. It was
simple enough for Burgoyne to descend the lakes and take once again the
forts which guarded them. Even Ticonderoga he took without a blow struck.
A precipitous height, which the Americans had supposed inaccessible
by any sort of carriage, rose above the strong fortifications of the
place beyond a narrow strip of water; the English dragged cannon to its
summit; and General St. Clair promptly withdrew in the night, knowing his
position to be no longer tenable. But it was another matter to penetrate
the forests which lay about Lake George and the upper waters of the
Hudson with militiamen out of every country-side within reach swarming
thicker and thicker at every step the redcoats took into the depths of
the perplexing region. A thousand men Burgoyne felt obliged to leave at
Ticonderoga for the sake of his communications; close upon a thousand
more he lost (August 16th) at Bennington, whither he had sent them to
seize stores; and by the time he had reached the neighborhood of Saratoga
with the six thousand left him, fully fourteen thousand provincials beset
him. He had been told that the people of the country through which he was
to pass would gladly give him aid and succor; that those quiet forests of
Vermont and New York would even yield him, it might be, a regiment or two
of loyalists wherewith to recruit his ranks when once his presence there
should give the secluded settlers heart of grace to declare themselves
openly for the King. Instead of that, he presently had a formidable force
of provincial yeomanry out of Vermont dogging his steps under General
Lincoln; a like levy, hurriedly drawn together out of New Hampshire and
Massachusetts, beat and captured his best German troops at Bennington;
the country was emptied of its people and of its cattle, was stripped
of its forage even, as he advanced; and every step he took threatened
to cut him off alike from his sources of supply and from his lines of
retreat. It maddened the watchful men of those scattered homes to see
him come with half a thousand savages at his front. It had been bad
enough to see any invaders on that defenceless border: but the presence
of the redskins put their homes and their lives in immediate and deadly
peril, and they mustered as they would have mustered to meet a threat of
massacre. Burgoyne himself would have checked his savage allies when the
mischief had been done and it was too late; but he only provoked them to
desert him and leave him without guides in an almost pathless wilderness,
without appeasing the men their presence had brought swarming upon his
flanks.
[Illustration: ARTHUR ST. CLAIR]
[Illustration: SAMUEL ADAMS]
[Illustration: BENJAMIN LINCOLN]
He pushed forward nevertheless, dogged, indomitable, determined to risk
everything rather than fail of his rendezvous with Howe and St. Leger at
the Hudson. And yet close upon the heels of his defeat and heavy loss at
Bennington came news that St. Leger had already failed. Late in July, St.
Leger had thrust his way cautiously through the forests from Oswego to
the upper waters of the Mohawk; and there, on the 3d of August, he had
set himself down to take Fort Stanwix, with its little garrison of six
hundred men under Colonel Peter Gansevoort. There, if anywhere, in those
northern forests by the Mohawk, might men who fought in the name of the
King look to be bidden Godspeed and given efficient aid and counsel by
the settlers of the country-side through which they moved. There William
Johnson (Sir William since the French war) had reigned supreme for a long
generation, his energy, subtlety, quick resource, and never failing
power over men holding the restless Iroquois always to their loyalty to
the English, the English always to their duty to the crown. Sir William
had been dead these three years; but his son, Sir John, still held his
ancient allies to their fealty and stood at the front of those who
would not accept the revolution wrought at Boston and Williamsburg and
Philadelphia. This war among the English sadly puzzled the red warriors
of the forest. War between the king of the French and the king of the
English they understood; it was a war of hostile peoples; but this war
of the English against their chiefs? “You are two brothers,” they said,
“of one blood.” The Mohawks deemed it some subtile treachery, as their
great chief did, the redoubtable Joseph Brant, himself trained with the
English boys in Mr. Wheelock’s school at Lebanon and taught to see the
white man close at hand; and the Cayugas and Senecas followed them in
their allegiance to the mighty sachem who “lived over the great lake,”
their friend and ally time out of mind. The Onondagas held off, neutral.
The Oneidas and Tuscaroras, among whom Mr. Kirkland was missionary, aided
the patriots when they could, because he wished it, but would not take
the war-path. There were white loyalists, too, as well as red, on that
far frontier. Sir John Johnson was their leader. Their regiment of Royal
Greens, together with John Butler’s Tory rangers, constituted the bulk
of St. Leger’s motley force of seventeen hundred, red men and white.
Scottish highlanders, stubborn Englishmen hot against the revolution,
and restless Irishmen, for the nonce on the side of authority, filled
their ranks.
[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON]
[Illustration: SIR JOHN JOHNSON]
[Illustration: JOSEPH BRANT]
[Illustration: PETER GANSEVOORT]
But even there, in Sir William Johnson’s one-time kingdom, enemies of
King and Parliament mustered stronger yet, and showed quicker concert,
freer, more instant union than the Tories. There were Dutch there, and
Germans and Scots-Irish, who recked nothing of the older ties that had
bound them when it came to the question whether they should yield in
their own affairs to masters over sea. Peter Gansevoort commanded the
little garrison at Stanwix; Nicholas Herkimer brought eight hundred men
to his succor. Brant and Johnson trapped the stout-hearted German in a
deadly ambush close by Oriskany as he came; but he beat them off. While
that heroic struggle went forward there in the close ravine the hot
morning through (August 6, 1777), Gansevoort made sally and sacked Sir
John’s camp. Herkimer could come no further; but there came, instead,
rumors that Burgoyne was foiled and taken and the whole American army on
the road to Stanwix. It was only Benedict Arnold, with twelve hundred
Massachusetts volunteers; but the rumors they industriously sent ahead
of them carried the panic they had planned, and when they came there was
no army to meet. St. Leger’s men were in full flight to Oswego, the very
Indians who had been their allies harrying them as they went, in mere
wanton savagery and disaffection.
Though he knew now that St. Leger could not come, though he knew nothing,
and painfully conjectured a thousand things, of Sir William Howe’s
promised movement below upon the river, Burgoyne pushed forward to the
Hudson and crossed it (September 13, 1777), to face the Americans under
General Gates upon the western bank. It was as safe to go forward as to
turn back. Gates, secure within his intrenchments, would not strike; and
he, his supplies instantly threatened behind him, could not wait. On the
19th of September he threw four thousand men forward through the forest
to turn, if it were possible, the flank of General Gates’s army where
it lay so still upon Bemis’s Heights by Stillwater. But Arnold was too
quick for him. With three thousand men Arnold met and checked him, moving
with all the quick audacity and impetuous dash of which he had given Guy
Carleton a taste upon Champlain and at the gates of Quebec, Daniel Morgan
and his Virginian riflemen again at his back as they had been at far
Quebec. His stroke having failed, Burgoyne lay still for eighteen tedious
days, waiting once more for Sir Henry Clinton, now at last, he knew,
actually upon the river. On the 7th of October he struck again. Clinton
came too slowly. Burgoyne’s lines of communication by the northern lakes,
long threatened by General Lincoln and his Vermonters, were now actually
cut off, and it was possible to calculate just how few days’ rations
remained to make his campaign upon. He tried an attack with picked men,
moving quickly; but overwhelming forces met him, and the inevitable
Arnold, coming upon the field when he was already beaten, turned his
defeat almost into a rout. He withdrew hopelessly towards Saratoga.
Every crossing of the river he found heavily guarded against him. No
succor came to him, or could come, it seemed, either from the west or
from the south; he could find no safe way out of the wilderness; without
aid, the odds were too great against him; and on the 17th of October he
capitulated.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF CLOSING PARAGRAPHS OF BURGOYNE’S SURRENDER]
General Howe had moved south instead of north. He fancied that it would
bring him no small moral advantage to take Philadelphia, the “capital” of
the insurgent confederacy; and he calculated that it ought to be easily
possible to do so before Burgoyne would need him in the north. Early in
June, accordingly, he attempted to cross the Jerseys; but Washington,
striking from Morristown, threatened his flank in a way which made
him hesitate and draw back. He returned to New York, and put eighteen
thousand men aboard his transports, to get at Philadelphia by water
from the south. It was the 25th of August, and Burgoyne was needing him
sorely in the northern forests, before he had got ready for his land
movement. He had gone all the long way round about into Chesapeake Bay,
and had made his landing at the Head of Elk, in Maryland. Washington met
him behind the fords of the Brandywine (September 11th), but could not
withstand him. He could only delay him. Defeat no longer meant dismay
for the Americans; Washington acted in force as steadily and effectively
after defeat as after victory. It was the 27th of September before
Sir William entered Philadelphia. He was hardly settled there before
Washington attacked him again, at his outpost at Germantown, in the
thick mist of the morning of the 4th of October, and would have taken
the place had not the mist confused and misled his own troops. Meantime
Burgoyne was trapped at Saratoga. On October 3d Sir Henry Clinton had
begun at last the movement from New York for Burgoyne’s relief which
ought to have been begun in midsummer,—carrying northward a strong
fleet upon the river and an army of three thousand men. But it was too
late. Burgoyne’s surrender was already inevitable. The net result of
the campaign was the loss of the northern army and the occupation of
Philadelphia. “Philadelphia has taken Howe,” laughed Dr. Franklin, in
Paris, when they told him that Howe had taken Philadelphia.
[Illustration: SCENE OF THE BATTLE OF THE BRANDYWINE]
The long, slow year had been full of signs both good and bad.
International forces were beginning to work in favor of the insurgent
colonies. From the outset France and Spain had been willing to give them
aid against England, their traditional rival and enemy. Since the summer
of 1776 they had been promised French and Spanish assistance through
Beaumarchais, acting ostensibly as the firm of “Roderigue Hortalez et
Cie.,” but really as the secret agent of the two governments; and early
in 1777 the fictitious firm had begun actually to despatch vessels laden
with arms and ammunition to America. Private money also went into the
venture, but governments were known to be behind it; and on January 5th,
1777, Mr. Franklin had arrived in Paris to assist in bringing France
into still closer touch with the war for independence over sea. As the
year drew towards its close the great Frederick of Prussia had forbidden
troops hired in the other German states to cross Prussian territory to
serve the English in America, and so had added his good-will to the
French and Spanish money. French, and even German and Polish officers,
too, volunteered for service in the American armies. It was the gallant
Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko who had shown General Gates how to
intrench himself upon Bemis’s Heights.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON’S PROCLAMATION]
The winter was deeply disheartening, nevertheless, for Washington. Having
failed in the mist at Germantown, he withdrew his army to Valley Forge,
whence he could watch Howe at Philadelphia, and move as he moved, and yet
himself feel safe against attack; but utter demoralization had fallen
upon the Congress, sitting in a sort of exile at York, and his army was
brought to such straits of privation and suffering in its exposed camp as
he had never been obliged to see it endure before. There was plenty of
food in the country; plenty even at the disposal of Congress and in the
stores of its commissariat. The British had overrun very little of the
fertile country; the crops had been abundant and laborers had not been
lacking to gather them in,—especially there in thriving Pennsylvania.
But the Congress had lost all vigor alike in counsel and in action.
Men of initiative had withdrawn from it to serve their states in the
reorganization of their several governments and in the command of forces
in the field. Sometimes scarcely a dozen members could be got together
to take part in its deliberations. It yielded to intrigue,—even to
intrigue against Washington; allowed its executive committees, and most
of all the commissary department, upon which the army depended, to fall
into disorganization; listened to censures and bickerings rather than to
plans of action; lost the respect of the states, upon which its authority
depended; and left the army almost to shift for itself for sustenance.
Fortunately it was a mild winter. Fortunately Washington was masterful
and indomitable, and proved equal to checkmating at a single move those
who intrigued in the Congress to displace him. Despite every bitter
experience of that dark and anxious season, he had when spring came an
army stronger and fitter for service than it had been when he took it
into winter quarters. The lengthened term of service had given him at
last an army which might be drilled, and foreign officers,—notably the
capable Steuben,—had taught him how to drill it.
[Illustration: BARON DE STEUBEN]
General Howe’s winter passed easily and merrily enough in Philadelphia.
The place was full of people of means and influence who hoped as heartily
as Mr. Galloway did for the success of the British arms. Some of the
leading Quakers of the town, whose influence was all for an accommodation
of the quarrel with the mother country, had been arrested the previous
summer (1777) and sent south by the patriot leaders; but many more were
left who were of their mind, and General Howe met something like a
welcome when he came in the autumn. The fashionable young women of the
town were delighted to look their best and to use their charms to the
utmost at all the balls and social gatherings that marked the gay winter
of his stay, and their parents were not displeased to see them shine
there. But for the soldiers’ coats one would have thought that peace had
come again.
But the minds of the ministers in England were not so much at ease. In
February, 1778, Lord North introduced and pressed through Parliament
conciliatory measures of the most radical sort, practically retracing
every misjudged step taken with regard to the colonies since 1763; and
commissioners of peace were sent to America with almost plenipotentiary
powers of accommodation. But that very month a formal treaty of alliance
was signed between France and the United States; by the time the peace
commissioners reached Philadelphia, England had a war with France on
her hands as well as a war with the colonies; there was no rejoicing in
the camp at Valley Forge over the news of Lord North’s unexpected turn
of purpose, but there was very keen rejoicing when news of the French
alliance came. The Congress would not treat with the commissioners.
Conciliation had come too late; for the colonies the aspect of the war
was too hopeful.
When the commissioners reached Philadelphia they found General Clinton
about to abandon it. Sir Henry Clinton had succeeded General Howe in
chief command in May. His orders were to evacuate Philadelphia and
concentrate his forces once more at New York. The town was as full of
excitement and dismay at the prospect as it had been but a little more
than a year ago at news of the British approach. When the army began to
move, three thousand loyalists abandoned the town with it, going with the
stores by sea, while Sir Henry took his fifteen thousand men overland
through the Jerseys again.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF PLAY BILL]
When he moved, Washington moved also; outstripped him; caught him at
a disadvantage at Monmouth Court House (June 28, 1778); and would
inevitably have beaten him most seriously had not Charles Lee again
disobeyed him and spoiled the decisive movement of the day,—Charles Lee,
the soldier of fortune whom the Americans had honored and trusted. He
had disobeyed before, when Washington was retreating hard pressed from
New York. This time he seemed to play the coward. It was not known until
afterwards that he had played the traitor, too. Clinton got off, but
in a sort of rout, leaving his wounded behind him. “Clinton gained no
advantage except to reach New York with the wreck of his army,” was the
watchful Frederick’s comment over sea. “America is probably lost for
England.”
[Illustration: CHARLES LEE]
Even the seas were no longer free for the movements of the British
fleets, now that France was America’s ally and French fleets were
gathering under orders for the American coast. Every month the war had
lasted the English had found their commerce and their movement of stores
and transports more and more embarrassed by the American privateersmen.
There were bold and experienced seamen at every port of the long coast.
The little vessels which were so easily set up and finished by skilful
carpenters and riggers in almost any quiet inlet were sure to be fast
and deftly handled when they got to sea; kept clear of his Majesty’s
fleets and of too closely guarded harbors; cruised whithersoever the wits
of their sagacious masters took them; and had generally to be heavily
overmatched to be beaten. They had taken more than five hundred British
soldiers from the transports before the Congress at Philadelphia had
uttered its Declaration of Independence. Their prizes numbered more than
four hundred and fifty the year of Saratoga and Brandywine and the fight
in the morning’s mist at Germantown, though there were seventy ships of
war upon the coast. The very coasts of England herself were not safe
against them. Mr. Franklin went to France in the autumn of 1776 with his
pocket full of blank letters of marque, and American privateersmen from
out the French ports caught prizes enough in English waters to keep the
commissioners in Paris well found in money for their plans. In January,
1778, Captain Rathburne, in the _Providence_, actually seized the fort
in the harbor of Nassau in New Providence of the Bahamas, and took
possession of town and shipping; and in the spring of that same year John
Paul Jones performed the same daring feat at Whitehaven by Solway Firth
in England itself.
These privateersmen, it turned out, were more to be feared for the
present than the fleets of France. The Count d’Estaing was, indeed,
despatched to America with twelve ships of the line and six frigates,
with four thousand troops aboard; and his fleet appeared off Sandy Hook
in midsummer, 1778, while Sir Henry Clinton was still fresh from his
fright at Monmouth. But the too cautious admiral came and went, and that
was all. He would not attempt an attack upon the English fleet within the
bay at New York, though it was of scarcely half his strength. His pilots
told him his larger ships could not cross the bar. Newport was the only
other harbor the English held; and there he allowed Lord Howe to draw him
off. A storm separated the fleets before they could come to terms, and
his cruise ended peaceably in Boston harbor. But it was a heavy thing
for England to have French fleets to reckon with, and embarrassments
thickened very ominously about her. She had absolutely no hold on
America, it seemed, outside the lines actually occupied by her armies at
Newport and New York; the very sea was beset, for her merchantmen; and
France was now kindled into war against her.
[Illustration: REDUCED FACSIMILE OF INSTRUCTIONS FROM CONGRESS TO
PRIVATEERS]
[Illustration: CONTINENTAL LOTTERY BOOK]
And yet the Americans, too, were beset. They had not only their long
coasts to watch and British armies to thwart and checkmate, but their
western borders also to keep, against Tory and savage. The Iroquois
country, in particular, and all the long valleys of the Mohawk, the
Unadilla, and the Susquehanna, were filled with the terrors of raid and
massacre throughout that disappointing and anxious summer of 1778. The
stubborn loyalists of the forest country, with their temper still of the
untamed highlands of old Scotland or of the intractable country-sides of
old England, had been driven into exile by the uncompromising patriots,
their neighbors, who outnumbered them. But they had not gone far. They
had made their headquarters, the more dogged and determined of them, at
Niagara, until this score should be settled. Sir John Johnson was still
their leader, for all he had been so discomfited before Fort Stanwix;
and John Butler and Walter Butler, father and son, men touched with
the savagery of the redmen, their allies. Joseph Brant, that masterful
spirit who was a sort of self-appointed king among the savage Mohawks,
did not often willingly forget the precepts of that Christian creed to
which good Mr. Wheelock had drawn him in his boyhood, and held the redmen
back when he could from every wanton deed of blood; but the Butlers
stopped at nothing, and white men and red made common cause against the
border settlements. Their cruel strokes were dealt both far and near.
Upon a day in July, 1778, never to be forgotten, twelve hundred men fell
upon the far-away Wyoming Valley upon the Susquehanna and harried it from
end to end until it was black and desolate. In November a like terrible
fate fell upon peaceful Cherry Valley, close at hand. There could be no
peace or quarter until the hands of these men were stayed.
[Illustration: REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST AND LAST PARTS OF PATRICK
HENRY’S LETTER OF INSTRUCTIONS TO GEORGE ROGERS CLARK]
[Illustration: GEORGE ROGERS CLARK]
But, though very slowly, the end came. The men who mustered in the
patriotic ranks knew the forest and were masters of its warfare. They
had only to turn to it in earnest to prevail. There were men upon the
border, too, who needed but a little aid and countenance to work the
work of pioneer statesmen on the western rivers. Most conspicuous among
these was George Rogers Clark, the young Saxon giant who, in 1777, left
his tasks as pioneer and surveyor on the lands which lay upon the south
of the great river Ohio in far Kentucky, Virginia’s huge western county,
and made his way back to the tide-water country to propose to Mr. Henry,
now governor of the revolutionized commonwealth, an expedition for the
conquest of the “Illinois country” which lay to the north of the river.
He was but five-and-twenty, but he had got his stalwart stature where
men came quickly into their powers, deep in the forests, where he had
learned woodcraft and had already shown his mettle among men. Mr. Henry
and Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Wythe and Mr. Madison, whom he consulted,
approved his purpose very heartily. It was a thing which must be prepared
for very quietly, and pushed, when once begun, with secrecy and quick
despatch; but the mustering of men and the gathering of munitions and
supplies were incidents which made no stir in those days of familiar
war. Clark could bring together what force he pleased at Pittsburgh,
and excite only the expectation that a new band of armed men were about
to set out for the frontiers of Kentucky. In May, 1778, he was ready.
He took but one hundred and eighty picked riflemen, a modest flotilla
of small boats, and a few light pieces of artillery, but they sufficed.
Before the summer was out he had gained easy mastery of the little
settlements which lay to the northward upon the Mississippi and within
the nearer valley of the Wabash. He had an infinitely pleasing way of
winning the friendship of men upon any border, and the Frenchmen of the
settlements of the Illinois country relished the change he promised them,
liked well enough the prospect of being quit of the English power. There
were few Englishmen to deal with.
When winter came Colonel Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, came
south into the forest with a motley force of five hundred men, mixed
of regulars, Tories, and Indians, such as St. Leger had taken against
Stanwix, and occupied Vincennes again, upon the Wabash; but Clark struck
once more, sending his boats up the river and bringing his picked force
straight across the frozen forests from Kaskaskia by the Mississippi; and
by the end of February, 1779, Colonel Hamilton and all his levy were his
prisoners. The Illinois country was added to Virginia, and the grant of
her ancient charter, “up into the land, west and northwest,” seemed made
good again by the daring of her frontiersmen. He could have taken Detroit
itself, Clark declared, with but a few hundred men. While he cleared the
northern rivers of the British arms a force like his own descended the
Mississippi, seized Natchez, and cleared the southern reaches of the
great stream.
[Illustration: GEORGE CLARK’S FINAL SUMMONS TO COLONEL HAMILTON TO
SURRENDER]
That winter had witnessed a sharp shifting of the scene of the war in
the east. The British commanders there had turned away from General
Washington and the too closely guarded reaches of the Hudson to try
for better fortune in the far south. In December, 1778, Clinton sent
thirty-five hundred men from New York to the southern coasts by sea, and
on the 29th Savannah was taken, with comparative ease, there being but a
scant six hundred to defend it. The town once taken, it proved an easy
matter, at that great remove from the centre of the American strength,
to overrun the country back of it during the early weeks of 1779. But
after that came delay again, and inaction, as of those who wait and doubt
what next to do. The new year saw nothing else decisive done on either
side. In April Spain made common cause with France against England;
but Washington waited in vain the year through to see the fighting
transferred to America. A few strategic movements about New York, where
Clinton lay; a few raids by the British; a few sharp encounters that
were not battles, and the year was over. The British made sallies here
and there, to pillage and burn, to keep the country in awe and bring off
whatever they could lay hands upon, striking sometimes along the coast as
far as Connecticut and even the Chesapeake at the south; but armed bands
were quick to muster to oppose and harass them wherever they went, and
it was never safe for them to linger. Clinton thrust his lines out upon
the river and fortified Stony Point; but Anthony Wayne stormed the place
of a sudden, with twelve hundred men, and took it, with unshotted guns
at the point of the bayonet before dawn on the morning of the 15th of
July, and brought more than five hundred prisoners away with him, having
come with that quick fury of reckless attack which made men call him Mad
Anthony, and having as quickly withdrawn again. Harry Lee stormed Paulus
Hook in like fashion, and the British were nowhere very easy within their
lines. But, for the rest, there was little to break the monotony of
waiting for news of the war at England’s door, where the fleets of the
allies threatened her. Privateersmen were as busy as ever, and as much
to be feared, almost, as the French cruisers themselves; but the formal
operations of the war seemed vaguely postponed. Without the co-operation
of a naval force it was impossible for Washington to do anything against
Sir Henry at New York.
[Illustration: CHARLES JAMES FOX]
While he waited, therefore, he despatched General Sullivan with five
thousand men into the forest country of the Mohawk and the Susquehanna
to make an end of the cruel mischief wrought upon defenceless homes by
the bitter Tories and their red allies. The little army, sent forward in
divisions, swept through the country it was bidden clear like men who
searched stream and valley upon a journey of discovery; converged to
meet their hunted foes, but fifteen hundred strong, where they lay at
bay within a bend of the Chemung,—the full rally of the forest country,
British regulars, Tory rangers, Indian braves, Johnson, the Butlers,
Joseph Brant, every leader they acknowledged, united to direct them,—and
overwhelmed them; ravaged the seats of Seneca and Cayuga far and near,
till neither village nor any growing thing that they could find upon
which men could subsist was left this side the Genesee; stopped short
only of the final thing they had been bidden attempt, the capture of the
stronghold at Niagara itself.
[Illustration: JOHN SULLIVAN]
That was a summer’s reckoning which redmen far and near were not likely
to forget. In April a little army of frontiersmen under Colonel Evan
Shelby, that stout pioneer out of Maryland who brought hot Welsh blood to
the task, swept suddenly along the northward reaches of the Tennessee and
harried the country of the Chickamaugas, among whom Tories and British
alike had been stirring war. In August, Colonel Brodhead, ordered to
co-operate with General Sullivan, had taken six hundred men from his post
at Fort Pitt, whence Clark had made his exit into the west, and had
destroyed the Indian settlements by the Alleghany and upon French Creek,
the old routes of the French from the lakes to the Ohio. Such work was
never finished. The Indians were for a little dislodged, disconcerted,
and put to sad straits to live; but they were not conquered. The terror
bred a deeper thirst for vengeance among them, and a short respite of
peace was sure to be followed when a new year came in with fresh flashes
of war on the border, as lurid and ominous as ever. The danger was
lessened, nevertheless. The final conquest of the Indian country was at
least begun. The backwoodsmen were within sight of ultimate mastery when
once peace should bring settlers crowding westward again.
[Illustration: CASIMIR PULASKI]
The fighting at sea that memorable year of doubt was of a like
import,—full of daring and stubborn courage, planned and carried through
with singular initiative and genius, quick with adventure, bright
with every individual achievement, but of necessity without permanent
consequence. Late in July, 1779, Captain Paul Jones had sailed from a
port of France in command of a little squadron, half American, half
French, with which the energy of Mr. Franklin had supplied him. His
flag-ship, the _Bon Homme Richard_, was a worn-out French East Indiaman,
fitted with forty guns, many of which were unserviceable; his French
consorts were light craft, lightly armed; only one ship of the squadron
was fully fit for the adventures he promised himself, having come fresh
from the stocks in America, and she was intrusted to the command of a
French captain who obeyed orders or not, as he pleased. But Jones was
a man to work with what he had, and made even that improvised fleet
suffice. With it he cruised the whole length of the western coast of
Ireland and circled Scotland. Off Flamborough Head he fell in with the
_Serapis_, 44, and the _Countess of Scarborough_, 20, the convoy of a
fleet of merchantmen, and himself took the larger ship almost unassisted
in a desperate fight after sunset, in the first watch of the night of the
23d of September. Neither ship survived the encounter forty-eight hours,
so completely had they shot each other to pieces, and no man who followed
the sea was likely to forget what he heard of that close grapple in the
gathering night in the North Sea. “If I fall in with him again, I will
make a lord of him,” Jones exclaimed, when he heard that the King had
knighted Captain Pearson, of the _Serapis_, for the gallant fight.
[Illustration: JOHN PAUL JONES]
[Illustration: THE FIGHT BETWEEN BON HOMME RICHARD AND SERAPIS]
For a little, in the autumn, it looked as if the naval aid for which
General Washington waited had come at last. The Count d’Estaing was in
the West Indies with a strong fleet, from an encounter with which the
English commander in those waters had drawn off to port again to refit.
The count was willing, while his hands were free, to co-operate in an
attack upon the southern coast at Savannah. A portion of Washington’s
army was sent south to join General Lincoln in South Carolina for the
attempt. Count d’Estaing put six thousand troops aboard his fleet, and
by the 16th of September was within the harbor. But he did not strike
quickly or boldly enough, took the slow way of siege to reduce the
place, suffered the English commander to make good both the rally of
his scattered force and the fortification of his position, and had done
nothing when it was high time for him to be back in the Indies to guard
the possessions of his own king against the English. A last assault
(October 9th) failed and he withdrew.
The next year a like disappointment was added. In midsummer a French
fleet arrived upon the northern coast, but it proved impossible to use
it. On the 10th of July a French squadron put in at Newport and landed a
force of six thousand men under the Comte de Rochambeau; but a powerful
British fleet presently blockaded the port, and Rochambeau could not
prudently withdraw while the fleet was threatened. He had been ordered to
put himself at General Washington’s disposal; but he could not do so till
the blockade was raised. Meanwhile not only Georgia but the entire South
seemed lost and given over to British control. In the spring, Clinton had
concentrated all his forces once more at New York; and then, leaving that
all-important place strong enough to keep Washington where he was, he
had himself taken eight thousand men by sea to Charleston. Two thousand
more troops, already in the South, joined him there, and by the 12th of
May (1780) he had taken not only the place itself, but General Lincoln
and three thousand men besides. South Carolina teemed with loyalists.
Partisan bands, some serving one side, some the other, swept and harried
the region from end to end. Wherever the British moved in force, they
moved as they pleased, and were masters of the country. In June General
Clinton deemed it already safe to take half his force back to New York,
and Cornwallis was left to complete the work of subjugation.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON AND ROCHAMBEAU IN THE TRENCHES AT YORKTOWN]
That same month the Congress conferred the chief command in the South
upon General Horatio Gates, who had been in command of the army to which
Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga,—the army which Schuyler had made
ready and which Morgan and Arnold had victoriously handled. Intriguers
had sought, while Washington lay at Valley Forge, to substitute Gates for
the commander-in-chief; now he was to show how happy a circumstance it
was that that selfish intrigue had failed. He met Cornwallis at Camden,
in South Carolina, his own force three thousand men, Cornwallis’s but two
thousand, and was utterly, even shamefully, defeated (August 16, 1780).
“We look on America as at our feet,” said Horace Walpole, complacently,
when the news had made its way over sea.
[Illustration: HORATIO GATES]
And certainly it seemed as if that dark year brought nothing but disaster
upon the Americans. It was now more evident than ever that they had
no government worthy of the name. The Congress had no more authority
now than it had had in 1774, when it was admitted to be nothing but a
“Congress of the Committees of Correspondence”; and it was not now made
up, as it had then been, of the first characters in America, the men
of the greatest force and initiative in the patriotic party. It could
advise, but it could not command; and the states, making their own
expenditures, which seemed heavy enough, maintaining their own militia,
guarding their own interests in the war, following their own leaders,
often with open selfishness and indifference to the common cause, paid
less and less heed to what it asked them to do. It could not raise money
by taxation; it could raise very little by loan, having no legal power to
make good its promises of repayment. Beaumarchais found to his heavy cost
that it was next to impossible to recover the private moneys advanced
through “Roderigue Hortalez et Cie.” The troops upon whom Washington and
his generals depended were paid in “continental” paper money, which, by
1780, had grown so worthless that a bushel of wheat could scarcely be
had for a month’s pay. Wholesale desertion began. Enlisted men by the
score quit the demoralized camps. It was reckoned that as many as a full
hundred a month went over to the enemy, if only to get food and shelter
and clothing. Those who remained in the depleted ranks took what they
needed from the farms about them, and grew sullen and mutinous. Promises
of money and supplies proved as fruitless as promises of reinforcements
from France.
[Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD’S OATH OF ALLEGIANCE]
[Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD]
[Illustration: JOHN ANDRÉ]
Even deliberate treason was added. Benedict Arnold, whom every soldier
in the continental ranks deemed a hero because of the gallant things he
had done at Quebec and Saratoga, and whom Washington had specially loved
and trusted, entered into correspondence with the enemy, and plotted to
give West Point and the posts dependent upon it into the hands of the
British. Congress had been deeply unjust to him, promoting his juniors
and inferiors and passing him over; a thousand slights had cut him;
a thousand subtle forces of discouragement and of social temptation
had been at work upon him, and he had yielded,—to pique, to bitter
disappointment, to the disorders of a mind unstable, irritable, without
nobility. His treason was discovered in time to be foiled, but the
heart-breaking fact of it cut Washington to the quick, like a last and
wellnigh fatal stroke of bitter dismay. Who could be trusted now? and
where was strength to be got wherewith to carry the languishing work to a
worthy finish?
[Illustration: MAJOR ANDRÉ’S WATCH]
It was the worst of all the bad signs of the times that no government
could be agreed upon that would give the young states a real union,
or assure them of harmony and co-operation in the exercise of the
independence for which they were struggling. Definitive articles of
confederation had been suggested as of course at the time the Declaration
of Independence was adopted; and the next year (November 15, 1777) the
Congress had adopted the plan which Mr. Dickinson had drawn up and which
its committee had reported July 12, 1776. But the states did not all
accept it, and without unanimous adoption it could not go into operation.
All except Delaware and Maryland accepted it before the close of 1778,
and Delaware added her ratification in 1779; but Maryland still held
out,—waiting until the great states, like Virginia, should forego some
part of their too great preponderance and advantage in the prospective
partnership by transferring their claims to the great northwestern
territories to the proposed government of the confederation; and her
statesmanlike scruples still kept the country without a government
throughout that all but hopeless year 1780.
[Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD’S PASS TO MAJOR ANDRÉ]
But the autumn showed a sudden turning of the tide. Cornwallis had
ventured too far from his base of operations on the southern coast.
He had gone deep into the country of the Carolinas, north of him, and
was being beset almost as Burgoyne had been when he sought to cross
the forests which lay about the upper waters of the Hudson. Gates had
been promptly superseded after his disgraceful discomfiture and rout
at Camden, and the most capable officers the long war had bred were
now set to accomplish the task of forcing Cornwallis to a checkmate:
Nathanael Greene, whose quality Washington had seen abundantly tested
at Trenton and Princeton, at the Brandywine, at Germantown, and at
Monmouth; the dashing Henry Lee, whom nature and the hard school of war
had made a master of cavalry; the veteran and systematic Steuben; Morgan,
who had won with Arnold in the fighting about Saratoga, and had kept
his name unstained; and William Washington, a distant kinsman of the
commander-in-chief, whom English soldiers were to remember with Lee as a
master of light horsemen. The wide forests were full, too, of partisan
bands, under leaders whom the British had found good reason to dread.
[Illustration: MAJOR ANDRÉ’S POCKET-BOOK]
[Illustration: VIRGINIA COLONIAL CURRENCY]
The conquest of the back country of the Carolinas was always doing and to
be done. The scattered settlements and lonely plantations were, indeed,
full of men who cared little for the quarrel with the mother country
and held to their old allegiance as of course, giving to the King’s
troops ready aid and welcome; and there were men there, as everywhere,
who loved pillage and all lawless adventure, upon whom the stronger army
could always count to go in its ranks upon an errand of subjugation; but
there were also men who took their spirit and their principles from the
new days that had come since the passage of the Stamp Act, and, though
they were driven from their homes and left to shift for themselves for
mere subsistence when the King’s forces were afield, they came back
again when the King’s men were gone, and played the part, albeit without
Indian allies, that the ousted Tories played in the forest country of New
York. The English commanders at Savannah and Charleston had hit at last,
nevertheless, upon effective means of holding, not their seaports merely,
but the country itself. The forces they sent into the interior were made
up, for the most part, of men recruited in America, and were under the
command of officers fitted by school and temperament for their irregular
duty of keeping a whole country-side in fearful discipline of submission.
Many a formidable band of “Whigs” took the field against them, but were
without a base of supplies, moved among men who spied upon them, and were
no match in the long run for Tarleton and Ferguson,—Tarleton with his
reckless, sudden onset and savage thoroughness of conquest, and Ferguson
with his subtile gifts at once of mastery and of quiet judgment that
made him capable of succeeding either as a soldier who compelled or as
a gentleman who won men to go his way and do his will. South Carolina
seemed once and again to lie almost quiet under these men.
[Illustration: LORD CORNWALLIS]
[Illustration: WILLIAM WASHINGTON]
[Illustration: BANASTRE TARLETON]
[Illustration: FRANCIS MARION]
But Ferguson, for all he had the gifts of a soldier statesman, had gone
too far. He had carried his persuasion of arms to the very foothills
of the western mountains, and had sent his threats forward into the
western country that lay beyond the passes of the mountains, where hardy
frontiersmen of whom he knew almost nothing had so far kept their homes
against the redmen without thought of turning to the east. His threats
had angered and aroused them. They had put their riflemen from the back
country of Carolina and Virginia into the saddle hundreds strong, had
pushed league upon league through the passes of the mountains, from the
far-off waters of the Holston, and had surrounded and utterly overwhelmed
him at King’s Mountain (October 7, 1780). There he lost a thousand men
and his own life. “A numerous army appeared on the frontier,” reported
Lord Rawdon, “drawn from Nolachucky and other settlements beyond the
mountains, whose very names had been unknown to us.” The hold of the
British upon the inland settlements was of a sudden loosened, and
Cornwallis had reason to know at once what a difference that made to him.
[Illustration: ENGLISH COLONIES, 1763-1775.
BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
[Illustration: DANIEL MORGAN]
[Illustration: COUNT ROCHAMBEAU]
[Illustration: NATHANAEL GREENE]
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF THE LAST ARTICLE OF CAPITULATION AT YORKTOWN]
[Illustration: PAROLE OF CORNWALLIS]
Early in December came General Greene to take the place of Gates, and
new difficulties faced the English commander. Greene kept no single
force afield, to be met and checkmated, but sent one part of his little
army towards the coast to cut Cornwallis’s communications, and another
southward against the inland posts and settlements where scattered
garrisons lay between the commander-in-chief and his base at Charleston
in the south. With the first detachment went Francis Marion, a man as
formidable in strategy and sudden action as Ferguson, and the men who had
attached themselves to him as if to a modern Robin Hood. With the second
went Daniel Morgan, a man made after the fashion of the redoubtable
frontiersmen who had brought Ferguson his day of doom at King’s Mountain.
Tarleton was sent after Morgan with eleven hundred men, found him at
the Cowpens (January 17, 1781), just within the border upon which King’s
Mountain lay, and came back a fugitive, with only two hundred and seventy
men. Greene drew his forces together again, and at Guilford Court
House Cornwallis beat him, outnumbered though he was (March 15th). But
to beat Greene, it seemed, was of no more avail than to beat General
Washington. The country was no safer, the communications of the army were
as seriously threatened, the defeated army was as steady and as well in
hand after the battle as before; and the English withdrew to Wilmington,
on the coast.
[Illustration: ORDER PERMITTING THE ILLUMINATION OF PHILADELPHIA]
[Illustration: NELSON HOUSE, CORNWALLIS’S HEADQUARTERS, YORKTOWN]
It seemed a hazardous thing to take an army thence southward again, with
supplies, through the forests where Greene moved; news came that General
Arnold was in Virginia with a considerable body of Clinton’s troops from
New York, to anticipate what the southern commander had planned to do
for the conquest of the Old Dominion when the Carolinas should have been
“pacified” from end to end; and Cornwallis determined to move northward
instead of southward, and join Arnold in Virginia. Greene moved a little
way in his track, and then turned southward again against the garrisons
of the inland posts. Lord Rawdon beat him at Hobkirk’s Hill (April 25th)
and held him off at Eutaw Springs (September 8th); but both times the
English withdrew to save their communications; and, though the work was
slow in the doing, before winter came again they were shut within the
fortifications of Charleston and the country-sides were once more in
American possession, to be purged of loyalist bands at leisure.
[Illustration: EVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN FLAG]
In Virginia, Lord Cornwallis moved for a little while freely and safely
enough; but only for a little while. Baron Steuben had been busy, winter
and spring, raising recruits there for an army of defence; General
Washington hurried the Marquis de Lafayette southward with twelve
hundred light infantry from his own command; and by midsummer, 1781,
Lafayette was at the British front with a force strong enough to make it
prudent that Cornwallis should concentrate his strength and once more
make sure of his base of supplies at the coast. His watchful opponents
out-manœuvred him, caught his forces once and again in detail, and made
his outposts unsafe. By the first week in August he had withdrawn to the
sea and had taken post behind intrenchments at Yorktown, something more
than seven thousand strong.