Matters had not stood still before Boston to await a commander sent by
congress. While Washington waited for his commission and made ready for
his journey there had been fighting done which was to simplify his task.
General William Howe had reached Boston with reinforcements on the 25th
of May, and quite ten thousand troops held the city, while a strong
fleet of men-of-war lay watchfully in the harbor. There was no hurry, it
seemed, about attacking the sixteen thousand raw provincials, whose long
lines were drawn loosely about the town from Charlestown Neck to Jamaica
Plain. But commanding hills looked across the water on either hand--in
Charlestown on the north and in Dorchester on the southeast--and it
would be well, Howe saw, to secure them, lest they should be occupied by
the insurgents. On the morning of the 17th of June, however, while
leisurely preparations were a-making in Boston to occupy the hills of
Charlestown, it was discovered that the provincials had been beforehand
in the project. There they were in the clear sun, working diligently at
redoubts of their own upon the height. Three thousand men were put
across the water to drive them off. Though they mustered only seventeen
hundred behind their unfinished works, three several assaults and the
loss of a thousand men was the cost of dislodging them. They withheld
their fire till the redcoats were within fifty--nay, thirty--yards of
them, and then poured out a deadly, blazing fire which no man could face
and live. They were ousted only when they failed of powder and despaired
of reinforcements. Veteran officers who had led the assault declared the
regulars of France were not more formidable than these militia-men, whom
they had despised as raw peasants. There was no desire to buy another
American position at that price; and Washington had time enough for the
complimentary receptions and addresses and the elaborate parade of
escort and review that delayed his journey to headquarters.
He reached Cambridge on the 2d of July, and bore himself with so
straightforward and engaging a courtesy in taking command that the
officers he superseded could not but like him: jealousy was disarmed.
But he found neither the preparations nor the spirit of the army to his
liking. His soldierly sense of order was shocked by the loose
discipline, and his instinct of command by the free and easy insolence
of that irregular levy; and his authority grew stern as he labored to
bring the motley host to order and effective organization. “The people
of this government have obtained a character,” his confidential letters
declared, “which they by no means deserved--their officers, generally
speaking, are the most indifferent kind of people I ever saw. I dare say
the men would fight very well (if properly officered), although they are
an exceedingly dirty and nasty people.... It is among the most difficult
tasks I ever undertook in my life to induce these people to believe that
there is, or can be, danger till the bayonet is pushed at their breasts.
Not that it proceeds from any uncommon prowess, but rather from an
unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people,
which, believe me, prevails but too generally among the officers of the
Massachusetts part of the army, who are nearly of the same kidney with
the privates.” He had seen like demoralization and slackness in the old
days at Winchester, on the wild frontier, but he had expected to find a
better spirit and discipline in the New England levies.
His first disgust, however, soon wore off. He was not slow to see how
shrewd and sturdy these uncouth, intractable ploughboys and farmers
could prove themselves upon occasion. “I have a sincere pleasure in
observing,” he wrote to congress, “that there are materials for a good
army, a great number of able-bodied men, active, zealous in the cause,
and of unquestionable courage.” There was time enough and to spare in
which to learn his army’s quality. “Our lines of defence are now
completed,” he could tell Lund Washington on the 20th of August, “as
near so at least as can be--we now wish them to come out as soon as they
please; but they discover no inclination to quit their own works of
defence; and as it is almost impossible for us to get at them, we do
nothing but watch each other’s motions all day at the distance of about
a mile.” He could even turn away from military affairs to advise that
“spinning should go forward with all possible despatch” on the estate at
home, and to say, “I much approve of your sowing wheat in clean ground,
although you should be late in doing it.” Once more he settled to the
old familiar work, this time upon a great scale, of carrying a difficult
enterprise forward by correspondence. Letters to the Continental
Congress at Philadelphia, letters to the provincial congresses of the
New England colonies, letters to subordinate (sometimes insubordinate)
officers at distant posts, letters to intimate friends and influential
men everywhere, setting forth the needs and situation of the army,
advising measures of organization, supply, and defence, pointing out
means that might be used and mistakes that must be avoided, commanding,
dissuading, guiding, forecasting, poured steadily forth from those busy
headquarters, where the commander-in-chief was always to be found,
intent, deeply employed, calmly imperative, never tiring, never
hesitating, never storming, a leader and master of men and affairs. He
was in his prime, and all the forty-three years of his strenuous life he
had been at school to learn how such a task as this was to be performed.
He had found the army not only without proper discipline and equipment,
but actually without powder; and the winter had come and was passing
away before even that primary and perilous need could be supplied. The
men of that extemporized army had been enlisted but for a few months’
service. When their brief terms of enlistment ran out they incontinently
took themselves off; and Washington’s most earnest appeals to the
continental and provincial congresses to provide for longer enlistments
and an adequate system of recruitment did not always suffice to prevent
his force from perilously dwindling away under his very eyes. It was a
merciful providence that disposed the British to lie quiet in Boston.
Such authority as he had, Washington used to the utmost, and with a
diligence and foresight which showed all his old policy of Thorough.
Under his orders a few fast vessels were fitted out and armed as
privateers at the nearest safe ports. Marblehead volunteers in the army
were put aboard them for crews, and the enemy’s supplies were captured
upon the seas and brought overland--the much-needed powder and all--into
the American camp, while men-of-war which might have swept the coast lay
just at hand in the harbor. No opportunity was missed either to disturb
the British or to get what the army needed; and the ministers at home,
as well as the commanders in Boston, grew uneasy and apprehensive in the
presence of so active and watchful an opponent. He was playing the game
boldly, even a bit desperately at times. More than once, as the slow
months of siege dragged by, he would have hazarded a surprise and sought
to take the city by storm, had not the counsel of his officers
persistently restrained him.
Only in the north was there such fighting as he wished to see.
Montgomery had pushed through the forests and taken Montreal (November
12th, 1775). At the same time Washington had sent a force of some twelve
hundred men, under Benedict Arnold, to see what could be done against
the little garrison at Quebec. The journey had cost Arnold four hundred
men; but with what he had left he had climbed straight to the Heights of
Abraham and summoned the British at their gates. When they would neither
surrender nor fight, he had sat down to wait for Montgomery; and when he
came, with barely five hundred men, had stormed the stout defences, in a
driving snow-storm, in the black darkness that came just before the
morning on the last day of the year. Had Montgomery not been killed in
the assault, the surprise would have succeeded; and Arnold had no cause
to be ashamed of the gallant affair. Failure though it was, it heartened
the troops before Boston to think what might be done under such
officers.
The monotony of the long, anxious season was broken at Cambridge by a
touch now and again of such pleasures as spoke of home and gracious
peace. In midwinter Mrs. Washington had driven into camp, come all the
way from Virginia, with proper escort, in her coach and four, her horses
bestridden by black postilions in their livery of scarlet and white; and
she had seemed to bring with her to the homely place not only the
ceremonious habit, but the genial and hospitable air of Virginia as
well. Many a quiet entertainment at headquarters coaxed a little ease of
mind out of the midst of even that grim and trying winter’s work while
she was there.
With the first month of spring Washington determined to cut inaction
short and make a decisive stroke. He had been long enough with the army
now to presume upon its confidence and obedience, though he followed his
own counsels. Siege cannon had been dragged through the unwilling
forests all the way from Ticonderoga; the supplies and the time had
come; and on the morning of the 5th of March, 1776, the British stared
to see ramparts and cannon on Dorchester Heights. “It was like the work
of the genii of Aladdin’s wonderful lamp,” declared one of their
astonished officers. Why they had themselves neglected to occupy the
hills of Dorchester, and had waited so patiently till Washington should
have time and such guns as he needed, was a question much pressed at
home in England; and their stupidity was rewarded now. They had suffered
themselves to be amused all night by a furious cannonading out of
Roxbury, Somerville, and East Cambridge, while two thousand men, a
battery of heavy ordnance, and hundreds of wagons and ox-carts with
timber, bales of hay, spades, crowbars, hatchets, hammers, and nails,
had been gotten safely to the Dorchester hills. When they saw what had
happened they thought of the assault upon Bunker’s Hill, and hesitated
what to do. A violent storm blew up while they waited, rendering an
attack across the water impracticable, and when the calmer morning of
the 6th dawned it was too late; the American position was too strong.
Neither the town nor the harbor could safely be held under fire from
Dorchester Heights. There was nothing for it but to evacuate the place,
and no one gainsaid their departure. By the 17th they were all embarked,
eight thousand troops and nine hundred loyalist citizens of Boston, and
had set sail towards the north for Halifax. They were obliged to leave
behind them more than two hundred cannon and a great quantity of
military stores of every kind--powder, muskets, gun-carriages,
small-arms--whatever an army might need. When Washington established
himself in General Howe’s headquarters, in Mrs. Edwards’s comfortable
lodging-house at the head of State Street, he could congratulate himself
not only on a surprising victory brilliantly won, but on the possession,
besides, of more powder and better stores and equipments than he could
have dreamed of in his camp at Cambridge. He caught up his landlady’s
little granddaughter one day, set her on his knee, as he liked to do,
and asked her, smiling, which she liked the better, the redcoats or the
provincials.
“The redcoats,” said the child.
“Ah, my dear,” said the young general, a blithe light in his blue eyes,
“they look better, but they don’t fight. The ragged fellows are the boys
for fighting.”
But he did not linger at Boston. He knew that its capture did not end,
but only deepened, the struggle. Reinforcements would be poured out of
England with the spring, and the next point of attack would
unquestionably be New York, the key to the Hudson. Here again was a city
flanked about on either hand by water, and commanded by heights--the
heights of Brooklyn. A garrison must be left in Boston, and New York
must be held for the most part by a new levy, as raw, as ill organized
and equipped, as factious, as uncertain in capacity and purpose, as that
which had awaited his discipline and guidance before Boston. It was an
army always a-making and to be made. The sea was open, moreover. The
British could enter the great harbor when they pleased. The insurgents
had no naval force whatever with which to withstand them on the water.
There were a score of points to be defended which were yet without
defence on the long island where the town lay, and round about the
spreading arms of the sea that enclosed it; and there were but eighteen
thousand militia-men mustered for the formidable task, in the midst of
an active loyalist population. The thing must be attempted,
nevertheless. The command of the Hudson would very likely turn out to be
the command of the continent, and the struggle was now to be to the
death.
It was too late to draw back. The royal authority had, in fact, been
everywhere openly thrown off, even in the middle colonies, where
allegiance and opinion hung still at so doubtful a balance. For
Washington the whole situation must have seemed to be summed up in what
had taken place in his own colony at home. Dunmore, when he fled to the
men-of-war in the bay, had called upon all who were loyal to follow him;
had even offered freedom to all slaves and servants who would enlist in
the force he should collect for the purpose of “reducing the colony to
a proper sense of its duty.” Unable to do more, he had ravaged the
coasts on either hand upon the Bay, and had put men ashore within the
rivers to raid and burn, making Norfolk, with its loyalist merchants,
his headquarters and rendezvous. Driven thence by the provincial
militia, he had utterly destroyed the town by fire, and was now refuged
upon Gwynn’s Island, striking when he could, as before, at the
unprotected hamlets and plantations that looked everywhere out upon the
water. Virginia’s only executive, these nine months and more, had been
her Committee of Safety, of which Edmund Pendleton was president.
Washington had hardly begun his work of organization and defence at New
York before North Carolina (April 12th, 1776) authorized her delegates
in the congress at Philadelphia to join in a declaration of
independence; and the next month (May 15th) the congress advised the
colonies to give over all show and pretence of waiting for or desiring
peace or accommodation: to form complete and independent governments of
their own, and so put an end to “the exercise of every kind of authority
under the crown.” The next step was a joint Declaration of Independence,
upon a motion made in congress by Richard Henry Lee, in eager obedience
to the express bidding of a convention met in the hall of the Burgesses
at Williamsburg to frame a constitution for Virginia. His motion was
adopted by the votes of every colony except New York. It was a bitter
thing to many a loyal man in the colonies to see such things done, and
peace rendered impossible. Not even those who counted themselves among
the warmest friends of the colonial cause were agreed that it was wise
thus to throw off one government before another was put in its
place--while there was as yet no better guidance in that distracted time
than might be had from a body of gentlemen in Philadelphia who possessed
no power but to advise. But the radicals were in the saddle. Washington
himself came down from New York to urge that the step be taken. He
deemed such radicalism wise; for he wished to see compromise abandoned,
and all minds set as sternly as his own in the resolve to fight the
fight out to the bitter end. “I have never entertained an idea of an
accommodation,” he said, “since I heard of the measures which were
adopted in consequence of the Bunker’s Hill fight”; and his will
hardened to the contest after the fashion that had always been
characteristic of him when once the heat of action was upon him. He grew
stern, and spoke sometimes with a touch of harshness, in the presence of
his difficulties at New York; because he knew that they were made for
him in no small part by Americans who were in the British interest, and
whom he scorned even while scrupulous to be just in what he did to
thwart and master them. “It requires more serenity of temper, a deeper
understanding, and more courage than fell to the lot of Marlborough to
ride in this whirlwind,” said John Adams; and the young
commander-in-chief had them all. But his quiet was often that of a metal
at white heat, and he kindled a great fire with what he touched.
No strength of will, however, could suffice to hold New York and its
open harbor against a powerful enemy with such troops as Washington
could drill and make between April and July. On the 28th of June British
transports began to gather in the lower bay. Within a few days they had
brought thirty thousand men, armed and equipped as no other army had
ever been in America. It was impossible to prevent their landing, and
they were allowed to take possession of Staten Island unopposed.
Men-of-war passed untouched through the Narrows, and made their way at
will up the broad Hudson, unhurt by the batteries upon either shore.
General Howe remembered Dorchester and Charlestown Heights, and directed
his first movement against Washington’s intrenched position on the hills
of Brooklyn, where quite half the American army lay. For a little space
he waited, till his brother, Admiral Lord Howe, should come to act with
him in negotiation and command. Lord Howe was authorized to offer pardon
for submission, and very honorably used a month and more of good
fighting time in learning that the colonists had no desire to be
pardoned. “No doubt we all need pardon from Heaven for our manifold sins
and transgressions,” was Governor Trumbull’s Connecticut version of the
general feeling, “but the American who needs the pardon of his Britannic
Majesty is yet to be found.” On the 22d of August, accordingly, General
Howe put twenty thousand men ashore at Gravesend Bay. On the 27th, his
arrangements for an overwhelming attack succeeding at every point, he
drove the five thousand Americans thrown out to oppose him back into
their works upon the heights, with a loss of four hundred killed and
wounded and a thousand taken. Still mindful of Bunker’s Hill, he would
not storm the intrenchments, to which Washington himself had brought
reinforcements which swelled his strength upon the heights to ten
thousand. He determined, instead, to draw lines of siege about them, and
at his leisure take army, position, stores, and all. Washington, seeing
at once what Howe intended, and how possible it was, decided to
withdraw immediately, before a fleet should be in the river and his
retreat cut off. It was a masterly piece of work. The British commander
was as much astounded to see Brooklyn Heights empty on the morning of
August 30th as he had been to see Dorchester Heights occupied that
memorable morning six months before. Washington had taken ten thousand
men across that broad river, with all their stores and arms, in a single
night, while a small guard kept up a sharp fire from the breastworks,
and no sound of the retreat reached the dull ears of the British
sentries.
But the sharp fighting and bitter defeat of the 27th had sadly, even
shamefully, demoralized Washington’s raw troops, and he knew he must
withdraw from New York. All through September and a part of October he
held what he could of the island, fighting for it almost mile by mile as
he withdrew--now cut to the quick and aflame with almost uncontrollable
anger to see what cowards his men could be; again heartened to see them
stand and hold their ground like men, even in the open. The most that he
could do was to check and thwart the powerful army pressing steadily
upon his front and the free fleet threatening his flanks. He repulsed
the enemy at Harlem Heights (September 16th); he kept his ground before
them at White Plains, despite the loss of an outpost at Chatterton Hill
(October 28th); he might possibly have foiled and harassed them the
winter through had not General Greene suffered a garrison of three
thousand of the best-trained men in the army to be penned up and taken,
with a great store of artillery and small-arms besides, in Fort
Washington, on the island (November 16th). After such a blow there was
nothing for it but to abandon the Hudson and retreat through New Jersey.
His generals growing insubordinate, Washington could not even collect
his divisions and unite his forces in retreat. His men deserted by the
score; whole companies took their way homeward as their terms of
enlistment expired with the closing of the year; barely three thousand
men remained with him by the time he had reached Princeton. Congress, in
its fright, removed to Baltimore; hundreds of persons hurried to take
the oath of allegiance upon Howe’s offer of pardon; and the British
commanders deemed the rebellion at an end.
They did not understand the man they were fighting. When he had put the
broad Delaware between his dwindling regiments and the British at his
heels, he stopped, undaunted, to collect force and give his opponents a
taste of his quality. Such an exigency only stiffened his temper, and
added a touch of daring to his spirit. Charles Lee, his second in
command, hoping to make some stroke for himself upon the Hudson, had
withheld full half the army in a safe post upon the river, in direct
disobedience to orders, while the British drove Washington southward
through New Jersey; but Lee was now happily in the hands of the enemy,
taken at an unguarded tavern where he lodged, and most of the troops he
had withheld found their way at last to Washington beyond the Delaware.
Desperate efforts at recruiting were made. Washington strained his
authority to the utmost to keep and equip his force, and excused himself
to congress very nobly. “A character to lose,” he said, “an estate to
forfeit, the inestimable blessing of liberty at stake, and a life
devoted must be my excuse.” What he planned and did won him a character
with his foes. Before the year was out he had collected six thousand
men, and was ready to strike a blow at the weak, extended line--Hessian
mercenaries for the most part--which Howe had left to hold the Delaware.
On Christmas Day he made his advance, and ordered a crossing to be made
in three divisions, under cover of the night. Only his own division,
twenty-five hundred strong, effected the passage. ’Twas ten hours’
perilous work to cross the storm-swept river in the pitchy darkness,
amidst the hazards of floating ice, but not a man or a gun was lost.
There was a nine miles’ march through driving snow and sleet after the
landing before Trenton could be reached, the point of attack, and two
men were frozen to death as they went. General Sullivan sent word that
the guns were wet: “Tell him to use the bayonet,” said “Washington, “for
the town must be taken.” And it was taken--in the early morning, at the
point of the bayonet, with a loss of but two or three men. The surprise
was complete. Colonel Rahl, the commander of the place, was mortally
wounded at the first onset, and nine hundred Hessians surrendered at
discretion.
When he had gotten his prisoners safe on the south side of the river,
Washington once more advanced to occupy the town. It was a perilous
place to be, no doubt, with the great unbridged stream behind him; but
the enemy’s line was everywhere broken, now that its centre had been
taken; had been withdrawn from the river in haste, abandoning its cannon
even and its baggage at Burlington; and Washington calmly dared to play
the game he had planned. It was not Howe who came to meet him, but the
gallant Cornwallis, no mean adversary, bringing eight thousand men.
Washington let him come all the way to the Delaware without himself
stirring, except to put a small tributary stream between his men and the
advancing columns; and the confident Englishman went to bed that night
exclaiming, “At last we have run down the old fox, and we’ll bag him in
the morning.” Then, while a small force kept the camp-fires burning and
worked audibly at the ramparts the cold night through, the fox was up
and away. He put the whole of his force upon the road to Princeton and
New Brunswick, where he knew Cornwallis’s stores must be. As the
morning’s light broadened into day (January 3d, 1777) he met the British
detachment at Princeton in the way, and drove it back in decisive rout,
a keen ardor coming into his blood as he saw the sharp work done. “An
old-fashioned Virginia fox-hunt, gentlemen,” he exclaimed, shouting the
view-halloo. Had his troops been fresh and properly shod to outstrip
Cornwallis at their heels, he would have pressed on to New Brunswick and
taken the stores there; but he had done all that could be done with
despatch, and withdrew straight to the heights of Morristown. Cornwallis
could only hasten back to New York. By the end of the month the
Americans were everywhere afoot; the British held no posts in New Jersey
but Paulus Hook, Amboy, and New Brunswick; and Washington had issued a
proclamation commanding all who had accepted General Howe’s offer of
pardon either to withdraw within the British lines or to take oath of
allegiance to the United States. Men loved to tell afterwards how
Frederick the Great had said that it was the most brilliant campaign of
the century.
Congress took steps before the winter was over to secure long
enlistments, and substitute a veritable army for the three months’
levies with which Washington had hitherto been struggling to make shift.
After the affair at Trenton, Washington had been obliged to pledge his
own private fortune for their pay to induce the men whose terms of
enlistment were to expire on New Year’s Day--more than half his
force--to stay with him but a few weeks more, till his plan should be
executed. Now he was authorized to raise regiments enlisted till the war
should end, and to exercise almost dictatorial powers in everything that
might affect the discipline, provisioning, and success of his army.
There was need, for the year witnessed fighting of tremendous
consequence. The British struck for nothing less than complete
possession of the whole State of New York, throughout the valleys of the
Hudson and the Mohawk. General Howe, who had above twenty thousand men
in New York city, was to move up the Hudson; General Burgoyne, with
eight thousand men, from Canada down Lake Champlain; Colonel St. Leger,
with a small but sufficient force, down into the valley of the Mohawk,
striking from Oswego, on Ontario; and the colonies were to be cut in
twain, New England hopelessly separated from her confederates, by the
converging sweep of three armies, aggregating more than thirty-three
thousand men. But only the coast country, it turned out, was tenable
ground for British troops. Sir Guy Carleton had attempted Champlain out
of Canada the year before, and had gone back to Quebec without touching
Ticonderoga, so disconcerted had he been by the price he had had to pay
for his passage up the lake to a small force and an extemporized fleet
under Benedict Arnold. This time Burgoyne, with his splendid army, made
short work of Ticonderoga (July, 1777), and drove General Schuyler and
his army back to their posts beyond the Hudson; but the farther he got
from his base upon the lake into the vast forests of that wide frontier,
the more certainly did he approach disaster. No succor came. St. Leger
was baffled, and sent in panic back the way he had come. Howe did not
ascend the river. The country swarmed with gathering militia. They would
not volunteer for distant campaigns; but this invading host, marching by
their very homes into the deep forest, roused and tempted them as they
had been roused at Concord, and they gathered at its rear and upon its
flanks as they had run together to invest Boston. A thousand men
Burgoyne felt obliged to leave in garrison at Ticonderoga; a thousand
more, sent to Bennington to seize the stores there, were overwhelmed and
taken (August 16th). Quite twenty thousand provincials presently beset
him, and he had but six thousand left wherewith to save himself. He
crossed the river, for he still expected Howe; and there was stubborn
fighting about Saratoga (September 19th, October 7th), in which Arnold
once more made his name in battle. But the odds were too great;
Burgoyne’s supplies were cut off, his troops beaten; there was nothing
for it but capitulation (October 17th). He had been trapped and taken by
a rising of the country.
Howe had not succored him, partly because he lacked judgment and
capacity, partly because Washington had thwarted him at every turn. From
his position at Morristown, Washington could send reinforcements to the
north or recall them at will, without serious delay; and Howe, in his
hesitation, gave him abundant time to do what he would. It was Sir
William’s purpose to occupy the early summer, ere Burgoyne should need
him, in an attack on Philadelphia. On the 12th of June, accordingly, he
threw a force of eighteen thousand men into New Jersey. But Washington
foiled him at each attempt to advance by hanging always upon his flank
in such a position that he could neither be safely ignored nor forced to
fight; and the prudent Howe, abandoning the march, withdrew once more to
New York. But he did not abandon his project against Philadelphia. He
deemed it the “capital” of the insurgent confederacy, and wished to
discredit congress and win men of doubtful allegiance to his standard by
its capture; and he reckoned upon some advantage in drawing Washington
after him to the southward, away from Burgoyne’s field of operations in
the north. Though July had come, therefore, and Burgoyne must need him
presently, he put his eighteen thousand men aboard the fleet and carried
them by sea to the Chesapeake. Washington was sorely puzzled. He had
taken it for granted that Howe would go north, and he had gone south!
“Howe’s in a manner abandoning Burgoyne is so unaccountable,” he said,
“that I cannot help casting my eyes continually behind me;” and he
followed very cautiously, ready upon the moment to turn back, lest the
movement should prove a feint. But there was no mistake. Howe entered
the Delaware, and, being frightened thence by reports of obstructions in
the river, went all the long four hundred miles about the capes of
Chesapeake, and put his army ashore at Elkton for its advance upon
Philadelphia. It was then the 25th of August. Washington met him
(September 11th) behind the fords of the Brandywine, and, unable to
check Cornwallis on his flank, was defeated. But for him defeat was
never rout: his army was still intact and steady; and he held his foe
yet another fortnight on the road ere the “capital” could be entered
(September 27th). Burgoyne was by that time deep within the net spread
for him at Saratoga. On the morning of the 4th of October, in a thick
mist, Washington threw himself upon Howe’s main force encamped across
the village street of Germantown, and would have overwhelmed it in the
surprising onset had not two of his own columns gone astray in the fog,
attacked each other, and so lost the moment’s opportunity. General Howe
knew very soon how barren a success he had had. The end of November came
before he had made himself master of the forts upon the Delaware below
the “capital” and removed the obstructions from the river to give access
to his fleet; the British power was broken and made an end of in the
north; and Washington was still at hand as menacing and dangerous as
ever. Dr. Franklin was told in Paris that General Howe had taken
Philadelphia. “Philadelphia has taken Howe,” he laughed.
Philadelphia kept Howe safely through the winter, and his officers made
themselves easy amidst a round of gayeties in the complacent town, while
Washington went to Valley Forge to face the hardships and the intrigues
of a bitter season. A deep demoralization fell that winter, like a
blight, upon all the business of the struggling confederacy. The
congress, in its exile at York, had lost its tone and its command in
affairs. It would have lost it as completely in Philadelphia, no doubt,
for it was no longer the body it had been. Its best members were
withdrawn to serve their respective states in the critical business, now
everywhere in hand, of reorganizing their governments; and it itself was
no government at all, but simply a committee of advice, which the
states heeded or ignored as they pleased. Oftentimes but ten or twelve
members could be got together to transact its business. It suffered
itself to fall into the hands of intriguers and sectional politicians.
It gave commissions in the army not according to merit, but upon a plan
carefully devised to advance no more officers from one section than from
another--even men like John Adams approving. Adams denounced claims of
seniority and service as involving “one of the most putrid corruptions
of absolute monarchy,” and suggested that the officers who did not
relish the idea of seeing the several states given “a share of the
general officers,” proportioned to the number of troops they had sent to
the army, had better take themselves off, and see how little they would
be missed. Worst of all, an ugly plot was hatched to displace
Washington; and the various distempers of different men for a brief
season gave it a chance to succeed. Some were impatient of Washington’s
“Fabian policy,” as they called it, and would have had him annihilate,
instead of merely checking, these invading hosts. “My toast,” cried John
Adams, “is a short and violent war.” Others envied Washington his power
and his growing fame, resented their own subordination and his
supremacy, and intrigued to put General Gates in his place. Had not
Gates won at Saratoga, and Washington lost at the Brandywine and at
Germantown? Schuyler had prepared the victory in the north; Arnold and
Morgan had done the fighting that secured it; but Gates had obtained the
command when all was ready, and was willing to receive the reward. With
a political committee-congress in charge of affairs, nothing was
impossible.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON’S HEADQUARTERS AT VALLEY FORGE]
Washington and his army were starving the while at Valley Forge, in
desperate straits to get anything to eat or anything to cover them in
that bitter season--not because there were no supplies, but because
congress had disorganized the commissary department, and the supplies
seldom reached the camp. The country had not been too heavily stricken
by the war. Abundant crops were everywhere sown and peacefully reaped,
and there were men enough to do the work of seed-time and harvest. It
was only the army that was suffering for lack of food and lack of men.
The naked fact was that the confederacy was falling apart for lack of a
government. Local selfishness had overmastered national feeling, and
only a few men like Washington held the breaking structure together.
Washington’s steadfastness was never shaken; and Mrs. Washington, stanch
lady that she was, joined him even at Valley Forge. The intrigue against
him he watched in stern silence till it was ripe and evident, then he
crushed it with sudden exposure, and turned away in contempt, hardly so
much as mentioning it in his letters to his friends. “Their own artless
zeal to advance their views has destroyed them,” he said. His soldiers
he succored and supplied as he could, himself sharing their privations,
and earning their love as he served them. “Naked and starving as they
are,” he wrote, “we cannot sufficiently admire the incomparable patience
and fidelity of the soldiers.” And even out of that grievous winter some
profit was wrung. Handsome sums of French money had begun of late to
come slowly into the confederate treasury--for France, for the nonce,
was quick with sympathy for America, and glad to lend secret aid against
an old foe. Presently, she promised, she would recognize the
independence of the United States, and herself grapple once more with
England. Meanwhile French, German, and Polish officers hurried
over sea to serve as volunteers with the raw armies of the
confederacy--adventurers, some of them; others sober veterans, gentlemen
of fortune, men of generous and noble quality--among the rest the boyish
Lafayette and the distinguished Steuben. Baron von Steuben had won
himself a place on the great Frederick’s staff in the Seven Years’ War,
and was of that studious race of soldiers the world was presently to
learn to fear. He joined Washington at Valley Forge, and turned the
desolate camp into a training-school of arms, teaching, what these
troops had never known before, promptness and precision in the manual of
arms, in massed and ordered movement, in the use of the bayonet, the
drill and mastery of the charge and of the open field. Neither
Washington nor any of his officers had known how to give this training.
The commander-in-chief had not even had a properly organized staff till
this schooled and thorough German supplied it, and he was valued in the
camp as he deserved. “You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he doeth
it,” he wrote to an old comrade in Prussia; “I am obliged to say to
mine, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and then he does
it.” But he learned to like and to admire his new comrades soon enough
when he found what spirit and capacity there was in them for the field
of action.
The army came out of its dismal winter quarters stronger than it had
ever been before, alike in spirit and in discipline; more devoted to its
commander than ever, and more fit to serve him. At last the change to a
system of long enlistments had transformed it from a levy of militia
into an army steadied by service, unafraid of the field. The year
opened, besides, with a new hope and a new confidence. They were no
longer a body of insurgents even to the eye of Europe. News came to the
camp late in the night of the 4th of May (1778) that France had entered
into open alliance with the United States, and would send fleets and an
army to aid in securing their independence. Such an alliance changed the
whole face of affairs. England would no longer have the undisputed
freedom of the seas, and the conquest of her colonies in America might
turn out the least part of her task in the presence of European enemies.
She now knew the full significance of Saratoga and Germantown.
Washington’s splendid audacity and extraordinary command of his
resources in throwing himself upon his victorious antagonist at
Germantown as the closing move of a long retreat had touched the
imagination and won the confidence of foreign soldiers and statesmen
hardly less than the taking of Burgoyne at Saratoga. Parliament at last
(February, 1778) came to its senses: resolved to renounce the right to
tax the colonies, except for the regulation of trade, and sent
commissioners to America to offer such terms for submission. But it was
too late; neither congress nor the states would now hear of anything but
independence.
With a French fleet about to take the sea, it was necessary that the
British commanders in America should concentrate their forces.
Philadelphia, they had at last found out, was a burden, not a prize. It
had no strategic advantage of position; was hard to defend, and harder
to provision; was too far from the sea, and not far enough from
Washington’s open lines of operation. Before the summer’s campaign
began, Sir William Howe resigned his command and bade the town good-bye,
amidst elaborate festivities (May 18th, 1778). General Clinton, who
succeeded him, received orders from England to undo Howe’s work at once,
abandon Philadelphia, and concentrate his forces at New York. ’Twas
easier said than done. There were not transports enough to move his
fifteen thousand men by sea; only the three thousand loyalists who had
put themselves under his protection could be sent in the ships, with a
portion of his stores; he must cross the hostile country; and his march
was scarcely begun (June 18th) before Washington was at his heels, with
a force but little inferior to his own either in numbers or in
discipline. He might never have reached New York at all had not Charles
Lee been once more second in command in the American army. He had come
out of captivity, exchanged, and now proved himself the insubordinate
poltroon he was. He had never had any real heart in the cause. He owned
estates in Virginia, but he was not of the great Virginian family of the
Northern Neck. He was only a soldier of fortune, strayed out of the
British service on half-pay to seek some profit in the colonies, and
cared for no interest but his own. While a prisoner he had secretly
directed Howe’s movement against Philadelphia, and now he was to
consummate his cowardly treachery. Washington outstripped his opponent
in the movement upon New York, and determined to fall upon him at
Monmouth Court House, where, on the night of the 27th of June, Clinton’s
divisions lay separate, offering a chance to cut them asunder. On the
morning of the 28th, Lee was ordered forward with six thousand men to
enfold Clinton’s left wing--eight thousand men, the flower of the
British force--by gaining its flank, while Washington held his main body
ready to strike in his aid at the right moment. The movement was
perfectly successful, and the fighting had begun, when, to the amazement
and chagrin alike of officers and men, Lee began to withdraw. Lafayette
sent a messenger hot-foot for Washington, who rode up to find his men,
not attacking, but pursued. “What is the meaning of all this?” he
thundered, his wrath terrible to see. When Lee would have made some
excuse, he hotly cursed him, in his fury, for a coward, himself rallied
the willing troops, and led them forward again to a victory: won back
the field Lee had abandoned, and drove the enemy to the cover of a
morass. In the night that followed, Clinton hastily withdrew, leaving
even his wounded behind him, and Washington’s chance to crush him was
gone.
“Clinton gained no advantage except to reach New York with the wreck of
his army,” commented the observant Frederick over sea; “America is
probably lost for England.” But a great opportunity had been
treacherously thrown away, and the war dragged henceforth with every
painful trial of hope deferred. A scant three weeks after Clinton had
reached New York, the Count d’Estaing was off Sandy Hook, with a French
fleet of twelve ships of the line and six frigates, bringing four
thousand troops. The British fleet within the harbor was barely half as
strong; but the pilots told the cautious Frenchman that his larger ships
could not cross the bar, and he turned away from New York to strike at
Newport, the only other point now held by the British in all the
country. That place had hardly been invested, however, when Lord Howe
appeared with a stronger fleet than the French. D’Estaing was obliged
to draw off to meet him; a great storm sent both fleets into port to
refit instead of to fight; and the disgusted militia-men and
continentals, who had come to take the town with the French, withdrew in
high choler to see the fleet, without which they could do nothing, taken
off to Boston. When the autumn came Clinton felt free to send
thirty-five hundred men to the Southern coast, and Savannah was taken
(December 29th, 1778). Only in the far West, at the depths of the great
wilderness beyond the mountains, was anything done that promised
decisive advantage. George Rogers Clark, that daring Saxon frontiersman,
who moved so like a king through the far forests, swept the whole
country of the Illinois free from British soldiers and British authority
that winter of 1778-9, annexing it to the states that meant to be
independent; and a steady stream of immigration began to pour into the
opened country, as if to prepare a still deeper task of conquest for the
British at far New York.
But few noted in the East what gallant men were doing in the valley of
the Mississippi. They saw only that the British, foiled in New England
and the middle colonies, had changed their plans, and were now minded to
try what could be done in the South. There at last their campaigns
seemed about to yield them something. Savannah taken, they had little
trouble in overrunning Georgia, and every effort to dislodge them
failed; for Washington could not withdraw his army from before Clinton
at New York. Spain joined France in offensive alliance in April, 1779;
in August a combined French and Spanish fleet attempted an invasion of
England; all Europe seemed about to turn upon the stout little kingdom
in its unanimous fear and hatred of her arrogant supremacy upon the
seas. Everywhere there was war upon the ocean highways--even America
sending forth men of desperate valor, like John Paul Jones, to ravage
and challenge Britain upon her very coasts. But England’s spirit only
rose with the danger, and Washington waited all the weary year through
for his French allies. In 1780 it looked for a little as if the British
were indeed turned victors. In the spring Clinton withdrew the force
that had held Newport to New York, and, leaving General Knyphausen there
with a powerful force to keep Washington and the city, carried eight
thousand men southward to take Charleston. There were forces already in
the South sufficient to swell his army to ten thousand ere he invested
the fated town; and on the 12th of May (1780) it fell into his hands,
with General Lincoln and three thousand prisoners. Washington had sent
such succor as he could, but the British force was overwhelming, and
South Carolina was lost. South Carolina teemed with loyalists. The whole
country was swept and harried by partisan bands. The men who should have
swelled General Lincoln’s force knew not when their homes might be
plundered and destroyed, if they were to leave them. The planters of the
low country dared not stir for fear of an insurrection of their slaves.
In June, Clinton could take half his force back to New York, deeming the
work done. General Gates completed the disastrous record. On the 13th of
June he was given chief command in the South, and was told that the
country expected another “Burgoynade.” His force was above three
thousand, and he struck his blow, as he should, at Camden, where
Cornwallis had but two thousand men, albeit trained and veteran troops;
but the end was total, shameful rout (August 16th, 1780), and men knew
at last the incapacity of their “hero of Saratoga.” “We look on America
as at our feet,” said Horace Walpole.
Certainly things looked desperate enough that dark year. The congress
was sinking into a more and more helpless inefficiency. Definitive
articles of confederation had been submitted to the states nearly three
years ago (November, 1777), but they had not been adopted yet, and the
states had almost ceased to heed the requisitions of the congress at
all. Unable to tax, it paid its bills and the wages of its troops in
paper, which so rapidly fell in value that by the time the hopeless year
1780 was out, men in the ranks found a month’s pay too little with which
to buy even a single bushel of wheat. Washington was obliged to levy
supplies from the country round him to feed his army; and in spite of
their stanch loyalty to him, his men grew mutinous, in sheer disgust
with the weak and faithless government they were expected to serve.
Wholesale desertion began, as many as one hundred men a month going over
to the enemy, to get at least pay and food and clothing. The country
seemed not so much dismayed as worn out and indifferent; weary of
waiting and hoping; looking stolidly to see the end come. Washington was
helpless. Without the co-operation of a naval force, it was impossible
to do more than hold the British in New York. France, it was true, was
bestirring herself again. On the 10th of July a French fleet put in at
Newport and landed a force of six thousand men, under Count Rochambeau,
a most sensible and capable officer, who was directed to join Washington
and put himself entirely under his command. But a powerful British fleet
presently made its appearance in the Sound; the French admiral dared
not stir; Rochambeau dared not leave him without succor; and the
reinforcements that were to have followed out of France were blockaded
in the harbor of Brest.
Then, while things stood so, treason was added. Benedict Arnold, the man
whom Washington trusted with a deep affection, and whom the army loved
for his gallantry, entered into correspondence with the enemy; arranged
to give West Point and the posts dependent upon it into their hands;
and, his treason suddenly detected, escaped without punishment to the
British sloop of war that waited in the river for the British agent in
the plot. Washington was at hand when the discovery was made. His aides
were breakfasting with Arnold when the traitor was handed the note which
told him he was found out; and Arnold had scarcely excused himself and
made good his flight when the commander-in-chief reached the house. When
Washington learned what had happened, it smote him so that mighty sobs
burst from him, as if his great heart would break; and all the night
through the guard could hear him pacing his room endlessly, in a lonely
vigil with his bitter thoughts. He did not in his own grief forget the
stricken wife upstairs. “Go to Mrs. Arnold,” he said to one of his
officers, “and tell her that, though my duty required that no means
should be neglected to arrest General Arnold, I have great pleasure in
acquainting _her_ that he is now safe on board a British vessel.” Arnold
had deemed himself wronged and insulted by congress--but what officer
that Washington trusted might not? Who could be confided in if such men
turned traitors?
But a sudden turning of affairs marked the close of the year. Cornwallis
had penetrated too far into the Carolinas; had advanced into North
Carolina, and was beset, as Burgoyne had been, by a rising of the
country. He lost twelve hundred men at King’s Mountain (October 7th,
1780), as Burgoyne had lost a thousand at Bennington; and everywhere, as
he moved, he found himself checked by the best officers the long war had
bred--Nathanael Greene, who had been Washington’s right hand the war
through; Henry Lee, the daring master of cavalry, whom Washington loved;
the veteran Steuben; Morgan, who had won Saratoga with Arnold; and
partisan leaders a score, whom he had learned to dread in that wide
forested country. He was outgeneralled; his forces were taken in detail
and beaten, and he himself was forced at last into Virginia. By
midsummer, 1781, all his interior posts were lost, and he was cut off
from Charleston and Savannah by a country he dared not cross again. In
Virginia, though at first he raided as he pleased, he was checked more
and more as the season advanced by a growing force under Lafayette; and
by the first week in August he had taken counsel of prudence, and
established himself, seven thousand strong, at Yorktown, near the sea,
his base of supplies. Then it was that Washington struck the blow which
ended the war. At last Rochambeau was free to move; at last a French
fleet was at hand to block the free passage of the sea. The Count de
Grasse, with twenty-eight ships of the line, six frigates, and twenty
thousand men, was in the West Indies, and in August sent word to
Washington that he was about to bring his whole fleet to the Chesapeake,
as Washington had urged. Either the Chesapeake or New York, had been
[Illustration: THE ESCAPE OF ARNOLD]
Washington’s prayer to him. Making as if he were but moving about New
York from north to south for some advantage of position, Washington
suddenly took two thousand Continentals and four thousand Frenchmen,
under Rochambeau, all the long four hundred miles to York River in
Virginia, to find Cornwallis already entrapped there, as he had planned,
between Grasse’s fleet in the bay and Lafayette intrenched across the
peninsula with eight thousand men, now the French had loaned him three
thousand. A few weeks’ siege and the decisive work was done, to the
admiration of Cornwallis himself. The British army was taken. The
generous Englishman could not withhold an expression of his admiration
for the extraordinary skill with which Washington had struck all the way
from New York with six thousand men as easily as if with six hundred.
“But, after all,” he added, “your Excellency’s achievements in New
Jersey were such that nothing could surpass them.”
THE STRESS OF VICTORY