George Washington Read online

  Baffled at Throg’s Neck, on October 18, Howe tried again at Pell’s Point, four miles farther north, this time concentrating the bulk of his army. An American brigade of about 750 men under the reliable Colonel John Glover took advantage of the district’s woods and walls to mount a stubborn delaying action, skirmishing with the grenadiers and light infantry of Howe’s advance guard before falling back. In his last orders from Harlem Heights, issued on October 21, Washington paid tribute to their “merit and good behavior.”53 Rather than pushing forward vigorously, hounding Washington’s heels, Howe advanced warily, with obvious deliberation. Unmolested, Washington left Manhattan Island by King’s Bridge that same day; on October 22, he established another strong position ten miles upcountry at the village of White Plains.

  As Lord Rawdon wryly noted, “plains” was a misnomer for what was in fact “as hilly and difficult a country” as he had ever clapped eyes on.54 Washington’s latest position covered a three-mile frontage, its right anchored on the steep, rocky, and partially wooded Chatterton Hill. Washington was still learning the rudiments of battlefield command. Repeating his error on Long Island, he failed to reconnoiter the ground carefully: despite its obvious importance, he neglected to fortify Chatterton Hill, instead entrusting it to the care of a few hundred of the jittery militia who so exasperated him.

  Skirmishers from Howe’s army reached White Plains on the morning of October 28. Only now did Washington begin to take his bearings, assessing developments from the summit of Chatterton Hill. He was accompanied by Major General Lee, who scanned the horizon and pointed out what he reckoned to be a much stronger defensive position, still farther back, at North Castle. They were about to ride off and inspect it when it became clear that a determined British attack was developing, targeted at Chatterton Hill. About 1,000 Continental troops, along with a few cannon, were sent to bolster the militia there.

  Like Washington’s command, Howe’s army at White Plains consisted of about 13,000 men; almost as many remained behind on Manhattan Island. Preceded by an intensive and effective cannonade, his assault columns of Hessians and redcoats waded across the shallow Bronx River at the foot of Chatterton Hill, deployed as best as they could on the constricted ground, then ascended the slope with fixed bayonets. True to Washington’s predictions, the mere sight of cold steel was enough to panic the militia into flight, but the Continentals mounted a more respectable resistance before falling back. Once again, Howe failed to capitalize upon this victory with a determined pursuit of Washington, who had established reserve positions to the east. One frustrated officer wished that the army had instead been led by Howe’s old commander, the bold Wolfe. Of course, such critics failed to appreciate that the general’s aim was not the annihilation of the Continental Army, but rather its continued withdrawal at the minimum cost in British and German blood.55

  Howe was poised to resume his methodical offensive on the morning of October 31, but a rainstorm on the evening before the intended assault drenched his ammunition and made the going heavy for his artillery, giving Washington an opportunity to slip away once more. Now conforming to the “Fabian” pattern, he fell back some five miles to North Castle, the formidable position recently identified by Lee. Howe made no effort to dislodge him from there; as he subsequently reported to Germain, he could not see the “least consequence” in merely “driving their rearguard further back.”56 Indeed, Washington’s army had been driven quite far enough for Howe’s purposes. On November 4, the British commander quit White Plains and returned to Manhattan, where a more tempting target awaited.

  Baffled by Howe’s sudden withdrawal, Washington couldn’t credit that he was retiring into winter quarters so soon. He would surely strike again, but where? If Howe shifted into New Jersey, he might venture a lunge at Philadelphia, the Revolution’s capital. Intelligence also suggested that Fort Washington would attract the enemy’s “earliest attention.” Washington summoned another council of war to mull things over. If the enemy continued toward New York, would it not be wise to “throw a body of troops” into New Jersey? The reply was a unanimous yes. It was agreed that the regiments raised west of the Hudson should be detached for that duty, with the proviso that the units “belonging to the eastern side of Hudson’s River”—the New Englanders—should remain there if circumstances permitted. Finally, as it was necessary to safeguard the rugged Hudson “Highlands,” which not only barred the route to Canada but also secured the Americans’ communications between New England and the middle and southern states, a hefty contingent of 3,000 men would be sent there.57 Washington’s army, which was already shedding manpower as the militia levies’ enlistments expired, would now be fragmented and dispersed in the face of a powerful enemy.

  Although Howe’s precise intentions remained unclear, the threat to Fort Washington was obvious enough. Despite that strongpoint’s vulnerability, Washington faced considerable pressure to maintain it. In conjunction with Fort Lee, which lay opposite on the New Jersey shore, its cannon were supposed to prevent British shipping from penetrating the Hudson. Congress had cautioned Washington to spare no effort or expense to block the river, an injunction underlined by the council of war of October 16. Such a stance made sense only if Fort Washington was defensible; men whom Washington trusted believed that it was. The complex was commanded by the bullish Pennsylvanian rifleman Colonel Robert Magaw, but overall responsibility for the sector rested with Major General Greene, a conscientious and capable officer whose judgment Washington had grown to value. Based at Fort Lee, Greene monitored the situation on Manhattan closely, making frequent trips back and forth across the Hudson. Like Magaw, Greene was adamant that the fort could be held. Washington initially accepted this verdict but had second thoughts after three British ships pushed up the Hudson on November 5, heedless of its guns. Washington asked Greene, “What valuable purpose can it answer to attempt to hold a post from which the expected benefit cannot be had?” He was now “inclined to think” it would be unwise to “hazard” the men and supplies at Fort Washington. However, while revoking previous orders that Greene must hold the fort at all costs, Washington failed to act upon his instincts and order its immediate evacuation. Greene meanwhile was sure that Washington’s fears were unfounded: indeed, not only was the garrison “of advantage” but it was in no “great danger.”58

  On November 9, Washington began shifting part of his army to New Jersey by a roundabout route, crossing the Hudson River higher up at Peekskill. Once over, he aimed to bolster his command with enough local reinforcements to rebuff any advance by Howe. Meanwhile, William Heath was left with the contingent to secure the Hudson Highlands; the strongest force remained around White Plains under Charles Lee. As Howe’s plans were still obscure, Washington’s instructions for his second in command, in whom he placed “the most entire confidence,” allowed him discretion to react to developments: as the enemy’s “appearances of embarking troops for the Jerseys” might be no more than a feint, Washington took the liberty to “suggest” that Lee guard against an attack on his own command. On one point, however, Washington made his wishes crystal clear: “If the enemy should remove the whole, or the greatest part of their force to the west side of Hudson’s River, I have no doubt of your following with all possible dispatch.”59

  By November 14, Washington and most of his men were over in New Jersey. Writing to Hancock from Greene’s headquarters at Fort Lee, Washington confessed that “the movements and designs of the enemy” were no clearer: while there was a general agreement that they would besiege Fort Washington, that would only employ a small part of their force. As for the rest, only time could tell.60

  That same night, a flotilla of flatboats carrying British troops rowed silently up the Hudson, passing unnoticed beneath Forts Washington and Lee before peeling off into a creek leading to the Harlem River. Utterly oblivious to this ominous development, the next morning Washington rode out from Fort Lee and headed for Hackensack, six miles deeper into New Jersey. There he received ala
rming intelligence, forwarded by Greene. A British flag of truce had delivered a blunt ultimatum to Magaw: he had two hours to surrender or risk “every man being put to the sword.” Magaw remained defiant, prepared to defend his post to the death.61 Washington lost no time in heading back to help. Even now, his urgency was blunted by poor advice. Halfway across the Hudson, Washington met a boat with Greene and Putnam aboard, bound for New Jersey. When he called over for a situation report, they both maintained that the threatened garrison was in “high spirits” and capable of “a good defense.” By now the fort had been reinforced: nearly 3,000 Continental troops were concentrated there, manning the cramped five-sided earthwork and its extensive outlying defenses. Reassured, Washington returned to Fort Lee, spending the night there.

  The next morning, November 16, Howe ordered an all-out assault on Fort Washington. This bold action suggests that it was not simply fear of another Bunker Hill–style butcher’s bill that had stopped him short of the Brooklyn lines on August 27, but rather his hopes for a negotiated settlement—hopes that had now withered. Howe’s troops struck from three sides—the east, north, and south. At about 10 a.m., Hessians and redcoats began fighting their way up the surrounding slopes, encountering punishing terrain and determined resistance. Alerted by the firing, Washington once again crossed the river to assess the situation in person. By noon, despite heavy casualties, Howe’s men had cleared the outworks and were closing in on the fort itself. For all of Magaw and Greene’s assurances, its fall now seemed inevitable. Washington and his generals must get out while they still could. Greene recalled: “We all urged his Excellency to come off. I offered to stay. General Putnam did the same and so did General Mercer, but his Excellency thought it best for all of us to come off together, which we did about half an hour before the enemy surrounded the fort.”62

  Rather than face a final assault and risk the slaughter of his men, Magaw reluctantly capitulated. More than 50 of the fort’s defenders had been killed; all the rest—about 2,800, of whom several hundred must have been wounded—were captured. These survivors were lucky to escape with their lives: excited troops who have just subdued a formidable defensive position, seeing comrades slain or maimed alongside them, are notoriously reluctant to spare opponents whose weapons are still warm. Howe’s men were no exception. A massacre of the surrendered garrison by the incensed Hessians, who had “been pretty well pelted” as Major General Grant put it, was only averted by the prompt intervention of their officers.63 Even then, many captives were roughed up, abused, and otherwise humiliated; owing to the combatants’ failure to agree upon a workable system for the exchange of prisoners of war, most of them subsequently endured a harsh confinement within the fetid prison hulks moored in New York’s harbor, an ordeal that eventually killed two-thirds of them through illness and neglect.

  Mercifully, Washington had no inkling of the garrison’s ultimate fate. He already felt bad enough, racked by self-reproach. As he reported to his brother Jack three days later, this “most unfortunate affair” had given him “great mortification.” Not only had Howe bagged a significant percentage of Washington’s scarce manpower, but also much artillery and some of the army’s best muskets. Worst of all, the blow had fallen because Washington failed to follow his own convictions, instead accepting bad advice. He wrote: “And what adds to my mortification is that this post, after the last ships went past it, was held contrary to my wishes and opinion, as I conceived it to be a dangerous one.” But urged on by a full council of general officers, and with Congress pressing for the Hudson to be blocked, Washington “did not care to give an absolute order for withdrawing the garrison till I could get round and see the situation of things.” By then it was too late.64 The council of war had proved a dangerously double-sided tool: at Boston it repeatedly checked Washington when he was bent upon sacrificing his army in suicidal frontal assaults; at New York it persuaded him, against his own better judgment, to throw away the defenders of Fort Washington.

  As Lieutenant John Peebles of the Royal Highland Regiment noted, these men were some of Washington’s “best troops,” including many riflemen. Peebles recognized their commander, Magaw, as “an old acquaintance”; he didn’t elaborate, but it is likely they had served alongside each other in western Pennsylvania during the last war.65 Like many other Scots—the rebel officers Adam Stephen and Hugh Mercer, for instance—Peebles had come to America with a medical background, serving first as a surgeon’s mate with the 2nd Virginia Regiment in 1758. Transferring to Montgomery’s Highlanders, he fought as a volunteer during Henri Bouquet’s celebrated 1763 clash with the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run, earning an ensign’s commission in the 42nd for his bravery.66

  Other British and Hessian observers were unimpressed by Magaw’s garrison. According to Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the prisoners were a dirty and shabby bunch. Mackenzie noted that “many of them were lads under 15, and old men” who cut odd, unsoldierly, and even comical figures.67 Strikingly similar observations had been made by Ambrose Serle in August after the Long Island rout. He scornfully dismissed the rebel army as “the strangest that ever was collected”; it was a “motley crew,” composed of “old men of 60, boys of 14, and blacks of all ages, and ragged for the most part.” Serle also noted the “vast numbers of Irish” in the rebel ranks, convinced that many of them were convicts who had been transported into the colonies, and were consequently “glad of an idle vagabond life, and well-disposed to any bad purpose they may be set on.”68 Making due allowance for prejudice and exaggeration, such eyewitness testimony indicates that in 1776, Washington’s army was already drawing on the very sources of manpower that its recruiting officers had been warned to shun; coming years would do little to change its profile.

  The disaster at Fort Washington was swiftly compounded by another. On November 20, as Washington informed Hancock next day, a powerful enemy force landed on the seemingly inaccessible cliff-lined Jersey shore between Dobbs Ferry and Fort Lee. Like Wolfe’s men at Quebec in 1759, the redcoats scaled the cliffs and, led by a vigorous veteran of the Seven Years’ War’s German campaigns, Major General Charles Cornwallis, rapidly pushed onward to Fort Lee. Warned by Washington, that strongpoint was abandoned in the nick of time, and the garrison escaped across the Hackensack River. But crucial stores and almost all of the artillery were lost.69

  Reporting this blow to Lee, Washington appealed for him to bring his troops to his assistance. With no more than 3,000 “much broken and dispirited” men under his own command, he had no option but to retreat across a “dead flat” landscape that offered no potential for making a stand, even though it meant exposing “a very fine country” to the enemy’s ravages. As Howe had shifted “the seat of war” to New Jersey, and its inhabitants would naturally expect the Continental Army to protect them, Washington and his generals now believed that “the public interest” required Lee to bring his troops across the Hudson. “Unless therefore some new event should occur, or some more cogent reason present itself, I would have you move over by the easiest and best passage,” Washington wrote. Even now he fought shy of issuing an explicit order, so allowing his subordinate leeway for ignoring his appeal.70

  Unknown to Washington, another letter had been inserted with his, written by his trusted adjutant general, Joseph Reed. This diminished Washington and fed Lee’s already inflated ego: “I do not mean to flatter or praise you at the expense of any other,” Reed had written, “but I confess I do think it is entirely owing to you that this army, and the liberties of America, so far as they are dependent on it, are not totally cut off.” While lauding Lee, Reed blamed Washington for the loss of the fort named after him, lamenting that “an indecisive mind is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall an army.”71

  Washington, meanwhile, had no option but to continue his headlong retreat, crossing the Passaic River at Aquackanock and then marching south to Newark. His troops now numbered about 5,400, but of those, more than 2,000 were at liberty to
leave for home on December 1, when their enlistments expired; the time of another 950 would be up on New Year’s Day.72 With his own army disintegrating, Washington needed Lee’s help more badly than ever. But, far from responding to his commander’s call, Lee was following his own inclinations. Instead of coming west himself, he had ordered Major General Heath to send 2,000 of his men from the Hudson Highlands. Aware that such a move would be “extremely hazardous,” and determined to obey Washington’s specific instructions to hold his ground, Heath wrote to warn him that Lee was interpreting his own commands as “a recommendation not a positive order.”73 As events would show, this was an astute analysis.

  Luckily for Washington, the British pursuit of his demoralized force had initially been slowed by wet weather, but on November 25, Cornwallis set out after him in earnest at the head of an elite force: British grenadiers and light infantry and Hessian grenadiers and jägers—green-clad marksmen armed with rifles that were shorter, but no less accurate, than those used by the Americans. As Washington’s rear guard left Newark on November 28, these advance troops were already entering the town. Fearful that Howe would sever their line of withdrawal by landing a detachment on the New Jersey shore at Perth Amboy, Washington and his generals resolved to keep falling back as fast as they could. By hard marching, they covered another twenty-five miles to reach Brunswick, on the south bank of the Raritan River, by the next day. Reporting to Hancock on November 30, Washington believed that two enemy divisions were now converging on them, intending “to push every advantage resulting from the small number and state of our troops.”74

  Meanwhile, Charles Lee still refused to shift his men across the Hudson. His motives remain unclear, but it seems likely that he distrusted Washington’s abilities and genuinely felt his own would serve the cause better. Replying to Reed’s letter of November 21, Lee had likewise regretted that “fatal indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity, or even want of personal courage.” This response was opened by Washington, who had assumed that it related only to public business. In a brief, formally polite note, he informed his adjutant general of his unwitting discovery.75