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Aides he could appoint. His senior generals were out of his hands, because Congress kept to itself the power to hire and fire general officers. It told the commander in chief to hold councils of war with them over every major decision. He was also required to consult directly with committees of Congress.10
The second in command at Boston, Major General Artemas Ward, forty-eight years old, was a stern-looking man, medium tall, with a stout body and a slow way of speaking. A Harvard graduate, his military experience was a failed attack on Fort Ticonderoga in 1758. He directed the Battle of Bunker Hill from a sickbed and felt insulted when Washington superseded him. Products of alien cultures, they fired nasty darts at each other until Ward resigned a year later.11
Third in command was Major General Charles Lee, the most experienced soldier in the American army, and also the strangest. Tall and so thin that he looked as if he could stay dry in the rain, he had a startling hooked nose that parted the air before him. He was unusually dirty even for his time, looking as if he had been dragged by a tornado, smelly, and swarming with fleas. He was a constant talker and an entertaining one despite a shockingly obscene vocabulary.
Born in England in 1731, Lee served as a lieutenant in Braddock’s expedition, where Washington first met him, then as a captain in the Mohawk Valley. He was seriously wounded during the attack on Ticonderoga but returned to his regiment for the capture of Niagara and Montreal. He rose to lieutenant colonel through several campaigns in British service, became a major general in the service of the king of Poland, and earned another wound. Lee migrated to Virginia in 1773 and bought an estate in western Virginia. There he built a timber farmhouse as bachelor quarters for himself, two slaves, and an unruly pack of dogs. For the rest of his life, his dogs were with him, orbiting him like a mob of barking planets.
Lee became an effective pamphleteer for the American cause. He was witty, charming, and intelligent and knew the latest liberal ideas, winning him fans in Congress. He was suggested for commander in chief, and he wanted the post, but he was British. Washington welcomed him into the Continental Army to take advantage of his military experience. At Boston, Lee fulfilled his promise, riding the whole length of the American lines daily, calling himself the “scamperer-general.”12
Washington’s other two major generals in the summer of 1775 were, like him, experienced mostly as Indian fighters in days past. Philip Schuyler of New York and Israel Putnam of Connecticut were appointed for geographical balance. They were competent enough, Putnam especially as a recruiter, Schuyler for his political influence in New York. But both Putnam, at fifty-seven, and Schuyler, forty-five, were softened by age and comfortable living.13
Charles Lee, a contemporary caricature. A talented, erratic, and maligned man, he was recognized at the time as the strangest general in the war. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
The eccentric Lee was a bomb waiting to go off in Washington’s headquarters. So was another British veteran of the Braddock campaign, Horatio Gates. The bastard son of a British duke and his housemaid, he served with distinction in the Seven Years’ War but could not rise above major in an army dominated by aristocrats. At Washington’s urging, he moved to Virginia in 1772. Congress made him adjutant general, with a brigadier’s rank. Gates was forty-seven years old, squat, with a stooped posture, ruddy cheeks, thinning gray hair, and spectacles perched at the end of his long nose. His manner was that of a fussy schoolmaster, and the troops called him “Granny Gates.” Like Lee, he thought that he should have been appointed to the top command. He was an unenergetic man who as a general got lucky once, turned on Washington, and ended his career with a notorious disaster.14
Using the material at hand, Washington set out to organize the army. As troops from other states arrived, the Continental Army fielded thirty-eight regiments of varying size (600 to 1,000 men). Washington reorganized them into six brigades (usually of six regiments each) and into divisions of two brigades each. Brigades, divisions, and regiments were terms identifying administrative headquarters. The tactical designation of the regiment was “battalion”; it was the main unit of maneuver in an army that Washington intended would fight as a tactical whole. He followed European doctrine, as presented in the treatises he read.15
Washington tried to mold his army into shape by harsh means, copying British practice. Trials were frequent, and punishments were severe. Almost any infraction earned the lash. As far as his privates were concerned, he was a hard man.16
Horatio Gates, by C.W. Peale, 1782. As a general Gates got lucky once at Saratoga, became involved in intrigues against Washington, and ended his career with a spectacular disaster at Camden. (INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)
“An army,” Napoleon famously remarked, “marches on its stomach.” Washington would have agreed, because too often his services of supply failed him. Supply was the most chaotic operation of the Continental Army throughout the war. Except for small arms, artillery, and ammunition, the troops wanted for nearly everything. They suffered from shortages of food, forage, fuel, straw, clothing, blankets, shoes, and vehicles. America was not ready for war and never became so. The supply problems arose from unsound currencies, limited domestic manufactures, wavering popular support, congressional and state interference or inaction, and plain ineptitude. Competent staff officers moved to line commands, because capable commanders were in even shorter supply. Departments of the quartermaster, purchasing, clothing, and subsistence collided with each other. Medical services were poor.17
Supply shortages were especially galling around Boston, because Massachusetts was a land of plenty. Yet local and state authorities were noticeably uncooperative in meeting the army’s needs, and in recruiting state troops they competed with Congress. They gave higher bonuses and fatter rations, especially of spruce beer and rum, than offered by the Continental Army. When the New England troops neared the ends of their enlistments late in 1775, most planned to go home or join the state forces, so Congress raised the Continental ration. “Never,” Washington addressed the men, “were soldiers whose pay and provision have been so abundant and ample [as now provided]…. There is some reason to dread that the enemies to New England’s reputation may hereafter say…that they were bribed into the preservation of their liberties.”18
Washington aggravated his difficulties by failing to get along with New Englanders. He was a provincial Virginian and their ways were alien to him, while they resented his intruding into their territory and their war. Above all, New England egalitarianism was contrary to Washington’s patrician beliefs. He wanted to build an army founded on a strict hierarchy from commander down through the ranks to privates. New Englanders tended to be democratic about everything. He unwisely derided them at his dinner table and in letters, and his remarks leaked, causing an uproar in Congress, until he promised to “reform” himself.19
The commander in chief had a larger problem with the quality of officers, wherever they came from. Washington believed that military status should reflect social status, with “common” men serving in the ranks and middle- and upper-class officers supervising them. Unfortunately, few officers had any supervisory experience, military or otherwise. That was reflected in the poor quality of the winter housing in the early years of the war. It was not for want of skills. The difficulty was a failure to organize and direct the work, because company officers left everything to unsupervised sergeants, following the British example.20
The weaknesses in the officer corps left the Continental Army substantially untrained. Men could learn from each other how to load and fire a musket, but performing maneuvers as units was on another plane altogether. There were no standard tactical manuals, although they would have been of little help without a tradition of supervised training.21
The mob hoping to become an army stared across the harbor at the British, who stared back. Neither side was willing or able to attack the other. Washington—lonely, unhappy in this strange place, and pining for Mount Vernon—was thoroughly discouraged. S
uch army as he had was about to dissolve around him at the end of 1775, when most enlistments expired. He offered Congress a goal of a 20,000-man Continental Army—identified as such, and not with the states. That was a reasonable number to hope to recruit for 1776, but by November only about a thousand of the present army had proved willing to sign on for the long term. Washington would have to disband one army and form another in the face of the enemy.22
He complained to Reed about the “dearth of public spirit and want of virtue” to be found “in this great military arrangement.” He added, “Could I have foreseen what I have, and am likely to experience, no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”23
Washington talked like that when he was depressed, but he was not one to abandon any responsibility. He would carry on. He needed something to get the war moving, a dramatic gesture that would inspire men to stay with him, and others to join him. Or maybe he needed a miracle.
A miracle is what he got, in the roly-poly figure of Henry Knox.
I THINK THE GAME IS PRETTY NEAR UP
The stalemate around Boston bid fair to go on forever. Washington hatched one complicated plan after another for an attack on the city, only to meet objections from the other generals. The rebels needed to find a way to outgun the enemy, so the twenty-five-year-old Knox went to Washington with an idea.
Knox was the biggest general in the war, tipping the scale at 300 pounds. He was agile enough, but hard on horses. He was as jolly as the proverbial fat man, with a megaphone voice, hearty personality, genteel manners, and fancy dress, and had lost two fingers of his left hand when his shotgun blew up during a bird hunt.
Knox had witnessed the Boston Massacre of 1770 and hated the British. He had joined a Boston militia company at age eighteen, began importing books, and opened a shop he called the London Book-Store, which attracted redcoat officers. There he kept his ears open, learning as much as he could about military affairs in general, and about the occupiers’ intentions in particular, to pass on to rebel leaders in the city. He fought at Bunker Hill and accompanied Ward to the siege lines around Boston. He kept reading, concentrating on the art and science of artillery, and became a pioneer in field artillery tactics. He had another valuable military talent—he was a born scrounger.24
Knox told Washington that there were about five dozen big guns and mortars at Fort Ticonderoga, and volunteered to go get them. On November 17, 1775, Washington appointed him colonel of the (nonexistent) Continental Regiment of Artillery and sent him on his way. Knox left Cambridge a few days later with a small escort and reached Ticonderoga on December 5 in head-high snow. He selected forty-three heavy cannons, fourteen mortars, and two howitzers, at a total weight of nearly 200,000 pounds, to which he added shot and a barrel of flints. He and his men felled trees and built forty-two heavy sledges, and he rounded up eighty yoke of oxen. They dragged it all to the southern end of Lake George by January 7, 1776, with 300 miles yet to go. Always impatient, Knox pulled his train east through steep grades and heavy snows in the Berkshire Mountains at a remarkable rate. He had his “noble train of artillery” in Cambridge by the twenty-fifth of January.25
His work was not done. The best place to put the guns was the Dorchester Heights, which commanded the city and harbor. Getting them emplaced there involved a prodigy of construction, hauling, and heavy lifting in an area exposed to enemy fire. Virtually all this work took place secretly in one night, March 4, and the British woke up to find themselves literally under Knox’s guns. Delayed only by a storm, Major General Sir William Howe, who had replaced Gage, sailed away with his army on March 17, 1776. Washington had driven the enemy out of Boston.26
That triumph accompanied a disaster for the American cause—the invasion of Canada. Congress hoped that 80,000 French habitants in Quebec would welcome rescue from British occupation. Most of them would not.
Schuyler launched the campaign during the summer of 1775. Slowed by ill health and not knowing what he was doing anyway, he sent about a thousand men under Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, a veteran soldier from New York, toward Montreal, then on to Quebec. Washington sent another thousand under the pugnacious Brigadier General Benedict Arnold of Connecticut, who took along a company of riflemen under a Virginian captain, Daniel Morgan, to approach Quebec through the Maine woods. Both expeditions were poorly planned and supplied, through nearly impassable country, while most soldiers’ enlistments would expire at the end of the year.
Henry Knox, by C.W. Peale, 1784. A bookseller turned soldier, Knox was a pioneering genius in field-artillery tactics, and the largest general in the war. (INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)
A series of horrendous ordeals brought one small success after another, until Montgomery took Montreal, where he learned that Arnold was on his way to Quebec. They met there in December and besieged the place in howling winter weather with supplies running out. On New Year’s Eve, they assaulted the works at night during a blizzard. Montgomery’s face was shot away, Arnold took a ball in the leg, and Morgan stormed the place almost single-handedly and was captured. The disaster was compounded by Congress’ determination to send thousands more troops northward. When the ice broke and British ships landed troops in Canada in May 1776, the American armies retreated. The campaign had cost 5,000 casualties, along with tons of supplies and money.27
The evacuation of Boston was the last good news the American cause received for nearly a year. Congress passed a series of laws to give Washington his 20,000-man army, but the measures made recruitment more difficult. Washington’s manpower hovered around 9,000 men through the summer. After they were kicked out of New York, however, “the contagion of desertion…raged after the manner of a plague,” in Washington’s words. He was down to just over 5,000 men at the end of November, and half of them were slated to go home the next day. Unless the new army was recruited quickly, Washington warned Congress, “I think the game is pretty near up.”28
Few people, despite the Declaration of Independence on July 4, wanted to join an army with a record of defeats and disasters. After the British left Boston, Washington marched to New York to face 30,000 redcoats and Hessians, as well as a large fleet commanded by General Howe’s brother, Admiral Richard Lord Howe. Washington unwisely placed the majority of his troops on Long Island, in front of a superior opponent who commanded the sea. On August 27, 1776, the enemy assaulted the American lines. Washington’s position was too long, and his left flank hung in the air. The British turned it, capturing a new major general, John Sullivan.
The American army should have been trapped, but a change in weather allowed Washington to evacuate under cover of night and fog and reestablish himself on Manhattan. His officers disagreed about whether to stand there, or retreat. Lee—recently returned from a successful defense of Charleston, South Carolina, against a British attack earlier in the summer—and another new major general, Nathanael Greene, wanted to get onto solid ground north of the island. In the middle of September, a British force under Sir Henry Clinton landed on Manhattan and drove the Americans northward to Harlem Heights. There entrenched resistance and murderous fire from Pennsylvanian riflemen stopped the advance. Among Clinton’s subordinates was General Charles Lord Cornwallis, a veteran of Minden.
As the enemy continued probing, Washington evacuated Manhattan except for Fort Washington at its northern tip. He kept a garrison there at the urging of Greene, who had changed his mind about making a stand on the island. Cornwallis’ redcoats and Hessians attacked in November 1776, suffering heavy casualties before they overran the rebel position. Afterward, infuriated Hessians bayoneted many of the prisoners. Washington and Greene watched the disaster from Fort Lee on the New Jersey shore. Greene raged. Washington wept, “with the tenderness of [a] child,” said another officer.29
It appeared that the cause was lost. The dwindling army retreated across New Jersey, desertion rampant. The militia simply disappeared. Washington was down to about 5,000 men before he got out
of the state.
Meanwhile, Gates (now a major general) and Lee became rebellious. Gates openly criticized Washington’s alleged lack of competence, Lee his indecisiveness. Lee had led part of the army toward Morristown, and once the retreat began Washington ordered him to rejoin the main body. First Lee ignored the orders, then responded with excuses. Finally he headed toward Trenton. On December 13, he and the dogs were captured by British dragoons, betrayed by loyalists in a tavern where he spent the night.30
Lee left behind another bitter blow for the commander in chief. On November 29, Washington received a letter from Lee addressed to his adjutant general, Joseph Reed, and opened it expecting some news of Lee’s whereabouts. Instead, Lee thanked Reed for an “obliging, flattering letter.” He agreed with Reed’s complaints about “that fatal indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity.” The words were Lee’s, but clearly they echoed Reed’s, and they referred to Washington. He forwarded the letter to Reed and apologized for opening it accidentally. He knew that the younger man would resign out of embarrassment.
The wound Washington suffered from this betrayal was still bleeding years later. He explained to the belatedly apologetic Reed that his “unreserved manner” toward the aide entitled him to his honest advice, and Reed’s censuring his conduct to another was so disloyal that he “was not a little mortified at it.” At the time, he wondered whether he could trust anybody around him.31
There was disagreement in the British command on what to do after Washington retreated across the Delaware in early December 1776. Clinton wanted to go all out to obliterate the Continental Army and take Philadelphia. But supply lines reached all the way back to England, and the troops were short of everything, so the Howes contented themselves with taking New Jersey out of the war. British and Hessian troops fanned out over the state, ousting people from their homes amid looting, murder, burnings, and gang rapes. Where formerly the Crown had retained a fair measure of loyalty, now New Jersey was ready to rise in fury.