Section II

ACCORDING TO THE OFFICIAL ROSTER, the Connecticut brigade commanded by Colonel William Douglas numbered 1,500 men. But a third or more were sick, and only about half of those fit for duty were manning the trenches by Kips Bay. They had been awake all night and had had little or nothing to eat in twenty-four hours. Many were the greenest of green American troops, farm boys who had joined the ranks only the week before. Some who had no muskets carried homemade pikes fashioned from scythe blades fixed to the ends of poles.

Colonel Douglas, a New Haven shipmaster and merchant who had fought gallantly at Brooklyn, thought New York untenable. Still, in the expression of the time, he was a thorough soldier. “I think if we will stand by each other, and not run like cowards, with God’s blessing, [we] may keep them off,” he had written to his wife.

In the course of the night, five British frigates had maneuvered into position off Kips Bay, and in the gray half-light before dawn Douglas and his men could see their dark hulls anchored in a row, broadside to the shore about two hundred yards out, so close that they loomed much larger and more menacing than they had ever looked before. Private Martin would remember being able to read the name of the 44-gunPhoenix “as distinctly as though I had been directly under her stern.”

The sun rose on a warm late-summer morning with clear skies and a fine, southwest breeze. “We lay very quiet in our ditch…till the sun was an hour or two high,” Martin wrote. “We heard a cannonade at the city, but our attention was drawn toward our own guests.”

The distant roar was an exchange of fire on the other side of York Island, as more of the British fleet, taking advantage of the ideal winds and a running tide, moved into the Hudson, making it appear that the attack was to come there.

The five ships off Kips Bay lay “entirely quiet” as the day grew oppressively hot. Then four long columns of enemy flatboats could be seen emerging from Newtown Cove across the river, brimming with red-coated troops. “When they came to the edge of the tide,” wrote Martin, “they formed their boats in line…until they appeared like a large field of clover in full bloom.”

At about ten o’clock, a first wave of more than eighty flatboats pushed off into the river. On board were 4,000 British and Hessian soldiers, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder. Lord Rawdon, who was with General Clinton in the lead boat, later wrote that the Hessians, unaccustomed to “this water business” and fearful of being fired on when packed so closely, began singing hymns, while the redcoats responded in their own fashion, “by damning themselves and the enemy indiscriminately with wonderful fervency.”

The crossing went slowly, almost noiselessly, until all at once, the ships standing broadside to Kips Bay went into action, and the quiet of the nearly three weeks since the Battle of Brooklyn came to a thunderous end.

Just three days earlier, at Staten Island, Admiral Lord Howe had spoken solicitously of putting “a stop to these ruinous extremities,” if only the Americans would give up “independency.” Now, at about eleven o’clock, he lay aside the olive branch in a manner that none of the three members of Congress, or anyone, could have imagined, or that any of those present at Kips Bay would ever forget.

The fury let loose was impossible to conceive, wrote a British midshipman. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before,” recorded Ambrose Serle.

It continued without stop for a full hour, a total of nearly eighty guns pounding point-blank at the shore and shrouding the river with acrid smoke. Joseph Martin, who had made a “frog’s leap” into a ditch, thought he might die of the sound alone.

The barrage pulverized the meager breastworks, buried men under sod and sand, and kicked up such dust and smoke that there was no possibility of firing back at the enemy.

When the guns at last ceased, the first wave of flatboats emerged from the drifting smoke into the sunlight and made for shore. By then the Americans had fled as fast as their legs would carry them.

Colonel Douglas had told his men to save themselves and run, but the order was hardly necessary. The fire from the enemy ships, he wrote, was as “hot” as ever could be imagined, “but they mostly overshot us. The brigade was in such a scattered [position] that I could not collect them and I found the whole army on a retreat.”

From the lead landing craft, Lord Rawdon saw the rebels break instantly, “happy to escape” to the nearest woods. “We pressed to shore,” he wrote, “landed, and formed without losing a single man.”

Not all the Americans got away. As another British officer would write, “I saw a Hessian sever a rebel’s head from his body and clap it on a pole in the entrenchments.”

Clinton and his advance corps pressed inland unopposed for a quarter of a mile, to secure high ground known as Inclenberg. There they halted and waited.

***

FROM HIS NEW COMMAND POST on the crest of Harlem Heights, four miles to the north, Washington had heard the roar of cannon at Kips Bay and seen smoke rising in the distance. In an instant he was on his horse and racing south at a gallop, down the post road. Reining up at a cornfield about a mile inland from Kips Bay, he found men “flying in every direction.” It was everything he had feared and worse, his army in pell-mell panic, Americans turned cowards before the enemy.

In a fury, he plunged his horse in among them, trying to stop them. Cursing violently, he lost control of himself. By some accounts, he brandished a cocked pistol. In other accounts, he drew his sword, threatening to run men through. “Take the walls!” he shouted. “Take the corn field!” When no one obeyed, he threw his hat on the ground, exclaiming in disgust, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”

When an advance party of Hessians appeared, and the fleeing men refused to make a stand, Washington is said to have flogged some of their officers with his riding crop. A few soldiers turned and fired on the enemy, killing and wounding several. When a number of other Americans surrendered, with their hands uplifted, the Hessians shot or bayoneted them.

Two Continental brigades, a force of more than 2,000 under Generals Samuel Parsons and John Fellows, arrived in support, but at the sight of men fleeing in panic all around, they, too, turned and ran, strewing the ground with muskets, cartridge boxes, canteens, knapsacks, hats, and coats—this at the sight of fewer than a hundred enemy soldiers.

“The demons of fear and disorder,” said Joseph Martin, “seemed to take full possession of all and everything that day.” All, that is, but Washington, who, in a rage, heedless of his own safety or the chance of being captured, rode to within a hundred yards of the enemy. Only with difficulty were two of his aides able to grab the bridle of his horse and get him to leave the field.

More British troops were landing. By late afternoon, another 9,000 would be ashore at Kips Bay. When word came that the rebels had abandoned New York, a British brigade headed rapidly south and the city was theirs.

They were welcomed with open arms. “Nothing could equal the expressions of joy shown by the inhabitants, upon the arrival of the King’s officers among them,” wrote Ambrose Serle. “They even carried some of them upon their shoulders about the streets, and behaved in all respects, women as well as men, like overjoyed Bedlamites.” At old Fort George on the Battery, a woman pulled down the flag of the Continental Army and trampled it under foot before raising the Union Jack.

Serle had watched the whole scene from Lord Howe’s flagship. His contempt for the rebels had never been greater: “Thus this town and its environs, which these blustering gentlemen had taken such wonderful pains to fortify, were given up in two or three hours without any defense, or the least appearance of a manly resistance.”

For the remnants of the American army who had gotten away, it had been a close call. Henry Knox had managed to escape at the last minute only by seizing a boat on the Hudson. Israel Putnam and several thousand of his troops had set off on a forced march up the post road, a route that would have taken them up the east side of the island and straight into the invading British army had Putnam not been convinced by a young aide, twenty-year-old Lieutenant Aaron Burr, to head north by less traveled roads along the Hudson.

Leading his soldiers through the sweltering afternoon, rugged “Old Put” was at his best, riding up and down the long line exhorting them to stay together and keep moving, to get past the British before they had the island sealed off from the East River to the Hudson. At one time the two armies were passing each other less than a mile apart, only a stretch of woods dividing them.

Another young officer who made the march, Captain David Humphreys, would later write of General Putnam:

Having myself been a volunteer in his division and acting adjutant to the last regiment that left the city, I had frequent opportunities that day of beholding him, for the purpose of issuing orders, and encouraging the troops, flying on his horse covered with foam, wherever his presence was necessary. Without his extraordinary exertions…it is probable the entire corps would have been cut to pieces.

Putnam and his exhausted men marched into the main camp at Harlem after dark to rousing cheers. They had been given up for lost. When Knox turned up later, he, too, was greeted with shouts of welcome, even an embrace from the commander-in-chief.

***

WASHINGTON WOULD CALLthe conduct of those who had fled at Kips Bay “shameful,” “scandalous,” “disgraceful and dastardly.” Nathanael Greene wrote of the “miserable disorderly retreat” and described Washington’s behavior as he tried to rally the terrified men as close to suicidal. “Fellows’s and Parsons’s whole brigade[s] ran away from about fifty men,” Greene reported to a friend, “and left his Excellency on the ground within eighty yards of the enemy, so vexed at the infamous conduct of the troops that he sought death rather than life.”

Washington’s anger may also have been partly with himself, as the attack at Kips Bay had been nearly as great a tactical surprise as the enemy’s night march through the Jamaica Pass. He had been made to look a fool by Howe still again.

The Connecticut militia, already in disgrace for deserting in such appalling numbers, were tagged now with cowardice. The Connecticut “runaways” were held to blame for the whole fiasco, which only made worse the hard feelings between the troops of New England and those of the other states that had plagued the army almost from the beginning.

Not all judgments were so harsh, however. Other things had to be weighed in the balance, wrote General Heath. “The wounds received on Long Island were yet bleeding; and the officers, if not the men, knew that the city was not to be defended.” A Connecticut chaplain, Benjamin Trumbull, who only a short while before had delivered a rousing sermon calling for courage and heroism in battle, wrote in his diary:

The men were blamed for retreating and even flying…but I imag[in]e the fault was principally in the general officers…to give the men [a] rational prospect of defense and a safe retreat, should they engage the enemy. And it is probable many lives were saved…though it was not honorable. It is admirable that so few men are lost.

In fact, many lives were saved, and even veteran troops would have fled under such a murderous cannonade as at Kips Bay. For the Connecticut men to have stayed would have been truly suicidal.

Henry Knox attributed the failure at both Brooklyn and Kips Bay to inadequate leadership by ill-trained, inexperienced officers, and a woefully overworked commander-in-chief. “The general is as worthy a man as breathes, but he cannot do everything and be everywhere,” Knox reflected in a letter to his brother.

We ought to have men of merit in the most extensive and unlimited sense of the word. Instead of which, the bulk of the officers of the army are a parcel of ignorant, stupid men who might make tolerable soldiers but [are] bad officers.

There should be military academies established to “teach the art of war,” Knox wrote, “and every other encouragement possible to draw persons into the army that may give luster to our arms.”

Again, as on Long Island, the enemy effort had gone like clockwork. But why their commanders had delayed in crossing the island, why they had not pushed straight on to the Hudson, remained a puzzle. Had they advanced another mile or so, they could have cut the island in two, just as Nathanael Greene had predicted, sealing off any chance Putnam and his troops had to escape.

In explanation, a romantic story spread—a story that would become legendary—that a Mrs. Robert Murray, a Quaker and an ardent patriot, had delayed William Howe and his generals by inviting them to afternoon tea at her country home at Inclenberg, later known as Murray Hill. “Mrs. Murray treated them with cake and wine, and they were induced to tarry two hours or more,” the story went, and thus Mary Lindley Murray was credited with saving part of the army, perhaps even the cause of liberty. She would be portrayed as a veritable Circe charming the gallant Britons with her feminine wiles. Possibly she did invite the officers to tea, and she may have been extremely charming, but she was also a woman in her fifties and the mother of twelve children.

More to the point, Clinton’s delay at Inclenberg was according to plan. His orders had been to hold the line there until General Howe and the rest of the invading force had landed later in the afternoon.

The British, quite understandably, considered the invasion an immense success. Howe had wanted to seize and occupy New York as quickly as possible and at the least cost in bloodshed, and all that had been accomplished. New York, the key to British strategy, was at last in British hands. Howe and his generals were entirely satisfied with the day’s work, and by nightfall their troops had crossed the middle of the island to the Hudson and pressed north to within striking distance of the rebel lines by the Harlem River.

But then, the very next day, September 16, to the astonishment of everyone, it would be the Americans’ turn to claim success.

***

WASHINGTON, AS USUAL, was up before dawn, drafting correspondence at his spacious new headquarters, the Palladian-style mansion of a departed Loyalist, Colonel Roger Morris, with whom he had once served in the French and Indian War. The house, about a mile south of Fort Washington, commanded the summit of Harlem Heights—indeed, it stood at the highest elevation on all of York Island. From the balcony of its columned portico, one could see the Hudson on the right, and off to the left, three miles down the Harlem River valley, the old Dutch village of Harlem and the waters of Hell Gate. To the south, on clear days—and they were nearly all clear, dry days that September—one could pick out the distant spires of New York and further still, the hills of Staten Island, twenty miles away.

According to Joseph Reed, who was with Washington, it was still very early when word came that the enemy was advancing, and Washington sent Reed cantering off to investigate.

Washington had been expecting an attack. “I have sent out some reconnoitering parties to gain intelligence if possible of the disposition of the enemy,” he had already reported in a letter to Congress that morning. More than a hundred Connecticut Rangers, some of the best soldiers in the army, had left on the mission before dawn, led by one of the best field officers in the army, a strapping Connecticut farmer and veteran of Bunker Hill, Colonel Thomas Knowlton. (It was Knowlton at Bunker Hill who, with Colonel John Stark, had famously held the rail fence in the face of the oncoming British lines, and Knowlton who, during the siege of Boston, had led the night attack on Charlestown that so upset the British officer’s production of the Burgoyne farce The Blockade at Faneuil Hall.)

Knowlton and his Rangers were to probe for the enemy along the wooded ridges to the south, which rose beyond a narrow, intervening valley known as the Hollow Way. And it was there at daybreak, in the woods of the highlands to the south, that Knowlton and his men ran into the British and a “brisk” skirmish ensued.

Reed arrived just as the enemy attacked, with some four hundred light infantry, thus outnumbering the Americans by nearly four to one.

I went down to our most advanced post [he wrote] and while talking there with the officer of the guard, the enemy’s advanced guard fired upon us at about fifty yards distance. Our men behaved well, stood and returned the fire, till, overpowered by numbers, they were obliged to retreat.

Reed raced off to get help from Washington, who had since ridden to the southern reaches of Harlem Heights, where Nathanael Greene’s brigades were drawn up, overlooking the Hollow Way. By the time Reed arrived, Knowlton and his men could be seen retreating swiftly down the slopes on the opposite side.

Then out of the far woods and down the hill came the British in pursuit, sounding their bugles, as if on a fox hunt. “I never felt such a sensation before,” Reed wrote. “It seemed to crown our disgrace.”

What the Virginia fox hunter watching the scene from his saddle may have felt or thought can only be imagined, for he never said. But his response was an immediate decision to make a fight, if only, as he later explained to Patrick Henry, “to recover that military ardor which is of the utmost moment to an army.”

Washington ordered a counterattack across the Hollow Way, and sent Knowlton and his men, plus three companies of Virginians led by Major Andrew Leitch, on the encircling move to the left, with Reed as guide. They were to get behind the redcoats and entrap them in the Hollow Way. Greene and Putnam led the main attack, and both were soon in the thick of it.

The enemy had “rushed down the hill with all speed to a plain spot of ground,” wrote Joseph Hodgkins, who was back in action with Greene’s troops for the first time since Brooklyn. “Then our brigade marched out of the woods. Then a very hot fire began on both sides.”

But Knowlton’s encircling move ran into trouble when some of his men opened fire too soon, attacking the enemy’s flank, instead of getting behind and cutting off their retreat. The fighting grew fierce. Within minutes Knowlton and Major Leitch both fell, mortally wounded.

With the chance to encircle and capture the British gone, Washington threw more of his forces into the main attack, and the British, too, rushed in reinforcements. In little time the British had committed 5,000 men.

The struggle went on for hours, the Americans, for once, holding their own. Slowly the British began to give way. Then the British turned and ran, and the Americans took after them. “[We] drove the dogs near three miles,” wrote one of the Connecticut men.

Fearing the enemy might bring up still more strength, and that his men might be running into a trap, Washington called off the attack, which was not easily done. “The pursuit of a flying enemy was so new a scene, that it was with difficulty our men could be brought to retreat,” wrote Joseph Reed.

From all that Joseph Hodgkins had seen, and from what others had told him, he reckoned they had killed no fewer than 500 of the enemy and wounded that many or more. “They were seen to carry off several wagon loads. Besides our people buried a good many that they left.”

Probably the British and Hessian losses were 90 killed and about 300 wounded. The number of American casualties was far lower, fewer than 100 wounded and 30 killed, but these included Major Leitch and Colonel Knowlton, whose deaths were a heavy blow to the army. To Reed, who had carried the wounded Knowlton from the field, and to Washington, Thomas Knowlton was the “greatest loss.”

***

REPORTING TOCONGRESS on the Battle of Harlem Heights, Washington referred to it only as “a pretty sharp skirmish” and made no claims to a great victory. But to the troops it was a genuine victory at long last, and an urgently needed lift to their self-respect. They had seen the backs of redcoats on the fly. As Henry Knox wrote, “They find that if they stick to these mighty men, they will run as fast as other people.”

Nathanael Greene, who from the first weeks at Boston had never doubted that the army would fight if properly led, wrote proudly to William Ellery, a delegate to Congress from Rhode Island:

Our people beat the enemy off the ground…. Had all the colonies good officers, there is no danger of the troops; never was troops that would stand in the field longer than the American soldiery. If the officers were as good as the men, and had only a few months to form the troops to discipline, America might bid defiance to the whole world.

British prisoners captured in the fight said they had never expected the Americans to attack, and were “never more surprised.” Henry Clinton, in accounting for what happened, blamed the “impetuosity” of the light infantry for pursuing the rebels in the first place. For contrary to what Washington thought, the British had had no plans for or any intention of engaging the rebels that day, or anytime soon.

***

FOR DAYS THE TWO ARMIES, close as they were, remained perfectly quiet, “as quiet,” wrote Lieutenant Tilghman of Washington’s staff, “as if they were a thousand miles apart.”

The position of the Americans on the rocky heights above the Harlem River was as advantageous as any they had held since the war began, and they labored on steadily to make it still more secure. “If we cannot fight them on this ground, we can on none in America,” concluded Joseph Reed. Nor was the point lost on the British commander-in-chief who, with New York in hand, saw no reason to press the attack just yet.

In his own good time William Howe was drawing up plans to outmaneuver the rebels once again, while his brother, Lord Howe, reflected on whether it might be the opportune moment for another peace overture. Increasing numbers of rebel soldiers, all “much dispirited,” were crossing the lines to defect, reinforcing the commonly held opinion among the British commanders that the rebellion had run its course.

Meanwhile, others of the British army were finding New York delightful. There were “many fair houses” for quarters. Food was more plentiful than ever. It was the height of the harvest season and the supply of fresh produce from the farms of Long Island seemed limitless. As a bonus, the rebels, in their hurry to leave, had left behind more than 5,000 barrels of flour.

Off-duty British soldiers and officers flocked like tourists to inspect the abandoned rebel fortifications, marveling at their size and number and the work that had gone into them.

“The shore of the Island, from Hell Gate on the East River, quite round by the town, up to Bloomingdale on the North River, an extent of near fourteen miles, is fortified at almost every accessible part, and there is hardly a height without a redoubt or battery on it,” wrote Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie in admiration. Ambrose Serle, after a walking tour of the town, recorded his “astonishment” at the sight of rebel breastworks and embrasures at the end of nearly every street and avenue.

The infinite pains and labor which they must have bestowed, one would have thought, from regret alone, would have inclined them to make some kind of stand. But their fears overpowered their resolution, and they evacuated the object of all their toil in one short hour, without making the least defense or anything like a handsome retreat.

On September 19, against the judgment of most of the British high command, including presumably his brother the general, Lord Howe issued a direct appeal to the people of America, in the form of a proclamation warning that the stubbornness of their representatives in Congress was leading to their downfall and misery. Americans ought to “judge for themselves,” he wrote, “whether it be more consistent with their honor and happiness to offer up their lives as a sacrifice to the unjust and precarious cause in which they are engaged,” or “to return to their allegiance, accept the blessings of peace,” and thus be “secured in the free enjoyment of their liberty and properties.”

The proclamation seemed only to irritate everyone on both sides, and was all but forgotten after the night of September 20–21, when fire raged out of control in New York and a large part of the city burned to the ground.

Fire was a constant fear in every town and city of the time, and never more than when the weather was as hot and dry as it had been that summer. Fire at night was the most terrifying of all.

The fire, it appears from several eyewitness accounts, began shortly after midnight in a “low grogery” called the Fighting Cocks, at Whitehall Slip, at the southern tip of New York.

Driven by a southwesterly wind, the flames turned quickly to wildfire. Choking smoke and fiery-red, windborne flakes of burning shingles filled the air, as the flames swept uptown, across Dock Street, Bridge Street, Stone, Marketfield, and Beaver streets. Seen from the American lines at Harlem, ten miles to the north, it looked as though the very heavens were ablaze.

No warning bells rang, because Washington had ordered every bell in the city carried away to be recast for cannon. British soldiers and others rushed to help, but the heat was so intense, the fire so out of control, that no one could get near it. There were too few buckets and little water at hand. The few fire engines there were proved useless.

Houses were torn down in advance of the flames, but then nothing seemed to check the inferno. Had the wind not shifted to the southeast at about two in the morning, the entire city might have been consumed. As it was, the fire raged up the west side, destroying nearly everything between Broadway and the Hudson, including the infamous Holy Ground, to as far as the open field at King’s College. When Trinity Church, at Broadway and Wall Street, burst into flames, its shingled steeple became a vast “pyramid of fire,” until it burned to its timbers and crashed to the ground.

“It is almost impossible to conceive a scene of more horror and distress,” wrote Frederick Mackenzie, who was among those trying to fight the flames.

The sick, the aged, women, and children, half naked, were seen going they knew not where, and taking refuge in houses which were at a distance from the fire, but from whence they were in several instances driven a second and even a third time…. The terror was increased by the horrid noise of the burning and falling houses, the pulling down of such wooden buildings as served to conduct the fire…the rattling of above 100 wagons, sent in from the army, and which were constantly employed in conveying to the common such goods and effects as could be saved. The confused voices of so many men, the shrieks and cries of the women and children…

Concerned that the burning city could be the prelude to a night attack by the rebels, the Howes held back from sending more soldiers and seamen to fight the blaze until daybreak, and by ten o’clock the fire had burned itself out.

Nearly five hundred houses were destroyed, or approximately a quarter of the city, and in the shock and horror of the moment it seemed certain the disaster was the villainous work of the enemy. Rebel incendiaries had been caught in the act, it was widely reported. One such man, caught with “fire brand” in hand, had been knocked down by a British grenadier and “thrown into the flames” for his reward. Another who was seen cutting off the handles of water buckets was hanged from a signpost by British sailors, then hung up by the heels like a slaughtered animal.

Witnesses reported having seen the fire break out in several different places, not just at Whitehall Slip, and this was taken as proof of arson. But Frederick Mackenzie, who was no less certain than others that the town had been “designedly” set afire, acknowledged in his diary, “There is no doubt…that the flames were communicated to several houses by means of the burning flakes of the shingles, which being light, were carried by the wind to some distance and…kindled the fire anew.”

In a letter to Lord Germain, General Howe charged the deed to unnamed “lurking” villains. “The Yankees [New York Loyalists] are convinced that the New England men set fire to the town; they will never forgive them,” wrote General James Grant. Governor William Tryon went further, implying in a letter to Germain that Washington himself had devised the plot and instructed the incendiaries.

More than a hundred suspects were rounded up, but no evidence was found against them. None were brought to trial. All were eventually released. It was never determined, then or later, that the “Great Fire” was anything other than accidental.

Washington, in his report to Congress, called it an accident. Writing privately, however, he allowed to Lund Washington that “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.” Beyond that he said no more.

Nor was Washington to say anything about Captain Nathan Hale, who was “apprehended” by the British the day after the fire and, it appears, as part of the roundup of suspected incendiaries.

By several accounts, Hale’s capture took place in New York. A report in the New York Gazette, a Tory paper, said an unnamed “New England man who had a captain’s commission” was seized in the city with “dreadful implements of ruin [firebrands]” and, when searched, “the sum of 500 [pounds] was found upon him.” This could refer to Hale, although Frederick Mackenzie noted that “a person named Nathan Hales” was apprehended on Long Island on the night of September 21.

Whatever the circumstances of his capture, Hale admitted to being a spy, and General Howe ordered him hanged without trial.

Hale was twenty-one years old, a handsome, athletic graduate of Yale, a schoolmaster and wholehearted patriot. Raised on a Connecticut farm, he was one of six brothers who served in the war. He had signed up more than a year before, taken part in the Siege of Boston, and lately joined Colonel Knowlton’s Rangers. Yet thus far he felt he had rendered no real service to the country, and when Knowlton, on orders from Washington, called for a volunteer to cross the lines and bring back desperately needed intelligence, he had bravely offered to go.

A fellow Connecticut officer, Captain William Hull, who had known Hale in college, tried to talk him out of it, warning that he was by nature “too frank and open for deceit and disguise,” and that no one respected the character of a spy. Hale had said only that he would “reflect, and do nothing but what duty demands.” The next thing Hull knew, his friend had disappeared.

The mission was doomed from the start, ill-planned and pathetically amateurish, and Hale was a poor choice. He knew nothing of spying. The scars from a powder burn on his face made him readily identifiable, and a Loyalist cousin who knew him well was serving as General Howe’s deputy commissary of prisoners.

Hale went under the guise of a Dutch schoolmaster in search of work. Apparently it was from naïvely confiding the truth of his mission to the wrong people that led to his capture.

He was hanged on the morning of September 21, in an artillery park near the Beekman house, a country estate not far from the East River that served as Howe’s headquarters.

It was Captain John Montresor, who, only hours afterward, under a white flag, brought word of Hale’s fate to the Americans and described what had happened to Hale to his friend Captain Hull. And it was Hull, later, who reported Montresor’s account of Hale’s last words as he was about to be executed: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” which was a variation on another then-famous line from the playCato. (One imagines that in delivering the line to his British executioners, Hale, knowing that it was as familiar to them as to him, put the emphasis on the second-to-last word: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose formy country.”)

On September 26, a British officer wrote in a letter,

We hung up a rebel spy the other day, and some soldiers got out of a rebel gentleman’s garden a painted soldier on a board, and hung it along with the rebel, and wrote upon it, General Washington, and I saw it yesterday beyond headquarters, by the roadside.

Hale’s place in the pantheon of American heroes, as the martyr spy of the Revolution, was not to come until years later. For now very little was known or said of his story. Washington, angry or saddened as he may have been, is not known to have mentioned the subject.

AMERICAN SOLDIERS WERE DESERTING as if leaving a sinking ship, thirty or forty at a time, many defecting to the enemy. Disobedience and theft were epidemic. It was far from an army of heroes only. “A spirit of desertion, cowardice, plunder, and shrinking from duty when attended with fatigue or danger, prevailed but too generally,” wrote Joseph Reed, who had become so demoralized that even he was on the verge of quitting.

An experience on the battlefield on September 16 had had a searing effect. In the heat of the fight, Reed had seen a soldier running from the enemy. Ordered to stop and go back, the soldier, a Connecticut private named Ebenezer Leffingwell, had raised his musket, taken aim from a distance of only a few yards, and pulled the trigger. But the lock only snapped. When Reed grabbed the gun of another soldier and pulled the trigger, it too snapped. Reed drew his sword and, striking twice, wounded Leffingwell on the head, severed a thumb, and forced him to surrender. “I should have shot him, could I have got my gun off,” Reed said at Leffingwell’s court-martial on September 19.

Leffingwell, who confessed he had been running away, was found guilty of cowardice and of “presenting his firelock at his superior officer.” He was sentenced to be executed before the assembled troops the following day. But at Reed’s urging, Washington pardoned Leffingwell at the last moment, after Leffingwell had kneeled to be shot. The next such offender would “suffer death without mercy,” warned Washington.

“To attempt to introduce discipline and subordination into a new army must always be a work of much difficulty,” Reed wrote to his wife, “but where the principles of democracy so universally prevail, where so great an equality and so thorough a leveling spirit predominates, either no discipline can be established, or he who attempts it must become odious and detestable, a position which no one will choose.”

Washington was no less a commanding presence than ever, and except for his raging outburst at Kips Bay, he seemed imperturbable, entirely in control. In truth, he was as discouraged as he had ever been in his life, and miserably unhappy. It was all he could do to keep up appearances.

“Unless some speedy, and effectual measures are adopted by Congress, our cause will be lost,” he told John Hancock in a long, foreboding letter dated September 25.

Like Greene, like Knox and Reed, Washington knew the problem with the army was not so much the men in the ranks as those who led them. The war was to be no “work of a day,” he warned, and must be carried on “systematically.” Good officers were mandatory, and the only means to obtain good officers was to establish the army on a permanent footing. There must be an end to short-term enlistments. Officers must be better paid, better trained. Soldiers must be offered a good bounty, adequate clothing and blankets, plus the promise of free land.

Inflamed by passions, stirred by patriotism, men will “fly hastily and cheerfully to arms,” Washington continued, but to expect “the bulk of an army” to serve on selflessly, come what may, once the first emotions subsided, would be “to look for what never did, and, I fear, never will, happen.” Even among officers, those who acted with true “disinterestedness” were “no more than a drop in the ocean,” wrote this most disinterested and selfless of officers.

To place any dependence on militia is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life—unaccustomed to the din of arms—totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill, which being followed by a want of confidence in themselves when opposed to troops regularly trained, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge, and superior in arms, makes them timid and ready to fly from their own shadows.

He wrote of the “lust after plunder” among the men, of regimental surgeons taking bribes to certify sickness or infirmities that would qualify for discharges. He understood the fear there was in Congress and among the people of a standing army, but he thought the evils imagined were remote. On the other hand, were there to be no standing army, the cause of independence faced ruin.

He wanted rules and regulations adopted, punishments made more severe. As it was, for the most “atrocious offenses,” the maximum was thirty-nine lashes, and these, he had found, were seldom layed on as they should be, but more as “sport.” It was punishment of a kind that, for a bottle of rum, many “hardened fellows” were quite willing to undergo.

But as Washington had no way of knowing, Congress had already acted on most of what he wanted, due largely to the efforts of John Adams as head of the Board of War and in floor debate. Every soldier who enlisted for the “duration” of the war was to receive $20 and one hundred acres of land. New Articles of War, drawn up by Adams and based largely on the British Articles of War, went far to ensure justice for the individual soldier, provided stiffer punishments for major offenses (up to one hundred lashes), and increased the number of crimes for which the penalty was death. Adams also proposed for the first time the creation of a military academy, as Knox had urged, but nothing came of the motion.

Writing to Lund Washington on September 30, Washington was even more candid about his miseries. “Such is my situation that if I were to wish the bitterest curse to an enemy on this side of the grave, I should put him in my stead with my feelings.” He was “wearied to death” with problems. One regiment had fewer than fifty men left, another, all of fourteen fit for duty. “In confidence I tell you that I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.” And the enemy, all the while, was “within stone’s throw.”

Then, as he had before, and as though such a giant shift of mind was perfectly natural, he turned to the subject of Mount Vernon. He was concerned about the fireplaces:

That in the parlor must, I should think, stand as it does; not so much on account of the wainscotting, which I think must be altered (on account of the door leading into the new building), as on account of the chimney piece and the manner of its fronting into the room. The chimney in the room above ought, if it could be so contrived, to be an angle chimney as the others are: but I would not have this attempted at the expense of pulling down the partition. The chimney in the new room should be exactly in the middle of it—the doors and everything else to be exactly answerable and uniform. In short, I would have the whole executed in a masterly manner.

If all could not be as he wished with the army, if all could not be “exactly answerable and uniform” or “executed in a masterly manner,” concerning the war he was expected to wage and win, then he would at least have it so at his distant, beloved home.

***

THE CRYSTAL DAYSof late September and early October in New York followed one after another, with lucent skies and stands of maple and sumac just beginning to turn color. The East River had become a spectacle of British ships of every kind lining nearly its entire length. The Hudson, in the sharp light of the season, sparkled like an inland sea. In all, it could not have been a more beautiful setting for the strange, extended intermission in a war that many hoped might be put to rest for the winter, not to resume until spring, and then, preferably, not too early.

On the morning of October 9, any such hopes ended. Three of the British warships, Phoenix, Roebuck, and Tartar, weighed anchor and with the advantage of a flood tide and a brisk southwesterly wind, proceeded up the Hudson to force passage beyond Forts Washington and Constitution, where, at enormous effort, the Americans had tried to block the river from shore to shore with sunken hulks and a submerged chain of spike-studded logs.

The guns of the forts high above the river opened fire. The ships answered with a pounding barrage, and by holding close to the eastern shore, where the river was deepest, they sailed straight, if slowly, through to safe anchorage upriver at the broad Tappan Zee, off Tarrytown.

Washington had observed the whole sorry scene. “To our surprise and mortification, they ran through without the least difficulty, and without receiving any apparent damage from our forts, though they kept up a heavy fire from both sides,” he wrote. Again, no end of time and labor devoted to defense had come to nothing.

In fact, the British had suffered nine seamen killed and considerable damage to their ships, while showing once more in spectacular fashion that the Hudson was undeniably theirs to employ as they wished.

The day could have led to a decisive change in American strategy. If the purpose of the forts was to deny the British navy use of the river, then all the effort and risk of holding the forts should have been reconsidered at once. Clearly the forts had been shown to be useless.

Yet Washington raised no questions then, and Nathanael Greene declared confidently, at day’s end, that the army was so strongly positioned in the forts that there was “little more to fear this campaign.” Instead of a lesson learned, the day marked the onset of one of the greatest American blunders of the war, and what was to be a painful humiliation for Washington and Greene.

***

THE BRITISH PLAN,once again, was to outflank the rebels, and again by water. Early on October 12, in an unexpected morning fog, a massive armada got under way on the East River.

With Admiral Lord Howe in command, 150 ships set sail upstream, through the dangerous Hell Gate channel “in very thick fog”—a mariner’s nightmare—and into Long Island Sound, and all without mishap. It was a stunning feat of seamanship. By noon an advance force of 4,000 troops led by Henry Clinton had landed at Throg’s Neck (also known as Frog’s Neck), a marshy point of land on the shoreline of Westchester County, due east of the American lines at Harlem Heights and King’s Bridge.

Throg’s Neck had been Lord Howe’s choice and proved to be a poor one for the army. What appeared to be a peninsula on the map was more an island connected to the mainland only at low tide. When the British tried to advance over a causeway, a small detachment of American riflemen, crouched behind log piles, held them in check, and when more American support moved in, after more British troops had landed, General Howe decided to reembark once sufficient supplies arrived and still more reinforcements were at hand, which consumed another four days. (“Tweedledum business,” an exasperated Henry Clinton called it.) But the reinforcements Howe expected were worth the wait—7,000 newly arrived Hessians under the command of the extremely able General Wilhelm von Knyphausen. And when Howe moved, he moved with astonishing speed, landing this time a short way up the sound, at Pell’s Point, a part of the mainland.

At the first report of the Throg’s Neck landing, Washington knew the Harlem Heights bastion had become a trap. The British were up to “their former scheme of getting to our rear,” he wrote. They had only to strike inland toward King’s Bridge. The army must withdraw as soon as possible. He would concentrate his forces at safer ground eighteen miles to the north at White Plains, the seat of Westchester County.

Through prisoner exchanges, Lord Stirling and General Sullivan had rejoined the army, in what seemed the nick of time. Both were warmly welcomed by Washington and assigned commands.

On October 14, the gaunt, odd-looking figure of General Charles Lee reappeared, dogs and all, and immediately resumed his place as second-in-command. Lee was the subject of much talk, raising spirits in the ranks and in Congress. Always popular in Congress, he had become even more so since the defeat of Clinton’s expedition to South Carolina, where Lee had had overall command of the American forces. While Washington’s ability had become subject to question, as one failure followed another, Lee’s reputation had never been higher. Some in Congress saw him as a potential savior.

For his part, Lee recklessly told General Gates that he thought Washington was only compounding his troubles by tolerating such “absurd interference” by the “cattle” in Congress in his conduct of the war, and that Washington was remiss for not “menacing ’em” with threats of resignation. (Were Washington to resign, of course, it would be Lee who succeeded him.)

Washington well knew the quirks and vanity of his old military friend and was glad to have him back. As a gesture of appreciation, he gave Fort Constitution a new name, Fort Lee.

At a council of war on October 16, it was decided that Fort Washington and its garrison should be, in the words of the brief minutes, “retained as long as possible.” The passage of ships on the Hudson was no longer the issue—the obstructions in the North River had proved insufficient—still, “communication” across the river to New Jersey had to be maintained.

Besides Washington and Lee, the general officers present included Heath, Sullivan, Stirling, and Mifflin. Colonel Knox was also present, but General Greene was not. According to the minutes, there was only one dissenting voice, and it was General George Clinton, not Lee, as he later implied.

The week before, Congress had resolved that, if “practicable,” every effort be made to “obstruct effectually” navigation on the Hudson at Fort Washington, but whether this was known in advance of the council of war, or had any bearing on the decision, is not clear.

All of York Island was finally to be evacuated. The entire American army would march off, except for 1,000 men left to hold Fort Washington.

Officially it was to be called “an alteration of our position,” not a retreat. The commander’s orders for October 17 read, in part, as follows:

As the movements of the enemy make an alteration of our position necessary…tents are to be struck and carefully rolled, the men to take the tent poles in their hands, two men out of a company, with a careful subaltern, to go with the baggage and not leave it on any pretense. No packs (unless of sick men), chairs, tables, benches, or heavy lumber [are] to be put on the wagons. No person, unless unable to walk, is to presume to get upon them. The wagons [are] to move forward before the regiments…Every regiment under marching orders, to see they have their flints and ammunition in good order and complete.

The exodus was soon under way, the army crossing the narrow bridge at King’s Bridge and heading north along the west bank of the little Bronx River. The sick were the greatest burden. With teams and wagons in short supply, the trek was slow and difficult, the men themselves, in many cases, hauling the baggage wagons and cannon.

Private Joseph Martin would remember lugging a cast-iron kettle the size of a milk pail until his arms were nearly dislocated. During a rest, he put it down, and, as he wrote, “one of the others gave it a shove with his foot, and it rolled down against a fence, and that was the last I ever saw of it. When we got through the night’s march, we found our mess was not the only one that was rid of their iron bondage.”

***

AS THE FIRST of Washington’s army struggled toward White Plains, the British made their swift landing at Pell’s Point. Again an advance force of 4,000 British and Hessian troops went ashore in the early morning and, this time, were unopposed. They moved directly inland a mile or more and might have kept going had it not been for the intrepid John Glover and his men. The date was October 18.

From a hilltop before dawn, Glover had seen through a telescope what looked like upwards of two hundred ships. “Oh! The anxiety of mind I was in then for the fate of the day…. I would have given a thousand worlds to have had General Lee, or some experienced officer present to direct, or at least to approve what I had done,” Glover later wrote.

Acting on his own, he rushed forward with some 750 men who fought tenaciously from behind stone walls, inflicting heavy casualties and stalling the enemy advance for a full day before forced to fall back.

Colonel Loammi Baldwin, the Massachusetts apple grower who, with his small regiment, joined in the fight, later claimed the men stayed as calm as if shooting ducks. He thought the enemy dead numbered at least 200, which was undoubtedly an exaggeration. But even if he was wrong by half, the British lost more men killed at Pell’s Point than in the Battle of Brooklyn. By Glover’s calculations, American casualties numbered 8 dead, 13 wounded.

Such ferocity as the Americans had shown appears to have stunned Howe, leading him to conclude that, with stone walls lining every road and adjacent field, more deadly fire could be waiting at any turn. Had the British kept moving inland with speed, they might have caught Washington’s retreating army head-on.

As it was, the British advance—along the shore as far as Mamaroneck, then inland toward White Plains—was slow and extremely cautious, seldom more than a few miles a day and against little or no resistance.

Probably Howe saw no more need to hurry now than he had before, and in fact, he did not expect to cut the rebel retreat. Rather, in eighteenth-century military fashion, he hoped to maneuver Washington onto the open field, and then, with his superior, professional force, destroy the Yankee “rabel” in one grand, decisive victory. Even after reaching White Plains, Howe took another few days to be sure all was ready.

***

AT LAST, on October 28, ten days after landing at Pell’s Point, William Howe sent 13,000 redcoats and Hessians up the main road to White Plains. It was early morning and yet another sparkling fall day. Washington, determined to avoid any test of strength on an open field, was well dug in on high ground in back of the village, his lines reaching more than a mile in length. For a brief time, it looked as though Howe intended to attack head-on, as the Americans hoped he would. British field guns opened fire, and Howe’s army marched in perfect order in two columns straight for where Washington commanded at the center. “The sun shone bright, their arms glittered, and perhaps troops never were shown to more advantage than these now appeared,” wrote General Heath of the oncoming foe.

Suddenly, one column wheeled sharply left in the direction of a higher hill on the American right, on the other side of the Bronx River. Chatterton’s Hill was thickly wooded on its slopes but had open fields above, and it dominated the American lines. “Yonder is the ground we ought to occupy,” Charles Lee had reportedly told Washington, but only at the last hour had troops been rushed to defend Chatterton’s Hill and these were mainly militia.

The British artillery moved to closer range. Cannon roared on both sides. “The air and hills smoked and echoed terribly,” wrote a Pennsylvania soldier. “The fences and walls were knocked down and torn to pieces, and men’s legs, arms, and bodies mingled with cannon and grapeshot all round us.”

Washington ordered more men to the top of Chatterton’s Hill. The British and Hessians forded the river, and the Hessians, part of the newly arrived 7,000 led by Colonel Johann Rall, launched the uphill charge. The militia broke and ran, and while the reinforcements, including Colonel Haslet’s Delaware troops and Smallwood’s Marylanders, fought bravely, they had to give way at the last.

The Battle of White Plains was the battle of Chatterton’s Hill and the British and the Hessians carried the day. But it was at a cost of more than 250 casualties, twice what the Americans suffered. Nor was it a victory that achieved anything.

The day after, October 29, Howe decided to pause again, to wait for still more reinforcements. The day after that, October 30, it poured rain. On the morning of November 1, Howe found that overnight Washington and his army had pulled back half a mile to a stronger position on high ground across the Bronx River.

For two more days the two armies waited and watched. “The enemy are determined on something decisive,” Henry Knox wrote to his brother, “and we are determined to risk a general battle on the most advantageous terms.”

When, on the night of November 3, American sentinels reported the rumbling of enemy carriages in the dark, it was assumed another attack was imminent. There was more stirring among the British ranks the next day, and the Americans braced themselves. But on the morning of November 5, to the complete surprise of the Americans, the whole of the British army was in motion, heading off in another direction, southwest toward the Hudson and King’s Bridge.