Washington’s Trials

By the time the United States declared independence on July 4, 1776, Washington’s army was in New York City, anticipating a British invasion. New York was home to many British loyalists, or Tories, but some had fled and others were lying low to avoid harassment by American revolutionaries. New York’s royal governor, William Tryon, had taken refuge offshore on a British sloop of war in October 1775 and plotted to assassinate Washington, a scheme exposed in June 1776. Patriots infuriated by the plot went after suspected Tories and scourged them. One witness saw men “being carried through the streets on rails, their clothes tore from their back and their bodies pretty well mingled with the dust.” Shortly after the Declaration of Independence was read in the city, 40 colonial soldiers and sailors celebrated by hauling down a large-scale gilded lead statue of King George III on horseback at the city’s Bowling Green park, severing the head, and sending parts of the statue to Connecticut, where the metal was recast to form musket balls for Washington’s forces.

Though not all his troops were fit to fight, Washington had about 20,000 soldiers, including militiamen on short-term enlistments and year-long Continental Army recruits. Opposing them were 32,000 troops under Maj. Gen. William Howe, a larger army than any other the British had ever sent abroad. Howe had arrived by sea from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in late June, followed in July by a formidable fleet commanded by his older brother, Vice Adm. Richard Howe.

The Howes served as both military commanders and peace commissioners, authorized to issue pardons and cease hostilities if rebel leaders agreed to dissolve Congress and disband their armed forces, among other concessions. To that end, Admiral Howe sent a letter to Washington—but Washington refused to receive it because it did not address him as an officer of the United States. He told the letter bearer that he had no authority from Congress to negotiate or seek a pardon for “defending what we deem our indisputable rights.” Similarly, when emissaries from Congress, including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, met with Admiral Howe in September, they made it clear that America would not renounce independence and submit to the crown.

Washington remained uncertain where General Howe’s troops would attack—and he feared an assault on Manhattan even after the British began landing on Long Island on August 22. A few thousand American troops held three passes by which British forces might advance below Washington’s base on Brooklyn Heights, but a fourth—narrow Jamaica Pass, on the American left flank—was guarded by only five mounted men. That flaw in the American defenses was detected by a British officer, Maj. Gen. Henry Clinton, who was raised in New York and who persuaded Howe to deliver his main thrust at Jamaica Pass. 

Well before dawn on August 27, Clinton andHowe led 10,000 British troops through the gap and captured the men guarding it. There were no American soldiers awaiting the British when they emerged on the far side, and they swept behind the defenders along the ridge, who were distracted by British skirmishers to their front. 

At 9 a.m., cannon fire signaled a devastating assault on Washington’s vanguard from front and rear. Some Americans were killed or captured before they fired a shot, but those on the right flank near Gowanus Bay battled hard under Brig. Gen. William Alexander, a New Yorker known as Lord Stirling for his claim to an earldom in Scotland. It was later said that he “fought like a wolf.” So did his troops as they fought to escape. Their line of retreat lay through bogs in which men “were mired and crying to their fellows for God’s sake to help them out,” one soldier from Pennsylvania recalled. Others tried to cross Gowanus Creek, which was treacherously deep at high tide, and drowned. Alexander himself was captured and kept as a prisoner of war.

Washington’s troops along the ridge were routed so quickly that he could only watch in despair from Brooklyn Heights, where the bulk of his forces remained for the next two days, hunkered behind fortifications as Howe laid siege. With his base in peril, Washington ferried his troops on August 29—some 9,000 men in all—across the East River to Manhattan overnight and under cover of fog without alerting the British. That remarkable escape did little to ease the pain of a humiliating defeat. “Tories rejoicing,” the Reverend Ezra Stiles, who co-founded Brown University, wrote in his diary at Newport, Rhode Island. “Sons of Liberty dejected.” 

Washington soon concluded that he could not hold New York City. He was still evacuating the city, then confined to the lower tip of Manhattan, when 4,000 British troops landed at Kips Bay, north of town on the island’s eastern shore, and stunned the woefully outnumbered Connecticut militiamen stationed there. Pvt. Joseph

Plumb Martin was among those caught under fire with only a ditch to shield them. When the big guns erupted, he recalled, “I made a frog’s leap for the ditch and lay as still as I possibly could, and began to consider which part of my carcass was to go first.”

Those not killed or wounded ran from invaders who included Hessians—soldiers from Hesse-Kassel and other German states whose rulers hired them out to the British Army.

Denounced in the Declaration of Independence as mercenaries sent to “complete the works of death, destruction and tyranny,” they had a grim reputation. A British officer at Kips Bay saw “a Hessian sever a rebel’s head from his body and clap it on a pole.”  

Washington was incensed by the chaotic retreat from Kips Bay and lost his composure trying to halt it. According to Col. George Weedon of Virginia, Washington was “so exasperated that he struck several officers in their flight, three times dashed his hat on the ground, and at last exclaimed, ‘Good God, have I got such troops as those!’”

After gathering his forces on Harlem Heights in northern Manhattan, Washington managed to briefly repulse the redcoats in a skirmish there—which “greatly inspired the whole of our troops,” he wrote.

After that, though...Washington pulled back most of his forces from Manhattan to White Plains, where he was joined by his second-in-command, British-born Maj. Gen. Charles Lee, whose prewar military experience far surpassed that of Washington and led some to consider him better suited to head up the Continental Army. It was a view Lee shared and encouraged. Under attack again from Howe on October 28, the Americans found themselves withdrawing yet again, this time farther north to North Castle.

Instead of chasing Washington again, Howe veered south toward Fort Washington, situated on the Hudson River at the highest point in Manhattan. It was overseen by Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, who was based at Fort Lee, across the river in New Jersey.

The two forts housed artillery that was intended to prevent British warships from sailing up the Hudson but proved incapable of doing so. Washington was inclined to abandon Fort Washington, the last remaining American presence in New York City, but deferred to Greene, one of his most promising officers, who argued for holding it.

To guard against the risk that Howe might seize Fort Washington, cross to New Jersey, and descend on Philadelphia, the American capital, Washington traversed the Hudson at Peekskill, to the north of Manhattan, with a few thousand troops and marched south to Fort Lee, leaving nearly 10,000 men east of the river under Lee’s command in case Howe altered course and headed toward New England. Now the Continental Army was dangerously divided.

With Howe amassing forces to attack Fort Washington, Washington and Greene debated evacuating its defenders across the Hudson. Against his better judgment, Washington left the decision to Greene, who thought the fort could weather the storm.

Unfortunately... 

Some of Washington’s closest officers blamed him for the New York disaster. His adjutant general, Col. Joseph Reed, shared his doubts about Washington in a letter to Lee, who replied that Washington’s “fatal indecision of mind” was a greater disqualification for command than stupidity or lack of courage. These scathing words came to Washington’s attention because the letter arrived while Reed was away, and he opened it to see if it contained important information, such as Lee’s whereabouts.

On December 8, Howe and Maj. Gen. Charles Cornwallis reached Trenton, on the east bank of the Delaware River, only to find that Washington had crossed with his troops to Pennsylvania on the west bank, leaving no boats behind. Lee belatedly entered an increasingly occupied New Jersey to join Washington, but he left camp near Morristown to spend the night of December 12 at a tavern, where British cavalrymen captured him the following morning. Satisfied with Washington’s retreat from New Jersey, Howe put his army into winter quarters there.

Trenton was occupied by 1,500 Hessians under Col. Johann Rall, a German officer whose low opinion of Washington’s army was shared by his superior, Maj. Gen. James Grant, stationed with British troops at New Brunswick. On December 24 Grant informed Rall by courier of a spy’s report that Washington might attack Trenton. “I don’t believe he will attempt it,” Grant stated. Rall took only his usual precautions, including posting guards on Trenton’s outskirts.

That same day, Washington met with his generals to plan a Christmas assault bolder and riskier than anything he had previously tried. Enlistments for the indispensable Continental troops expired in eight days, on January 1, 1777. Washington had little hope of persuading them to remain—or of attracting many fresh recruits—unless he altered the army’s dismal defeats of recent months with a resounding victory.

Washington’s famed advance back across the Delaware on Christmas night was nearly thwarted when ice kept two detachments from traversing the river south of Trenton and slowed his own crossing north of town. Nonetheless, skilled oarsmen ferried 2,400 men and artillery to the New Jersey shore amid snow and sleet. Washington’s troops reached Trenton not in darkness, as he had hoped, but early the next morning, yet they still caught the Hessian garrison by surprise. Rall was roused from sleep after shots were fired and tried to marshal his men at an orchard on Trenton’s outskirts but was mortally wounded, and resistance crumbled. Washington called it “a glorious day for our country.”

Washington persuaded roughly half his Continental troops to serve another six weeks beginning New Year’s Day by offering each a $10 bounty and telling them that “your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear.” He also received reinforcements from Pennsylvania who feared their state would be next to suffer invasion.  

But the fight for Trenton wasn’t over. Cornwallis challenged Washington by marching more than 5,000 men to the town on January 2, 1777, after leaving 1,200 behind as a rear guard at Princeton, 10 miles to the north. Under pressure, Washington withdrew from Trenton but had some 500 men camped nearby. While these men kept fires burning to simulate a larger force, Washington circled back toward Princeton with about 5,000 soldiers and targeted Cornwallis’s rear guard the next morning. The initial attack was repulsed, but Washington rode into battle, rallied his troops, and led them to victory. Some redcoats held out in Nassau Hall at Princeton University until an artillery battery commanded by Capt. Alexander Hamilton forced their surrender. Legend has it that a cannonball passed through a portrait of King George hanging in the hall. 

Washington’s army continued to suffer that winter around Morristown due to expiring enlistments—and scourges like smallpox, which could be deadlier than battle to troops living in close quarters. In February 1777 Washington began inoculating soldiers against smallpox. At his urging, all new Continental soldiers were inoculated thereafter, and an influx of long-term recruits that spring increased his forces.

Washington’s trials were not over, but he had proved his ability to overcome them. As Greene remarked, he “never appeared to so much advantage as in the hour of distress.”