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the 2d of July, and bore himself with so straightforward and engaging a courtesy in taking command that the officers he superseded could not but like him: jealousy was disarmed.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