← catalogue

Washington and His Comrades in Arms: A Chronicle of the War of Independence

by George McKinnon Wrong · English · Gutenberg #2704 · 389,366 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Washington and His Comrades in Arms: A Chronicle of the War of Independence
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Washington and His Comrades in Arms: A Chronicle of the War of Independence

Author: George McKinnon Wrong

Editor: Allen Johnson


        
Release date: July 1, 2001 [eBook #2704]
                Most recently updated: April 2, 2023

Language: English

Original publication: Toronto: s.n., 1920

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2704

Credits: Dianne Bean, Alev Akman, David Widger and Robert J. Homa


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WASHINGTON AND HIS COMRADES IN ARMS: A CHRONICLE OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE ***




Washington and His Comrades in Arms By George M. Wrong A Chronicle of
the War of Independence

Volume 12 of the Chronicles of America Series

Allen Johnson, Editor Assistant Editors Gerhard R. Lomer Charles W.
Jefferys

Abraham Lincoln Edition

New Haven: Yale University Press Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co. London:
Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press 1921

Copyright, 1921 by Yale University Press



PREFATORY NOTE


The author is aware of a certain audacity in undertaking, himself a
Briton, to appear in a company of American writers on American history
and above all to write on the subject of Washington. If excuse is needed
it is to be found in the special interest of the career of Washington to
a citizen of the British Commonwealth of Nations at the present time and
in the urgency with which the editor and publishers declared that such
an interpretation would not be unwelcome to Americans and pressed upon
the author a task for which he doubted his own qualifications. To the
editor he owes thanks for wise criticism. He is also indebted to Mr.
Worthington Chauncey Ford, of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a
great authority on Washington, who has kindly read the proofs and given
helpful comments. Needless to say the author alone is responsible for
opinions in the book. University of Toronto, June 15, 1920.


Contents

        Washington and his Comrades in Arms

  Chapter  Chapter Title                                 Page
   Prefatory Note                                        vii
     I.  The Commander-In-Chief                            1
    II.  Boston and Quebec                                27
   III.  Independence                                     54
    IV.  The Loss of New York                             81
     V.  The Loss of Philadelphia                        108
    VI.  The First Great British Disaster                123
   VII.  Washington and his Comrades at Valley Forge     148
  VIII.  The Alliance with France and its Results        182
    IX.  The War in the South                            211
     X.  France to the Rescue                            230
    XI.  Yorktown                                        247
    Bibliographical Note                                 277
    Index                                                283



WASHINGTON AND HIS COMRADES IN ARMS



CHAPTER I. THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

Moving among the members of the second Continental Congress, which met
at Philadelphia in May, 1775, was one, and but one, military figure.
George Washington alone attended the sittings in uniform. This colonel
from Virginia, now in his forty-fourth year, was a great landholder, an
owner of slaves, an Anglican churchman, an aristocrat, everything that
stands in contrast with the type of a revolutionary radical. Yet from
the first he had been an outspoken and uncompromising champion of the
colonial cause. When the tax was imposed on tea he had abolished the use
of tea in his own household and when war was imminent he had talked of
recruiting a thousand men at his own expense and marching to Boston. His
steady wearing of the uniform seemed, indeed, to show that he regarded
the issue as hardly less military than political.

The clash at Lexington, on the 19th of April, had made vivid the reality
of war. Passions ran high. For years there had been tension, long
disputes about buying British stamps to put on American legal papers,
about duties on glass and paint and paper and, above all, tea. Boston
had shown turbulent defiance, and to hold Boston down British soldiers
had been quartered on the inhabitants in the proportion of one soldier
for five of the populace, a great and annoying burden. And now British
soldiers had killed Americans who stood barring their way on Lexington
Green. Even calm Benjamin Franklin spoke later of the hands of British
ministers as "red, wet, and dropping with blood." Americans never forgot
the fresh graves made on that day. There were, it is true, more British
than American graves, but the British were regarded as the aggressors.
If the rest of the colonies were to join in the struggle, they must have
a common leader. Who should he be?

In June, while the Continental Congress faced this question at
Philadelphia, events at Boston made the need of a leader more urgent.
Boston was besieged by American volunteers under the command of General
Artemas Ward. The siege had lasted for two months, each side watching
the other at long range. General Gage, the British Commander, had the
sea open to him and a finely tempered army upon which he could rely. The
opposite was true of his opponents. They were a motley host rather than
an army. They had few guns and almost no powder. Idle waiting since
the fight at Lexington made untrained troops restless and anxious to go
home. Nothing holds an army together like real war, and shrewd officers
knew that they must give the men some hard task to keep up their
fighting spirit. It was rumored that Gage was preparing an aggressive
movement from Boston, which might mean pillage and massacre in the
surrounding country, and it was decided to draw in closer to Boston to
give Gage a diversion and prove the mettle of the patriot army. So, on
the evening of June 16, 1775, there was a stir of preparation in the
American camp at Cambridge, and late at night the men fell in near
Harvard College.

Across the Charles River north from Boston, on a peninsula, lay the
village of Charlestown, and rising behind it was Breed's Hill, about
seventy-four feet high, extending northeastward to the higher elevation
of Bunker Hill. The peninsula could be reached from Cambridge only by a
narrow neck of land easily swept by British floating batteries lying off
the shore. In the dark the American force of twelve hundred men under
Colonel Prescott marched to this neck of land and then advanced half a
mile southward to Breed's Hill. Prescott was an old campaigner of the
Seven Years' War; he had six cannon, and his troops were commanded by
experienced officers. Israel Putnam was skillful in irregular frontier
fighting, and Nathanael Greene, destined to prove himself the best man
in the American army next to Washington himself, could furnish sage
military counsel derived from much thought and reading.

Thus it happened that on the morning of the 17th of June General Gage in
Boston awoke to a surprise. He had refused to believe that he was shut
up in Boston. It suited his convenience to stay there until a plan
of campaign should be evolved by his superiors in London, but he was
certain that when he liked he could, with his disciplined battalions,
brush away the besieging army. Now he saw the American force on Breed's
Hill throwing up a defiant and menacing redoubt and entrenchments. Gage
did not hesitate. The bold aggressors must be driven away at once. He
detailed for the enterprise William Howe, the officer destined soon
to be his successor in the command at Boston. Howe was a brave and
experienced soldier. He had been a friend of Wolfe and had led the party
of twenty-four men who had first climbed the cliff at Quebec on the
great day when Wolfe fell victorious. He was the younger brother of
that beloved Lord Howe who had fallen at Ticonderoga and to whose memory
Massachusetts had reared a monument in Westminster Abbey. Gage gave him
in all some twenty-five hundred men, and, at about two in the afternoon,
this force was landed at Charlestown.

The little town was soon aflame and the smoke helped to conceal Howe's
movements. The day was boiling hot and the soldiers carried heavy packs
with food for three days, for they intended to camp on Bunker Hill.
Straight up Breed's Hill they marched wading through long grass
sometimes to their knees and throwing down the fences on the hillside.
The British knew that raw troops were likely to scatter their fire on
a foe still out of range and they counted on a rapid bayonet
charge against men helpless with empty rifles. This expectation was
disappointed. The Americans had in front of them a barricade and Israel
Putnam was there, threatening dire things to any one who should fire
before he could see the whites of the eyes of the advancing soldiery. As
the British came on there was a terrific discharge of musketry at twenty
yards, repeated again and again as they either halted or drew back.

The slaughter was terrible. British officers hardened in war declared
long afterward that they had never seen carnage like that of this fight.
The American riflemen had been told to aim especially at the British
officers, easily known by their uniforms, and one rifleman is said to
have shot twenty officers before he was himself killed. Lord Rawdon,
who played a considerable part in the war and was later, as Marquis of
Hastings, Viceroy of India, used to tell of his terror as he fought in
the British line. Suddenly a soldier was shot dead by his side, and,
when he saw the man quiet at his feet, he said, "Is Death nothing but
this?" and henceforth had no fear. When the first attack by the British
was checked they retired; but, with dogged resolve, they re-formed and
again charged up the hill, only a second time to be repulsed. The third
time they were more cautious. They began to work round to the weaker
defenses of the American left, where were no redoubts and entrenchments
like those on the right. By this time British ships were throwing shells
among the Americans. Charlestown was burning. The great column of black
smoke, the incessant roar of cannon, and the dreadful scenes of carnage
had affected the defenders. They wavered; and on the third British
charge, having exhausted their ammunition, they fled from the hill in
confusion back to the narrow neck of land half a mile away, swept now
by a British floating battery. General Burgoyne wrote that, in the third
attack, the discipline and courage of the British private soldiers also
broke down and that when the redoubt was carried the officers of some
corps were almost alone. The British stood victorious at Bunker Hill. It
was, however, a costly victory. More than a thousand men, nearly half of
the attacking force, had fallen, with an undue proportion of officers.

Philadelphia, far away, did not know what was happening when, two days
before the battle of Bunker Hill, the Continental Congress settled the
question of a leader for a national army. On the 15th of June John Adams
of Massachusetts rose and moved that the Congress should adopt as
its own the army before Boston and that it should name Washington
as Commander-in-Chief. Adams had deeply pondered the problem. He
was certain that New England would remain united and decided in the
struggle, but he was not so sure of the other colonies. To have a leader
from beyond New England would make for continental unity. Virginia,
next to Massachusetts, had stood in the forefront of the movement, and
Virginia was fortunate in having in the Congress one whose fame as a
soldier ran through all the colonies. There was something to be said for
choosing a commander from the colony which began the struggle and Adams
knew that his colleague from Massachusetts, John Hancock, a man of
wealth and importance, desired the post. He was conspicuous enough to
be President of the Congress. Adams says that when he made his motion,
naming a Virginian, he saw in Hancock's face "mortification and
resentment." He saw, too, that Washington hurriedly left the room when
his name was mentioned.

There could be no doubt as to what the Congress would do. Unquestionably
Washington was the fittest man for the post. Twenty years earlier he
had seen important service in the war with France. His position and
character commanded universal aspect. The Congress adopted unanimously
the motion of Adams and it only remained to be seen whether Washington
would accept. On the next day he came to the sitting with his mind made
up. The members, he said, would bear witness to his declaration that he
thought himself unfit for the task. Since, however, they called him, he
would try to do his duty. He would take the command but he would accept
no pay beyond his expenses. Thus it was that Washington became a great
national figure. The man who had long worn the King's uniform was
now his deadliest enemy; and it is probably true that after this step
nothing could have restored the old relations and reunited the British
Empire. The broken vessel could not be made whole.

Washington spent only a few days in getting ready to take over his new
command. On the 21st of June, four days after Bunker Hill, he set out
from Philadelphia. The colonies were in truth very remote from each
other. The journey to Boston was tedious. In the previous year
John Adams had traveled in the other direction to the Congress at
Philadelphia and, in his journal, he notes, as if he were traveling in
foreign lands, the strange manners and customs of the other colonies.
The journey, so momentous to Adams, was not new to Washington. Some
twenty years earlier the young Virginian officer had traveled as far as
Boston in the service of King George II. Now he was leader in the war
against King George III. In New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut he was
received impressively. In the warm summer weather the roads were good
enough but many of the rivers were not bridged and could be crossed only
by ferries or at fords. It took nearly a fortnight to reach Boston.

Washington had ridden only twenty miles on his long journey when the
news reached him of the fight at Bunker Hill. The question which he
asked anxiously shows what was in his mind: "Did the militia fight?"
When the answer was "Yes," he said with relief, "The liberties of the
country are safe." He reached Cambridge on the 2d of July and on the
following day was the chief figure in a striking ceremony. In the
presence of a vast crowd and of the motley army of volunteers, which was
now to be called the American army, Washington assumed the command.
He sat on horseback under an elm tree and an observer noted that his
appearance was "truly noble and majestic." This was milder praise than
that given a little later by a London paper which said: "There is not a
king in Europe but would look like a valet de chambre by his side."
New England having seen him was henceforth wholly on his side. His
traditions were not those of the Puritans, of the Ephraims and the
Abijahs of the volunteer army, men whose Old Testament names tell
something of the rigor of the Puritan view of life. Washington, a sharer
in the free and often careless hospitality of his native Virginia, had a
different outlook. In his personal discipline, however, he was not less
Puritan than the strictest of New Englanders. The coming years were to
show that a great leader had taken his fitting place.

Washington, born in 1732, had been trained in self-reliance, for he had
been fatherless from childhood. At the age of sixteen he was working at
the profession, largely self-taught, of a surveyor of land. At the age
of twenty-seven he married Martha Custis, a rich widow with children,
though her marriage with Washington was childless. His estate on the
Potomac River, three hundred miles from the open sea, recently named
Mount Vernon, had been in the family for nearly a hundred years.
There were twenty-five hundred acres at Mount Vernon with ten miles of
frontage on the tidal river. The Virginia planters were a landowning
gentry; when Washington died he had more than sixty thousand acres. The
growing of tobacco, the one vital industry of the Virginia of the time,
with its half million people, was connected with the ownership of land.
On their great estates the planters lived remote, with a mail perhaps
every fortnight. There were no large towns, no great factories. Nearly
half of the population consisted of negro slaves. It is one of the
ironies of history that the chief leader in a war marked by a passion
for liberty was a member of a society in which, as another of its
members, Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, said,
there was on the one hand the most insulting despotism and on the
other the most degrading submission. The Virginian landowners were more
absolute masters than the proudest lords of medieval England. These
feudal lords had serfs on their land. The serfs were attached to
the soil and were sold to a new master with the soil. They were not,
however, property, without human rights. On the other hand, the slaves
of the Virginian master were property like his horses. They could not
even call wife and children their own, for these might be sold at will.
It arouses a strange emotion now when we find Washington offering to
exchange a negro for hogsheads of molasses and rum and writing that the
man would bring a good price, "if kept clean and trim'd up a little when
offered for sale."

In early life Washington had had very little of formal education. He
knew no language but English. When he became world famous and his friend
La Fayette urged him to visit France he refused because he would
seem uncouth if unable to speak the French tongue. Like another great
soldier, the Duke of Wellington, he was always careful about his dress.
There was in him a silent pride which would brook nothing derogatory
to his dignity. No one could be more methodical. He kept his accounts
rigorously, entering even the cost of repairing a hairpin for a ward.
He was a keen farmer, and it is amusing to find him recording in his
careful journal that there are 844,800 seeds of "New River Grass" to the
pound Troy and so determining how many should be sown to the acre. Not
many youths would write out as did Washington, apparently from French
sources, and read and reread elaborate "Rules of Civility and Decent
Behaviour in Company and Conversation." In the fashion of the age
of Chesterfield they portray the perfect gentleman. He is always to
remember the presence of others and not to move, read, or speak without
considering what may be due to them. In the true spirit of the time he
is to learn to defer to persons of superior quality. Tactless laughter
at his own wit, jests that have a sting of idle gossip, are to be
avoided. Reproof is to be given not in anger but in a sweet and mild
temper. The rules descend even to manners at table and are a revelation
of care in self-discipline. We might imagine Oliver Cromwell drawing up
such rules, but not Napoleon or Wellington.

The class to which Washington belonged prided itself on good birth and
good breeding. We picture him as austere, but, like Oliver Cromwell,
whom in some respects he resembles, he was very human in his personal
relations. He liked a glass of wine. He was fond of dancing and he went
to the theater, even on Sunday. He was, too, something of a lady's man;
"He can be downright impudent sometimes," wrote a Southern lady, "such
impudence, Fanny, as you and I like." In old age he loved to have the
young and gay about him. He could break into furious oaths and no one
was a better master of what we may call honorable guile in dealing with
wily savages, in circulating falsehoods that would deceive the enemy in
time of war, or in pursuing a business advantage. He played cards for
money and carefully entered loss and gain in his accounts. He loved
horseracing and horses, and nothing pleased him more than to talk of
that noble animal. He kept hounds and until his burden of cares became
too great was an eager devotee of hunting. His shooting was of a type
more heroic than that of an English squire spending a day on a moor
with guests and gamekeepers and returning to comfort in the evening.
Washington went off on expeditions into the forest lasting many days and
shared the life in the woods of rough men, sleeping often in the open
air. "Happy," he wrote, "is he who gets the berth nearest the fire." He
could spend a happy day in admiring the trees and the richness of the
land on a neighbor's estate. Always his thoughts were turning to the
soil. There was poetry in him. It was said of Napoleon that the one
approach to poetry in all his writings is the phrase: "The spring is at
last appearing and the leaves are beginning to sprout." Washington,
on the other hand, brooded over the mysteries of life. He pictured to
himself the serenity of a calm old age and always dared to look death
squarely in the face. He was sensitive to human passion and he felt the
wonder of nature in all her ways, her bounteous response in growth to
the skill of man, the delight of improving the earth in contrast
with the vain glory gained by ravaging it in war. His most striking
characteristics were energy and decision united often with strong likes
and dislikes. His clever secretary, Alexander Hamilton, found, as he
said, that his chief was not remarkable for good temper and resigned
his post because of an impatient rebuke. When a young man serving in
the army of Virginia, Washington had many a tussle with the obstinate
Scottish Governor, Dinwiddie, who thought his vehemence unmannerly and
ungrateful. Gilbert Stuart, who painted several of his portraits, said
that his features showed strong passions and that, had he not learned
self-restraint, his temper would have been savage. This discipline he
acquired. The task was not easy, but in time he was able to say with
truth, "I have no resentments," and his self-control became so perfect
as to be almost uncanny.

The assumption that Washington fought against an England grown decadent
is not justified. To admit this would be to make his task seem lighter
than it really was. No doubt many of the rich aristocracy spent idle
days of pleasure-seeking with the comfortable conviction that they could
discharge their duties to society by merely existing, since their luxury
made work and the more they indulged themselves the more happy and
profitable employment would their many dependents enjoy. The eighteenth
century was, however, a wonderful epoch in England. Agriculture became
a new thing under the leadership of great landowners like Lord Townshend
and Coke of Norfolk. Already was abroad in society a divine discontent
at existing abuses. It brought Warren Hastings to trial on the charge of
plundering India. It attacked slavery, the cruelty of the criminal law,
which sent children to execution for the theft of a few pennies, the
brutality of the prisons, the torpid indifference of the church to the
needs of the masses. New inventions were beginning the age of machinery.
The reform of Parliament, votes for the toiling masses, and a thousand
other improvements were being urged. It was a vigorous, rich, and
arrogant England which Washington confronted.

It is sometimes said of Washington that he was an English country
gentleman. A gentleman he was, but with an experience and training quite
unlike that of a gentleman in England. The young heir to an English
estate might or might not go to a university. He could, like the young
Charles James Fox, become a scholar, but like Fox, who knew some of the
virtues and all the supposed gentlemanly vices, he might dissipate
his energies in hunting, gambling, and cockfighting. He would almost
certainly make the grand tour of Europe, and, if he had little Latin and
less Greek, he was pretty certain to have some familiarity with Paris
and a smattering of French. The eighteenth century was a period of
magnificent living in England. The great landowner, then, as now, the
magnate of his neighborhood, was likely to rear, if he did not inherit,
one of those vast palaces which are today burdens so costly to the heirs
of their builders. At the beginning of the century the nation to honor
Marlborough for his victories could think of nothing better than to
give him half a million pounds to build a palace. Even with the colossal
wealth produced by modern industry we should be staggered at a residence
costing millions of dollars. Yet the Duke of Devonshire rivaled at
Chatsworth, and Lord Leicester at Holkham, Marlborough's building
at Blenheim, and many other costly palaces were erected during the
following half century. Their owners sometimes built in order to surpass
a neighbor in grandeur, and to this day great estates are encumbered by
the debts thus incurred in vain show. The heir to such a property was
reared in a pomp and luxury undreamed of by the frugal young planter of
Virginia. Of working for a livelihood, in the sense in which Washington
knew it, the young Englishman of great estate would never dream.

The Atlantic is a broad sea and even in our own day, when instant
messages flash across it and man himself can fly from shore to shore in
less than a score of hours, it is not easy for those on one strand to
understand the thought of those on the other. Every community evolves
its own spirit not easily to be apprehended by the onlooker. The state
of society in America was vitally different from that in England. The
plain living of Virginia was in sharp contrast with the magnificence
and ease of England. It is true that we hear of plate and elaborate
furniture, of servants in livery, and much drinking of Port and Madeira,
among the Virginians. They had good horses. Driving, as often they did,
with six in a carriage, they seemed to keep up regal style. Spaces were
wide in a country where one great landowner, Lord Fairfax, held no less
than five million acres. Houses lay isolated and remote and a gentleman
dining out would sometimes drive his elaborate equipage from twenty to
fifty miles. There was a tradition of lavish hospitality, of gallant men
and fair women, and sometimes of hard and riotous living. Many of the
houses were, however, in a state of decay, with leaking roofs, battered
doors and windows and shabby furniture. To own land in Virginia did
not mean to live in luxurious ease. Land brought in truth no very large
income. It was easier to break new land than to fertilize that long in
use. An acre yielded only eight or ten bushels of wheat. In England the
land was more fruitful. One who was only a tenant on the estate of Coke
of Norfolk died worth £150,000, and Coke himself had the income of a
prince. When Washington died he was reputed one of the richest men in
America and yet his estate was hardly equal to that of Coke's tenant.

Washington was a good farmer, inventive and enterprising, but he had
difficulties which ruined many of his neighbors. Today much of his
infertile estate of Mount Vernon would hardly grow enough to pay
the taxes. When Washington desired a gardener, or a bricklayer, or a
carpenter, he usually had to buy him in the form of a convict, or of
a negro slave, or of a white man indentured for a term of years. Such
labor required eternal vigilance. The negro, himself property, had no
respect for it in others. He stole when he could and worked only when
the eyes of a master were upon him. If left in charge of plants or of
stock he was likely to let them perish for lack of water. Washington's
losses of cattle, horses, and sheep from this cause were enormous. The
neglected cattle gave so little milk that at one time Washington, with a
hundred cows, had to buy his butter. Negroes feigned sickness for weeks
at a time. A visitor noted that Washington spoke to his slaves with
a stern harshness. No doubt it was necessary. The management of this
intractable material brought training in command. If Washington could
make negroes efficient and farming pay in Virginia, he need hardly be
afraid to meet any other type of difficulty.

From the first he was satisfied that the colonies had before them a
difficult struggle. Many still refused to believe that there was
really a state of war. Lexington and Bunker Hill might be regarded as
unfortunate accidents to be explained away in an era of good feeling
when each side should acknowledge the merits of the other and apologize
for its own faults. Washington had few illusions of this kind. He took
the issue in a serious and even bitter spirit. He knew nothing of the
Englishman at home for he had never set foot outside of the colonies
except to visit Barbados with an invalid half-brother. Even then he
noted that the "gentleman inhabitants" whose "hospitality and genteel
behaviour" he admired were discontented with the tone of the officials
sent out from England. From early life Washington had seen much of
British officers in America. Some of them had been men of high birth and
station who treated the young colonial officer with due courtesy. When,
however, he had served on the staff of the unfortunate General Braddock
in the calamitous campaign of 1755, he had been offended by the tone of
that leader. Probably it was in these days that Washington first brooded
over the contrasts between the Englishman and the Virginian. With
obstinate complacency Braddock had disregarded Washington's counsels
of prudence. He showed arrogant confidence in his veteran troops and
contempt for the amateur soldiers of whom Washington was one. In a wild
country where rapid movement was the condition of success Braddock would
halt, as Washington said, "to level every mole hill and to erect bridges
over every brook." His transport was poor and Washington, a lover of
horses, chafed at what he called "vile management" of the horses by
the British soldier. When anything went wrong Braddock blamed, not the
ineffective work of his own men, but the supineness of Virginia. "He
looks upon the country," Washington wrote in wrath, "I believe, as void
of honour and honesty." The hour of trial came in the fight of July,
1755, when Braddock was defeated and killed on the march to the Ohio.
Washington told his mother that in the fight the Virginian troops stood
their ground and were nearly all killed but the boasted regulars "were
struck with such a panic that they behaved with more cowardice than it
is possible to conceive." In the anger and resentment of this comment is
found the spirit which made Washington a champion of the colonial cause
from the first hour of disagreement.

That was a fatal day in March, 1765, when the British Parliament voted
that it was just and necessary that a revenue be raised in America.
Washington was uncompromising. After the tax on tea he derided "our
lordly masters in Great Britain." No man, he said, should scruple for
a moment to take up arms against the threatened tyranny. He and his
neighbors of Fairfax County, Virginia, took the trouble to tell the
world by formal resolution on July 18, 1774, that they were descended
not from a conquered but from a conquering people, that they claimed
full equality with the people of Great Britain, and like them would make
their own laws and impose their own taxes. They were not democrats; they
had no theories of equality; but as "gentlemen and men of fortune" they
would show to others the right path in the crisis which had arisen. In
this resolution spoke the proud spirit of Washington; and, as he brooded
over what was happening, anger fortified his pride. Of the Tories in
Boston, some of them highly educated men, who with sorrow were walking
in what was to them the hard path of duty, Washington could say later
that "there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these
wretched creatures."

The age of Washington was one of bitter vehemence in political thought.
In England the good Whig was taught that to deny Whig doctrine was
blasphemy, that there was no truth or honesty on the other side, and
that no one should trust a Tory; and usually the good Whig was true
to the teaching he had received. In America there had hitherto been
no national politics. Issues had been local and passions thus confined
exploded all the more fiercely. Franklin spoke of George III as drinking
long draughts of American blood and of the British people as so depraved
and barbarous as to be the wickedest nation upon earth, inspired by
bloody and insatiable malice and wickedness. To Washington George III
was a tyrant, his ministers were scoundrels, and the British people were
lost to every sense of virtue. The evil of it is that, for a posterity
which listened to no other comment on the issues of the Revolution, such
utterances, instead of being understood as passing expressions of party
bitterness, were taken as the calm judgments of men held in reverence
and awe. Posterity has agreed that there is nothing to be said for the
coercing of the colonies so resolutely pressed by George III and his
ministers. Posterity can also, however, understand that the struggle was
not between undiluted virtue on the one side and undiluted vice on the
other. Some eighty years after the American Revolution the Republic
created by the Revolution endured the horrors of civil war rather than
accept its own disruption. In 1776 even the most liberal Englishmen felt
a similar passion for the continued unity of the British Empire. Time
has reconciled all schools of thought to the unity lost in the case of
the Empire and to the unity preserved in the case of the Republic, but
on the losing side in each case good men fought with deep conviction.


CHAPTER II. BOSTON AND QUEBEC


Washington was not a professional soldier, though he had seen the
realities of war and had moved in military society. Perhaps it was an
advantage that he had not received the rigid training of a regular, for
he faced conditions which required an elastic mind. The force besieging
Boston consisted at first chiefly of New England militia, with companies
of minute-men, so called because of their supposed readiness to fight at
a minute's notice. Washington had been told that he should find 20,000
men under his command; he found, in fact, a nominal army of 17,000,
with probably not more than 14,000 effective, and the number tended
to decline as the men went away to their homes after the first vivid
interest gave way to the humdrum of military life.

The extensive camp before Boston, as Washington now saw it, expressed
the varied character of his strange command. Cambridge, the seat of
Harvard College, was still only a village with a few large houses and
park-like grounds set among fields of grain, now trodden down by the
soldiers. Here was placed in haphazard style the motley housing of a
military camp. The occupants had followed their own taste in building.
One could see structures covered with turf, looking like lumps of mother
earth, tents made of sail cloth, huts of bare boards, huts of brick and
stone, some having doors and windows of wattled basketwork. There were
not enough huts to house the army nor camp-kettles for cooking. Blankets
were so few that many of the men were without covering at night. In the
warm summer weather this did not much matter but bleak autumn and harsh
winter would bring bitter privation. The sick in particular suffered
severely, for the hospitals were badly equipped.

A deep conviction inspired many of the volunteers. They regarded as
brutal tyranny the tax on tea, considered in England as a mild expedient
for raising needed revenue for defense in the colonies. The men of
Suffolk County, Massachusetts, meeting in September, 1774, had declared
in high-flown terms that the proposed tax came from a parricide who
held a dagger at their bosoms and that those who resisted him would earn
praises to eternity. From nearly every colony came similar utterances,
and flaming resentment at injustice filled the volunteer army. Many a
soldier would not touch a cup of tea because tea had been the ruin of
his country. Some wore pinned to their hats or coats the words "Liberty
or Death" and talked of resisting tyranny until "time shall be no more."
It was a dark day for the motherland when so many of her sons believed
that she was the enemy of liberty. The iron of this conviction entered
into the soul of the American nation; at Gettysburg, nearly a century
later, Abraham Lincoln, in a noble utterance which touched the heart of
humanity, could appeal to the days of the Revolution, when "our fathers
brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty." The
colonists believed that they were fighting for something of import to
all mankind, and the nation which they created believes it still.

An age of war furnishes, however, occasion for the exercise of baser
impulses. The New Englander was a trader by instinct. An army had come
suddenly together and there was golden promise of contracts for supplies
at fat profits. The leader from Virginia, untutored in such things, was
astounded at the greedy scramble. Before the year 1775 ended Washington
wrote to his friend Lee that he prayed God he might never again have to
witness such lack of public spirit, such jobbing and self-seeking,
such "fertility in all the low arts," as now he found at Cambridge.
He declared that if he could have foreseen all this nothing would have
induced him to take the command. Later, the young La Fayette, who had
left behind him in France wealth and luxury in order to fight a hard
fight in America, was shocked at the slackness and indifference among
the supposed patriots for whose cause he was making sacrifices so
heavy. In the backward parts of the colonies the population was densely
ignorant and had little grasp of the deeper meaning of the patriot
cause.

The army was, as Washington himself said, "a mixed multitude." There
was every variety of dress. Old uniforms, treasured from the days of the
last French wars, had been dug out. A military coat or a cocked hat was
the only semblance of uniform possessed by some of the officers. Rank
was often indicated by ribbons of different colors tied on the arm. Lads
from the farms had come in their usual dress; a good many of these were
hunters from the frontier wearing the buckskin of the deer they had
slain. Sometimes there was clothing of grimmer material. Later in the
war in American officer recorded that his men had skinned two dead
Indians "from their hips down, for bootlegs, one pair for the Major,
the other for myself." The volunteers varied greatly in age. There
were bearded veterans of sixty and a sprinkling of lads of sixteen.
An observer laughed at the boys and the "great great grandfathers" who
marched side by side in the army before Boston. Occasionally a black
face was seen in the ranks. One of Washington's tasks was to reduce the
disparity of years and especially to secure men who could shoot. In
the first enthusiasm of 1775 so many men volunteered in Virginia that a
selection was made on the basis of accuracy in shooting. The men fired
at a range of one hundred and fifty yards at an outline of a man's nose
in chalk on a board. Each man had a single shot and the first men shot
the nose entirely away.

Undoubtedly there was the finest material among the men lounging about
their quarters at Cambridge in fashion so unmilitary. In physique they
were larger than the British soldier, a result due to abundant food and
free life in the open air from childhood. Most of the men supplied their
own uniform and rifles and much barter went on in the hours after
drill. The men made and sold shoes, clothes, and even arms. They
were accustomed to farm life and good at digging and throwing up
entrenchments. The colonial mode of waging war was, however, not that
of Europe. To the regular soldier of the time even earth entrenchments
seemed a sign of cowardice. The brave man would come out on the open to
face his foe. Earl Percy, who rescued the harassed British on the day of
Lexington, had the poorest possible opinion of those on what he called
the rebel side. To him they were intriguing rascals, hypocrites,
cowards, with sinister designs to ruin the Empire. But he was forced to
admit that they fought well and faced death willingly.

In time Washington gathered about him a fine body of officers, brave,
steady, and efficient. On the great issue they, like himself, had
unchanging conviction, and they and he saved the revolution. But a good
many of his difficulties were due to bad officers. He had himself the
reverence for gentility, the belief in an ordered grading of society,
characteristic of his class in that age. In Virginia the relation of
master and servant was well understood and the tone of authority was
readily accepted. In New England conceptions of equality were more
advanced. The extent to which the people would brook the despotism of
military command was uncertain. From the first some of the volunteers
had elected their officers. The result was that intriguing demagogues
were sometimes chosen. The Massachusetts troops, wrote a Connecticut
captain, not free, perhaps, from local jealousy, were "commanded by a
most despicable set of officers." At Bunker Hill officers of this type
shirked the fight and their men, left without leaders, joined in the
panicky retreat of that day. Other officers sent away soldiers to work
on their farms while at the same time they drew for them public pay. At
a later time Washington wrote to a friend wise counsel about the choice
of officers. "Take none but gentlemen; let no local attachment influence
you; do not suffer your good nature to say Yes when you ought to say No.
Remember that it is a public, not a private cause." What he desired
was the gentleman's chivalry of refinement, sense of honor, dignity of
character, and freedom from mere self-seeking. The prime qualities of
a good officer, as he often said, were authority and decision. It is
probably true of democracies that they prefer and will follow the man
who will take with them a strong tone. Little men, however, cannot see
this and think to gain support by shifty changes of opinion to please
the multitude. What authority and decision could be expected from
an officer of the peasant type, elected by his own men? How could he
dominate men whose short term of service was expiring and who had to be
coaxed to renew it? Some elected officers had to promise to pool their
pay with that of their men. In one company an officer fulfilled the
double position of captain and barber. In time, however, the authority
of military rank came to be respected throughout the whole army. An
amusing contrast with earlier conditions is found in 1779 when a captain
was tried by a brigade court-martial and dismissed from the service for
intimate association with the wagon-maker of the brigade.

The first thing to do at Cambridge was to get rid of the inefficient and
the corrupt. Washington had never any belief in a militia army. From
his earliest days as a soldier he had favored conscription, even in free
Virginia. He had then found quite ineffective the "whooping, holloing
gentlemen soldiers" of the volunteer force of the colony among whom
"every individual has his own crude notion of things and must undertake
to direct. If his advice is neglected he thinks himself slighted,
abused, and injured and, to redress his wrongs, will depart for his
home." Washington found at Cambridge too many officers. Then as later
in the American army there were swarms of colonels. The officers from
Massachusetts, conscious that they had seen the first fighting in the
great cause, expected special consideration from a stranger serving
on their own soil. Soon they had a rude awakening. Washington broke a
Massachusetts colonel and two captains because they had proved
cowards at Bunker Hill, two more captains for fraud in drawing pay and
provisions for men who did not exist, and still another for absence
from his post when he was needed. He put in jail a colonel, a major, and
three or four other officers. "New lords, new laws," wrote in his diary
Mr. Emerson, the chaplain: "the Generals Washington and Lee are upon
the lines every day… great distinction is made between officers and
soldiers."

The term of all the volunteers in Washington's army expired by the end
of 1775, so that he had to create a new army during the siege of Boston.
He spoke scornfully of an enemy so little enterprising as to remain
supine during the process. But probably the British were wise to avoid a
venture inland and to remain in touch with their fleet. Washington made
them uneasy when he drove away the cattle from the neighborhood. Soon
beef was selling in Boston for as much as eighteen pence a pound. Food
might reach Boston in ships but supplies even by sea were insecure, for
the Americans soon had privateers manned by seamen familiar with New
England waters and happy in expected gains from prize money. The British
were anxious about the elementary problem of food. They might have made
Washington more uncomfortable by forays and alarms. Only reluctantly,
however, did Howe, who took over the command on October 10, 1775, admit
to himself that this was a real war. He still hoped for settlement
without further bloodshed. Washington was glad to learn that the British
were laying in supplies of coal for the winter. It meant that they
intended to stay in Boston, where, more than in any other place, he
could make trouble for them.

Washington had more on his mind than the creation of an army and the
siege of Boston. He had also to decide the strategy of the war. On the
long American sea front Boston alone remained in British hands. New
York, Philadelphia, Charleston and other ports farther south were all,
for the time, on the side of the Revolution. Boston was not a good
naval base for the British, since it commanded no great waterway leading
inland. The sprawling colonies, from the rock-bound coast of New England
to the swamps and forests of Georgia, were strong in their incoherent
vastness. There were a thousand miles of seacoast. Only rarely were
considerable settlements to be found more than a hundred miles distant
from salt water. An army marching to the interior would have increasing
difficulties from transport and supplies. Wherever water routes could
be used the naval power of the British gave them an advantage. One such
route was the Hudson, less a river than a navigable arm of the sea,
leading to the heart of the colony of New York, its upper waters almost
touching Lake George and Lake Champlain, which in turn led to the
St. Lawrence in Canada and thence to the sea. Canada was held by the
British; and it was clear that, if they should take the city of New
York, they might command the whole line from the mouth of the Hudson to
the St. Lawrence, and so cut off New England from the other colonies and
overcome a divided enemy. To foil this policy Washington planned to hold
New York and to capture Canada. With Canada in line the union of the
colonies would be indeed continental, and, if the British were driven
from Boston, they would have no secure foothold in North America.

The danger from Canada had always been a source of anxiety to the
English colonies. The French had made Canada a base for attempts to
drive the English from North America. During many decades war had raged
along the Canadian frontier. With the cession of Canada to Britain in
1763 this danger had vanished. The old habit endured, however, of fear
of Canada. When, in 1774, the British Parliament passed the bill for the
government of Canada known as the Quebec Act, there was violent clamor.
The measure was assumed to be a calculated threat against colonial
liberty. The Quebec Act continued in Canada the French civil law and the
ancient privileges of the Roman Catholic Church. It guaranteed order in
the wild western region north of the Ohio, taken recently from France,
by placing it under the authority long exercised there of the Governor
of Quebec. Only a vivid imagination would conceive that to allow to
the French in Canada their old loved customs and laws involved designs
against the freedom under English law in the other colonies, or that
to let the Canadians retain in respect to religion what they had always
possessed meant a sinister plot against the Protestantism of the English
colonies. Yet Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the greatest mind in the
American Revolution, had frantic suspicions. French laws in Canada
involved, he said, the extension of French despotism in the English
colonies. The privileges continued to the Roman Catholic Church in
Canada would be followed in due course by the Inquisition, the burning
of heretics at the stake in Boston and New York, and the bringing
from Europe of Roman Catholic settlers who would prove tools for the
destruction of religious liberty. Military rule at Quebec meant, sooner
or later, despotism everywhere in America. We may smile now at the
youthful Hamilton's picture of "dark designs" and "deceitful wiles"
on the part of that fierce Protestant George III to establish Roman
Catholic despotism, but the colonies regarded the danger as serious. The
quick remedy would be simply to take Canada, as Washington now planned.

To this end something had been done before Washington assumed the
command. The British Fort Ticonderoga, on the neck of land separating
Lake Champlain from Lake George, commanded the route from New York to
Canada. The fight at Lexington in April had been quickly followed by
aggressive action against this British stronghold. No news of Lexington
had reached the fort when early in May Colonel Ethan Allen, with
Benedict Arnold serving as a volunteer in his force of eighty-three
men, arrived in friendly guise. The fort was held by only forty-eight
British; with the menace from France at last ended they felt secure;
discipline was slack, for there was nothing to do. The incompetent
commander testified that he lent Allen twenty men for some rough work
on the lake. By evening Allen had them all drunk and then it was easy,
without firing a shot, to capture the fort with a rush. The door to
Canada was open. Great stores of ammunition and a hundred and twenty
guns, which in due course were used against the British at Boston, fell
into American hands.

About Canada Washington was ill-informed. He thought of the Canadians as
if they were Virginians or New Yorkers. They had been recently conquered
by Britain; their new king was a tyrant; they would desire liberty and
would welcome an American army. So reasoned Washington, but without
knowledge. The Canadians were a conquered people, but they had found
the British king no tyrant and they had experienced the paradox of being
freer under the conqueror than they had been under their own sovereign.
The last days of French rule in Canada were disgraced by corruption
and tyranny almost unbelievable. The Canadian peasant had been cruelly
robbed and he had conceived for his French rulers a dislike which
appears still in his attitude towards the motherland of France. For
his new British master he had assuredly no love, but he was no longer
dragged off to war and his property was not plundered. He was free,
too, to speak his mind. During the first twenty years after the British
conquest of Canada the Canadian French matured indeed an assertive
liberty not even dreamed of during the previous century and a half of
French rule.

The British tyranny which Washington pictured in Canada was thus not
very real. He underestimated, too, the antagonism between the Roman
Catholics of Canada and the Protestants of the English colonies. The
Congress at Philadelphia in denouncing the Quebec Act had accused the
Catholic Church of bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion. This was
no very tactful appeal for sympathy to the sons of that France which was
still the eldest daughter of the Church and it was hardly helped by
a maladroit turn suggesting that "low-minded infirmities" should not
permit such differences to block union in the sacred cause of liberty.
Washington believed that two battalions of Canadians might be recruited
to fight the British, and that the French Acadians of Nova Scotia, a
people so remote that most of them hardly knew what the war was about,
were tingling with sympathy for the American cause. In truth the
Canadian was not prepared to fight on either side. What the priest and
the landowner could do to make him fight for Britain was done, but, for
all that, Sir Guy Carleton, the Governor of Canada, found recruiting
impossible.

Washington believed that the war would be won by the side which held
Canada. He saw that from Canada would be determined the attitude of the
savages dwelling in the wild spaces of the interior; he saw, too, that
Quebec as a military base in British hands would be a source of grave
danger. The easy capture of Fort Ticonderoga led him to underrate
difficulties. If Ticonderoga why not Quebec? Nova Scotia might be
occupied later, the Acadians helping. Thus it happened that, soon
after taking over the command, Washington was busy with a plan for the
conquest of Canada. Two forces were to advance into that country; one by
way of Lake Champlain under General Schuyler and the other through the
forests of Maine under Benedict Arnold.

Schuyler was obliged through illness to give up his command, and it was
an odd fortune of war that put General Richard Montgomery at the head
of the expedition going by way of Lake Champlain. Montgomery had served
with Wolfe at the taking of Louisbourg and had been an officer in the
proud British army which had received the surrender of Canada in 1760.
Not without searching of heart had Montgomery turned against his former
sovereign. He was living in America when war broke out; he had married
into an American family of position; and he had come to the view that
vital liberty was challenged by the King. Now he did his work well,
in spite of very bad material in his army. His New Englanders were, he
said, "every man a general and not one of them a soldier." They feigned
sickness, though, as far as he had learned, there was "not a man dead of
any distemper." No better were the men from New York, "the sweepings of
the streets" with morals "infamous." Of the officers, too, Montgomery
had a poor opinion. Like Washington he declared that it was necessary to
get gentlemen, men of education and integrity, as officers, or disaster
would follow. Nevertheless St. Johns, a British post on the Richelieu,
about thirty miles across country from Montreal, fell to Montgomery on
the 3d of November, after a siege of six weeks; and British regulars
under Major Preston, a brave and competent officer, yielded to a crude
volunteer army with whole regiments lacking uniforms. Montreal could
make no defense. On the 12th of November Montgomery entered Montreal
and was in control of the St. Lawrence almost to the cliffs of Quebec.
Canada seemed indeed an easy conquest.

The adventurous Benedict Arnold went on an expedition more hazardous.
He had persuaded Washington of the impossible, that he could advance
through the wilderness from the seacoast of Maine and take Quebec by
surprise. News travels even by forest pathways. Arnold made a wonderful
effort. Chill autumn was upon him when, on the 25th of September, with
about a thousand picked men, he began to advance up the Kennebec River
and over the height of land to the upper waters of the Chaudière, which
discharges into the St. Lawrence opposite Quebec. There were heavy
rains. Sometimes the men had to wade breast high in dragging heavy
and leaking boats over the difficult places. A good many men died of
starvation. Others deserted and turned back. The indomitable Arnold
pressed on, however, and on the 9th of November, a few days before
Montgomery occupied Montreal, he stood with some six hundred worn and
shivering men on the strand of the St. Lawrence opposite Quebec. He
had not surprised the city and it looked grim and inaccessible as he
surveyed it across the great river. In the autumn gales it was not easy
to carry over his little army in small boats. But this he accomplished
and then waited for Montgomery to join him.

By the 3d of December Montgomery was with Arnold before Quebec. They
had hardly more than a thousand effective troops, together with a few
hundred Canadians, upon whom no reliance could be placed. Carleton,
commanding at Quebec, sat tight and would hold no communication
with despised "rebels." "They all pretend to be gentlemen," said an
astonished British officer in Quebec, when he heard that among the
American officers now captured by the British there were a former
blacksmith, a butcher, a shoemaker, and an innkeeper. Montgomery was
stung to violent threats by Carleton's contempt, but never could he draw
from Carleton a reply. At last Montgomery tried, in the dark of early
morning of New Year's Day, 1776, to carry Quebec by storm. He was to
lead an attack on the Lower Town from the west side, while Arnold was to
enter from the opposite side. When they met in the center they were to
storm the citadel on the heights above. They counted on the help of the
French inhabitants, from whom Carleton said bitterly enough that he
had nothing to fear in prosperity and nothing to hope for in adversity.
Arnold pressed his part of the attack with vigor and penetrated to the
streets of the Lower Town where he fell wounded. Captain Daniel Morgan,
who took over the command, was made prisoner.

Montgomery's fate was more tragic. In spite of protests from his
officers, he led in person the attack from the west side of the
fortress. The advance was along a narrow road under the towering cliffs
of a great precipice. The attack was expected by the British and the
guard at the barrier was ordered to hold its fire until the enemy was
near. Suddenly there was a roar of cannon and the assailants not swept
down fled in panic. With the morning light the dead head of Montgomery
was found protruding from the snow. He was mourned by Washington and
with reason. He had talents and character which might have made him one
of the chief leaders of the revolutionary army. Elsewhere, too, was
he mourned. His father, an Irish landowner, had been a member of the
British Parliament, and he himself was a Whig, known to Fox and Burke.
When news of his death reached England eulogies upon him came from the
Whig benches in Parliament which could not have been stronger had he
died fighting for the King.

While the outlook in Canada grew steadily darker, the American cause
prospered before Boston. There Howe was not at ease. If it was really
to be war, which he still doubted, it would be well to seek some
other base. Washington helped Howe to take action. Dorchester Heights
commanded Boston as critically from the south as did Bunker Hill from
the north. By the end of February Washington had British cannon, brought
with heavy labor from Ticonderoga, and then he lost no time. On the
morning of March 5, 1776, Howe awoke to find that, under cover of a
heavy bombardment, American troops had occupied Dorchester Heights and
that if he would dislodge them he must make another attack similar
to that at Bunker Hill. The alternative of stiff fighting was the
evacuation of Boston. Howe, though dilatory, was a good fighting
soldier. His defects as a general in America sprang in part from his
belief that the war was unjust and that delay might bring counsels
making for peace and save bloodshed. His first decision was to attack,
but a furious gale thwarted his purpose, and he then prepared for the
inevitable step.

Washington divined Howe's purpose and there was a tacit agreement that
the retiring army should not be molested. Howe destroyed munitions
of war which he could not take away but he left intact the powerful
defenses of Boston, defenses reared at the cost of Britain. Many of the
better class of the inhabitants, British in their sympathies, were now
face to face with bitter sorrow and sacrifice. Passions were so aroused
that a hard fate awaited them should they remain in Boston and they
decided to leave with the British army. Travel by land was blocked; they
could go only by sea. When the time came to depart, laden carriages,
trucks, and wheelbarrows crowded to the quays through the narrow streets
and a sad procession of exiles went out from their homes. A profane
critic said that they moved "as if the very devil was after them." No
doubt many of them would have been arrogant and merciless to "rebels"
had theirs been the triumph. But the day was above all a day of sorrow.
Edward Winslow, a strong leader among them, tells of his tears "at
leaving our once happy town of Boston." The ships, a forest of masts,
set sail and, crowded with soldiers and refugees, headed straight out
to sea for Halifax. Abigail, wife of John Adams, a clever woman, watched
the departure of the fleet with gladness in her heart. She thought that
never before had been seen in America so many ships bearing so many
people. Washington's army marched joyously into Boston. Joyous it might
well be since, for the moment, powerful Britain was not secure in a
single foot of territory in the former colonies. If Quebec should fall
the continent would be almost conquered.

Quebec did not fall. All through the winter the Americans held on before
the place. They shivered from cold. They suffered from the dread disease
of smallpox. They had difficulty in getting food. The Canadians were
insistent on having good money for what they offered and since good
money was not always in the treasury the invading army sometimes used
violence. Then the Canadians became more reserved and chilling than
ever. In hope of mending matters Congress sent a commission to Montreal
in the spring of 1776. Its chairman was Benjamin Franklin and, with him,
were two leading Roman Catholics, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a
great landowner of Maryland, and his brother John, a priest, afterwards
Archbishop of Baltimore. It was not easy to represent as the liberator
of the Catholic Canadians the Congress which had denounced in scathing
terms the concessions in the Quebec Act to the Catholic Church. Franklin
was a master of conciliation, but before he achieved anything a dramatic
event happened. On the 6th of May, British ships arrived at Quebec. The
inhabitants rushed to the ramparts. Cries of joy passed from street
to street and they reached the little American army, now under General
Thomas, encamped on the Plains of Abraham. Panic seized the small force
which had held on so long. On the ships were ten thousand fresh British
troops. The one thing for the Americans to do was to get away; and they
fled, leaving behind guns, supplies, even clothing and private papers.
Five days later Franklin, at Montreal, was dismayed by the distressing
news of disaster.

Congress sent six regiments to reinforce the army which had fled from
Quebec. It was a desperate venture. Washington's orders were that the
Americans should fight the new British army as near Quebec as possible.
The decisive struggle took place on the 8th of June. An American force
under the command of General Thompson attacked Three Rivers, a town
on the St. Lawrence, half way between Quebec and Montreal. They were
repulsed and the general was taken prisoner. The wonder is indeed that
the army was not annihilated. Then followed a disastrous retreat. Short
of supplies, ravaged by smallpox, and in bad weather, the invaders tried
to make their way back to Lake Champlain. They evacuated Montreal. It is
hard enough in the day of success to hold together an untrained army. In
the day of defeat such a force is apt to become a mere rabble. Some of
the American regiments preserved discipline. Others fell into complete
disorder as, weak and discouraged, they retired to Lake Champlain. Many
soldiers perished of disease. "I did not look into a hut or a tent,"
says an observer, "in which I did not find a dead or dying man." Those
who had huts were fortunate. The fate of some was to die without medical
care and without cover. By the end of June what was left of the force
had reached Crown Point on Lake Champlain.

Benedict Arnold, who had been wounded at Quebec, was now at Crown Point.
Competent critics of the war have held that what Arnold now did saved
the Revolution. In another scene, before the summer ended, the British
had taken New York and made themselves masters of the lower Hudson.
Had they reached in the same season the upper Hudson by way of Lake
Champlain they would have struck blows doubly staggering. This Arnold
saw, and his object was to delay, if he could not defeat, the British
advance. There was no road through the dense forest by the shores of
Lake Champlain and Lake George to the upper Hudson. The British must go
down the lake in boats. This General Carleton had foreseen and he had
urged that with the fleet sent to Quebec should be sent from England,
in sections, boats which could be quickly carried past the rapids of the
Richelieu River and launched on Lake Champlain. They had not come and
the only thing for Carleton to do was to build a flotilla which could
carry an army up the lake and attack Crown Point. The thing was done
but skilled workmen were few and not until the 5th of October were the
little ships afloat on Lake Champlain. Arnold, too, spent the summer in
building boats to meet the attack and it was a strange turn in warfare
which now made him commander in a naval fight. There was a brisk
struggle on Lake Champlain. Carleton had a score or so of vessels;
Arnold not so many. But he delayed Carleton. When he was beaten on the
water he burned the ships not captured and took to the land. When he
could no longer hold Crown Point he burned that place and retreated to
Ticonderoga.

By this time it was late autumn. The British were far from their base
and the Americans were retreating into a friendly country. There is
little doubt that Carleton could have taken Fort Ticonderoga. It fell
quite easily less than a year later. Some of his officers urged him to
press on and do it. But the leaves had already fallen, the bleak winter
was near, and Carleton pictured to himself an army buried deeply in an
enemy country and separated from its base by many scores of miles of
lake and forest. He withdrew to Canada and left Lake Champlain to the
Americans.


CHAPTER III. INDEPENDENCE

Well-meaning people in England found it difficult to understand the
intensity of feeling in America. Britain had piled up a huge debt in
driving France from America. Landowners were paying in taxes no less
than twenty per cent of their incomes from land. The people who had
chiefly benefited by the humiliation of France were the colonists,
now freed from hostile menace and secure for extension over a whole
continent. Why should not they pay some share of the cost of their own
security? Certain facts tended to make Englishmen indignant with the
Americans. Every effort had failed to get them to pay willingly for
their defense. Before the Stamp Act had become law in 1765 the colonies
were given a whole year to devise the raising of money in any way which
they liked better. The burden of what was asked would be light. Why
should not they agree to bear it? Why this talk, repeated by the Whigs
in the British Parliament, of brutal tyranny, oppression, hired minions
imposing slavery, and so on. Where were the oppressed? Could any one
point to a single person who before war broke out had known British
tyranny? What suffering could any one point to as the result of the tax
on tea? The people of England paid a tax on tea four times heavier than
that paid in America. Was not the British Parliament supreme over the
whole Empire? Did not the colonies themselves admit that it had the
right to control their trade overseas? And if men shirk their duty
should they not come under some law of compulsion?

It was thus that many a plain man reasoned in England. The plain man in
America had his own opposing point of view. Debts and taxes in England
were not his concern. He remembered the recent war as vividly as did the
Englishman, and, if the English paid its cost in gold, he had paid his
share in blood and tears. Who made up the armies led by the British
generals in America? More than half the total number who served in
America came from the colonies, the colonies which had barely a third
of the population of Great Britain. True, Britain paid the bill in money
but why not? She was rich with a vast accumulated capital. The war,
partly in America, had given her the key to the wealth of India. Look
at the magnificence, the pomp of servants, plate and pictures, the parks
and gardens, of hundreds of English country houses, and compare this
opulence with the simple mode of life, simplicity imposed by necessity,
of a country gentleman like George Washington of Virginia, reputed to be
the richest man in America. Thousands of tenants in England, owning no
acre of land, were making a larger income than was possible in America
to any owner of broad acres. It was true that America had gained from
the late war. The foreign enemy had been struck down. But had he not
been struck down too for England? Had there not been far more dread in
England of invasion by France and had not the colonies by helping to
ruin France freed England as much as England had freed them? If now the
colonies were asked to pay a share of the bill for the British army that
was a matter for discussion. They had never before done it and they
must not be told that they had to meet the demand within a year or be
compelled to pay. Was it not to impose tyranny and slavery to tell
a people that their property would be taken by force if they did not
choose to give it? What free man would not rather die than yield on such
a point?

The familiar workings of modern democracy have taught us that a great
political issue must be discussed in broad terms of high praise or
severe blame. The contestants will exaggerate both the virtue of
the side they espouse and the malignity of the opposing side; nice
discrimination is not possible. It was inevitable that the dispute with
the colonies should arouse angry vehemence on both sides. The passionate
speech of Patrick Henry in Virginia, in 1763, which made him famous,
and was the forerunner of his later appeal, "Give me Liberty or give me
Death," related to so prosaic a question as the right of disallowance
by England of an act passed by a colonial legislature, a right
exercised long and often before that time and to this day a part of the
constitutional machinery of the British Empire. Few men have lived more
serenely poised than Washington, yet, as we have seen, he hated the
British with an implacable hatred. He was a humane man. In earlier
years, Indian raids on the farmers of Virginia had stirred him to
"deadly sorrow," and later, during his retreat from New York, he was
moved by the cries of the weak and infirm. Yet the same man felt no
touch of pity for the Loyalists of the Revolution. To him they were
detestable parricides, vile traitors, with no right to live. When we
find this note in Washington, in America, we hardly wonder that the
high Tory, Samuel Johnson, in England, should write that the proposed
taxation was no tyranny, that it had not been imposed earlier because
"we do not put a calf into the plough; we wait till he is an ox," and
that the Americans were "a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful
for anything which we allow them short of hanging." Tyranny and treason
are both ugly things. Washington believed that he was fighting the one,
Johnson that he was fighting the other, and neither side would admit the
charge against itself.

Such are the passions aroused by civil strife. We need not now, when
they are, or ought to be, dead, spend any time in deploring them. It
suffices to explain them and the events to which they led. There was
one and really only one final issue. Were the American colonies free to
govern themselves as they liked or might their government in the last
analysis be regulated by Great Britain? The truth is that the colonies
had reached a condition in which they regarded themselves as British
states with their own parliaments, exercising complete jurisdiction in
their own affairs. They intended to use their own judgment and they were
as restless under attempted control from England as England would have
been under control from America. We can indeed always understand the
point of view of Washington if we reverse the position and imagine what
an Englishman would have thought of a claim by America to tax him.

An ancient and proud society is reluctant to change. After a long and
successful war England was prosperous. To her now came riches from India
and the ends of the earth. In society there was such lavish expenditure
that Horace Walpole declared an income of twenty thousand pounds a year
was barely enough. England had an aristocracy the proudest in the world,
for it had not only rank but wealth. The English people were certain of
the invincible superiority of their nation. Every Englishman was taught,
as Disraeli said of a later period, to believe that he occupied a
position better than any one else of his own degree in any other country
in the world. The merchant in England was believed to surpass all others
in wealth and integrity, the manufacturer to have no rivals in skill,
the British sailor to stand in a class by himself, the British officer
to express the last word in chivalry. It followed, of course, that the
motherland was superior to her children overseas. The colonies had no
aristocracy, no great landowners living in stately palaces. They had
almost no manufactures. They had no imposing state system with places
and pensions from which the fortunate might reap a harvest of ten or
even twenty thousand pounds a year. They had no ancient universities
thronged by gilded youth who, if noble, might secure degrees without the
trying ceremony of an examination. They had no Established Church with
the ancient glories of its cathedrals. In all America there was not even
a bishop. In spite of these contrasts the English Whigs insisted upon
the political equality with themselves of the American colonists. The
Tory squire, however, shared Samuel Johnson's view that colonists were
either traders or farmers and that colonial shopkeeping society was
vulgar and contemptible.

George III was ill-fitted by nature to deal with the crisis. The King
was not wholly without natural parts, for his own firm will had
achieved what earlier kings had tried and failed to do; he had mastered
Parliament, made it his obedient tool and himself for a time a despot.
He had some admirable virtues. He was a family man, the father of
fifteen children. He liked quiet amusements and had wholesome tastes. If
industry and belief in his own aims could of themselves make a man
great we might reverence George. He wrote once to Lord North: "I have no
object but to be of use: if that is ensured I am completely happy."
The King was always busy. Ceaseless industry does not, however, include
every virtue, or the author of all evil would rank high in goodness.
Wisdom must be the pilot of good intentions. George was not wise. He was
ill-educated. He had never traveled. He had no power to see the point of
view of others.

As if nature had not sufficiently handicapped George for a high part,
fate placed him on the throne at the immature age of twenty-two.
Henceforth the boy was master, not pupil. Great nobles and obsequious
prelates did him reverence. Ignorant and obstinate, the young King was
determined not only to reign but to rule, in spite of the new doctrine
that Parliament, not the King, carried on the affairs of government
through the leader of the majority in the House of Commons, already
known as the Prime Minister. George could not really change what was the
last expression of political forces in England. The rule of Parliament
had come to stay. Through it and it alone could the realm be governed.
This power, however, though it could not be destroyed, might be
controlled. Parliament, while retaining all its privileges, might yet
carry out the wishes of the sovereign. The King might be his own Prime
Minister. The thing could be done if the King's friends held a majority
of the seats and would do what their master directed. It was a dark day
for England when a king found that he could play off one faction against
another, buy a majority in Parliament, and retain it either by paying
with guineas or with posts and dignities which the bought Parliament
left in his gift. This corruption it was which ruined the first British
Empire.

We need not doubt that George thought it his right and also his duty to
coerce America, or rather, as he said, the clamorous minority which was
trying to force rebellion. He showed no lack of sincerity. On October
26, 1775, while Washington was besieging Boston, he opened Parliament
with a speech which at any rate made the issue clear enough. Britain
would not give up colonies which she had founded with severe toil and
nursed with great kindness. Her army and her navy, both now increased
in size, would make her power respected. She would not, however, deal
harshly with her erring children. Royal mercy would be shown to those
who admitted their error and they need not come to England to secure it.
Persons in America would be authorized to grant pardons and furnish the
guarantees which would proceed from the royal clemency.

Such was the magnanimity of George III. Washington's rage at the tone of
the speech is almost amusing in its vehemence. He, with a mind conscious
of rectitude and sacrifice in a great cause, to ask pardon for his
course! He to bend the knee to this tyrant overseas! Washington himself
was not highly gifted with imagination. He never realized the strength
of the forces in England arrayed on his own side and attributed to the
English, as a whole, sinister and malignant designs always condemned by
the great mass of the English people. They, no less than the Americans,
were the victims of a turn in politics which, for a brief period, and
for only a brief period, left power in the hands of a corrupt Parliament
and a corrupting king.

Ministers were not all corrupt or place-hunters. One of them, the
Earl of Dartmouth, was a saint in spirit. Lord North, the king's chief
minister, was not corrupt. He disliked his office and wished to leave
it. In truth no sweeping simplicity of condemnation will include all the
ministers of George III except on this one point that they allowed to
dictate their policy a narrow-minded and ignorant king. It was their
right to furnish a policy and to exercise the powers of government,
appoint to office, spend the public revenues. Instead they let the King
say that the opinions of his ministers had no avail with him. If we ask
why, the answer is that there was a mixture of motives. North stayed in
office because the King appealed to his loyalty, a plea hard to resist
under an ancient monarchy. Others stayed from love of power or for what
they could get. In that golden age of patronage it was possible for a
man to hold a plurality of offices which would bring to himself many
thousands of pounds a year, and also to secure the reversion of offices
and pensions to his children. Horace Walpole spent a long life in
luxurious ease because of offices with high pay and few duties secured
in the distant days of his father's political power. Contracts to supply
the army and the navy went to friends of the government, sometimes
with disastrous results, since the contractor often knew nothing of
the business he undertook. When, in 1777, the Admiralty boasted that
thirty-five ships of war were ready to put to sea it was found that
there were in fact only six. The system nearly ruined the navy. It
actually happened that planks of a man-of-war fell out through rot and
that she sank. Often ropes and spars could not be had when most needed.
When a public loan was floated the King's friends and they alone were
given the shares at a price which enabled them to make large profits on
the stock market.

The system could endure only as long as the King's friends had a
majority in the House of Commons. Elections must be looked after. The
King must have those on whom he could always depend. He controlled
offices and pensions. With these things he bought members and he had to
keep them bought by repeating the benefits. If the holder of a public
office was thought to be dying the King was already naming to his Prime
Minister the person to whom the office must go when death should occur.
He insisted that many posts previously granted for life should now be
given during his pleasure so that he might dismiss the holders at will.
He watched the words and the votes in Parliament of public men and woe
to those in his power if they displeased him. When he knew that Fox,
his great antagonist, would be absent from Parliament he pressed through
measures which Fox would have opposed. It was not until George III was
King that the buying and selling of boroughs became common. The King
bought votes in the boroughs by paying high prices for trifles. He
even went over the lists of voters and had names of servants of the
government inserted if this seemed needed to make a majority secure.
One of the most unedifying scenes in English history is that of George
making a purchase in a shop at Windsor and because of this patronage
asking for the shopkeeper's support in a local election. The King was
saving and penurious in his habits that he might have the more money to
buy votes. When he had no money left he would go to Parliament and
ask for a special grant for his needs and the bought members could not
refuse the money for their buying.

The people of England knew that Parliament was corrupt. But how to end
the system? The press was not free. Some of it the government bought
and the rest it tried to intimidate though often happily in vain. Only
fragments of the debates in Parliament were published. Not until 1779
did the House of Commons admit the public to its galleries. No great
political meetings were allowed until just before the American war and
in any case the masses had no votes. The great landowners had in their
control a majority of the constituencies. There were scores of pocket
boroughs in which their nominees were as certain of election as peers
were of their seats in the House of Lords. The disease of England
was deep-seated. A wise king could do much, but while George III
survived--and his reign lasted sixty years--there was no hope of a wise
king. A strong minister could impose his will on the King. But only time
and circumstance could evolve a strong minister. Time and circumstance
at length produced the younger Pitt. But it needed the tragedy of two
long wars--those against the colonies and revolutionary France--before
the nation finally threw off the system which permitted the personal
rule of George III and caused the disruption of the Empire. It may thus
be said with some truth that George Washington was instrumental in the
salvation of England.

The ministers of George III loved the sports, the rivalries, the ease,
the remoteness of their rural magnificence. Perverse fashion kept them
in London even in April and May for "the season," just when in the
country nature was most alluring. Otherwise they were off to their
estates whenever they could get away from town. The American Revolution
was not remotely affected by this habit. With ministers long absent in
the country important questions were postponed or forgotten. The crisis
which in the end brought France into the war was partly due to the
carelessness of a minister hurrying away to the country. Lord George
Germain, who directed military operations in America, dictated a letter
which would have caused General Howe to move northward from New York
to meet General Burgoyne advancing from Canada. Germain went off to the
country without waiting to sign the letter; it was mislaid among other
papers; Howe was without needed instructions; and the disaster followed
of Burgoyne's surrender. Fox pointed out, that, at a time when there
was a danger that a foreign army might land in England, not one of the
King's ministers was less than fifty miles from London. They were in
their parks and gardens, or hunting or fishing. Nor did they stay away
for a few days only. The absence was for weeks or even months.

It is to the credit of Whig leaders in England, landowners and
aristocrats as they were, that they supported with passion the American
cause. In America, where the forces of the Revolution were in control,
the Loyalist who dared to be bold for his opinions was likely to be
tarred and feathered and to lose his property. There was an embittered
intolerance. In England, however, it was an open question in society
whether to be for or against the American cause. The Duke of Richmond,
a great grandson of Charles II, said in the House of Lords that under no
code should the fighting Americans be considered traitors. What they did
was "perfectly justifiable in every possible political and moral
sense." All the world knows that Chatham and Burke and Fox urged the
conciliation of America and hundreds took the same stand. Burke said of
General Conway, a man of position, that when he secured a majority in
the House of Commons against the Stamp Act his face shone as the face of
an angel. Since the bishops almost to a man voted with the King, Conway
attacked them as in this untrue to their high office. Sir George Savile,
whose benevolence, supported by great wealth, made him widely respected
and loved, said that the Americans were right in appealing to arms. Coke
of Norfolk was a landed magnate who lived in regal style. His seat of
Holkham was one of those great new palaces which the age reared at
such elaborate cost. It was full of beautiful things--the art of
Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Van Dyke, rare manuscripts, books,
and tapestries. So magnificent was Coke that a legend long ran that his
horses were shod with gold and that the wheels of his chariots were of
solid silver. In the country he drove six horses. In town only the King
did this. Coke despised George III, chiefly on account of his American
policy, and to avoid the reproach of rivaling the King's estate, he
took joy in driving past the palace in London with a donkey as his
sixth animal and in flicking his whip at the King. When he was offered
a peerage by the King he denounced with fiery wrath the minister through
whom it was offered as attempting to bribe him. Coke declared that if
one of the King's ministers held up a hat in the House of Commons and
said that it was a green bag the majority of the members would solemnly
vote that it was a green bag. The bribery which brought this blind
obedience of Toryism filled Coke with fury. In youth he had been taught
never to trust a Tory and he could say "I never have and, by God, I
never will." One of his children asked their mother whether Tories were
born wicked or after birth became wicked. The uncompromising answer was:
"They are born wicked and they grow up worse."

There is, of course, in much of this something of the malignance of
party. In an age when one reverend theologian, Toplady, called another
theologian, John Wesley, "a low and puny tadpole in Divinity" we must
expect harsh epithets. But behind this bitterness lay a deep conviction
of the righteousness of the American cause. At a great banquet at
Holkham, Coke omitted the toast of the King; but every night during the
American war he drank the health of Washington as the greatest man on
earth. The war, he said, was the King's war, ministers were his tools,
the press was bought. He denounced later the King's reception of the
traitor Arnold. When the King's degenerate son, who became George IV,
after some special misconduct, wrote to propose his annual visit to
Holkham, Coke replied, "Holkham is open to strangers on Tuesdays." It
was an independent and irate England which spoke in Coke. Those who
paid taxes, he said, should control those who governed. America was not
getting fair play. Both Coke and Fox, and no doubt many others, wore
waistcoats of blue and buff because these were the colors of the
uniforms of Washington's army.

Washington and Coke exchanged messages and they would have been
congenial companions; for Coke, like Washington, was above all a farmer
and tried to improve agriculture. Never for a moment, he said, had
time hung heavy on his hands in the country. He began on his estate the
culture of the potato, and for some time the best he could hear of it
from his stolid tenantry was that it would not poison the pigs.
Coke would have fought the levy of a penny of unjust taxation and he
understood Washington. The American gentleman and the English gentleman
had a common outlook.

Now had come, however, the hour for political separation. By
reluctant but inevitable steps America made up its mind to declare for
independence. At first continued loyalty to the King was urged on the
plea that he was in the hands of evil-minded ministers, inspired by
diabolical rage, or in those of an "infernal villain" such as the
soldier, General Gage, a second Pharaoh; though it must be admitted that
even then the King was "the tyrant of Great Britain." After Bunker Hill
spasmodic declarations of independence were made here and there by local
bodies. When Congress organized an army, invaded Canada, and besieged
Boston, it was hard to protest loyalty to a King whose forces were
those of an enemy. Moreover independence would, in the eyes at least of
foreign governments, give the colonies the rights of belligerents and
enable them to claim for their fighting forces the treatment due to a
regular army and the exchange of prisoners with the British. They could,
too, make alliances with other nations. Some clamored for independence
for a reason more sinister--that they might punish those who held to the
King and seize their property. There were thirteen colonies in arms
and each of them had to form some kind of government which would work
without a king as part of its mechanism. One by one such governments
were formed. King George, as we have seen, helped the colonies to make
up their minds. They were in no mood to be called erring children who
must implore undeserved mercy and not force a loving parent to take
unwilling vengeance. "Our plantations" and "our subjects in the
colonies" would simply not learn obedience. If George III would not
reply to their petitions until they laid down their arms, they could
manage to get on without a king. If England, as Horace Walpole admitted,
would not take them seriously and speakers in Parliament called them
obscure ruffians and cowards, so much the worse for England.

It was an Englishman, Thomas Paine, who fanned the fire into
unquenchable flames. He had recently been dismissed from a post in
the excise in England and was at this time earning in Philadelphia a
precarious living by his pen. Paine said it was the interest of America
to break the tie with Europe. Was a whole continent in America to be
governed by an island a thousand leagues away? Of what advantage was
it to remain connected with Great Britain? It was said that a united
British Empire could defy the world, but why should America defy the
world? "Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation."
Interested men, weak men, prejudiced men, moderate men who do not really
know Europe, may urge reconciliation, but nature is against it. Paine
broke loose in that denunciation of kings with which ever since the
world has been familiar. The wretched Briton, said Paine, is under a
king and where there was a king there was no security for liberty.
Kings were crowned ruffians and George III in particular was a sceptered
savage, a royal brute, and other evil things. He had inflicted on
America injuries not to be forgiven. The blood of the slain, not less
than the true interests of posterity, demanded separation. Paine called
his pamphlet Common Sense. It was published on January 9, 1776. More
than a hundred thousand copies were quickly sold and it brought decision
to many wavering minds.

In the first days of 1776 independence had become a burning question.
New England had made up its mind. Virginia was keen for separation,
keener even than New England. New York and Pennsylvania long hesitated
and Maryland and North Carolina were very lukewarm. Early in 1776
Washington was advocating independence and Greene and other army leaders
were of the same mind. Conservative forces delayed the settlement, and
at last Virginia, in this as in so many other things taking the
lead, instructed its delegates to urge a declaration by Congress of
independence. Richard Henry Lee, a member of that honored family which
later produced the ablest soldier of the Civil War, moved in Congress on
June 7, 1776, that "these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be,
Free and Independent States." The preparation of a formal declaration
was referred to a committee of which John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
were members. It is interesting to note that each of them became
President of the United States and that both died on July 4, 1826, the
fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams related
long after that he and Jefferson formed the sub-committee to draft the
Declaration and that he urged Jefferson to undertake the task since "you
can write ten times better than I can." Jefferson accordingly wrote
the paper. Adams was delighted "with its high tone and the flights of
Oratory" but he did not approve of the flaming attack on the King, as
a tyrant. "I never believed," he said, "George to be a tyrant in
disposition and in nature." There was, he thought, too much passion for
a grave and solemn document. He was, however, the principal speaker in
its support.

There is passion in the Declaration from beginning to end, and not the
restrained and chastened passion which we find in the great utterances
of an American statesman of a later day, Abraham Lincoln. Compared with
Lincoln, Jefferson is indeed a mere amateur in the use of words. Lincoln
would not have scattered in his utterances overwrought phrases about
"death, desolation and tyranny" or talked about pledging "our lives, our
fortunes and our sacred honour." He indulged in no "Flights of Oratory."
The passion in the Declaration is concentrated against the King. We do
not know what were the emotions of George when he read it. We know that
many Englishmen thought that it spoke truth. Exaggerations there are
which make the Declaration less than a completely candid document. The
King is accused of abolishing English laws in Canada with the intention
of "introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies." What had
been done in Canada was to let the conquered French retain their own
laws--which was not tyranny but magnanimity. Another clause of the
Declaration, as Jefferson first wrote it, made George responsible for
the slave trade in America with all its horrors and crimes. We may doubt
whether that not too enlightened monarch had even more than vaguely
heard of the slave trade. This phase of the attack upon him was too much
for the slave owners of the South and the slave traders of New England,
and the clause was struck out.

Nearly fourscore and ten years later, Abraham Lincoln, at a supreme
crisis in the nation's life, told in Independence Hall, Philadelphia,
what the Declaration of Independence meant to him. "I have never,"
he said, "had a feeling politically which did not spring from the
sentiments in the Declaration of Independence"; and then he spoke of
the sacrifices which the founders of the Republic had made for these
principles. He asked, too, what was the idea which had held together the
nation thus founded. It was not the breaking away from Great Britain. It
was the assertion of human right. We should speak in terms of reverence
of a document which became a classic utterance of political right and
which inspired Lincoln in his fight to end slavery and to make "Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness" realities for all men. In England the
colonists were often taunted with being "rebels." The answer was not
wanting that ancestors of those who now cried "rebel" had themselves
been rebels a hundred years earlier when their own liberty was at stake.

There were in Congress men who ventured to say that the Declaration
was a libel on the government of England; men like John Dickinson of
Pennsylvania and John Jay of New York, who feared that the radical
elements were moving too fast. Radicalism, however, was in the saddle,
and on the 2d of July the "resolution respecting independency" was
adopted. On July 4, 1776, Congress debated and finally adopted
the formal Declaration of Independence. The members did not vote
individually. The delegates from each colony cast the vote of the
colony. Twelve colonies voted for the Declaration. New York alone was
silent because its delegates had not been instructed as to their vote,
but New York, too, soon fell into line. It was a momentous occasion and
was understood to be such. The vote seems to have been reached in the
late afternoon. Anxious citizens were waiting in the streets. There
was a bell in the State House, and an old ringer waited there for the
signal. When there was long delay he is said to have muttered: "They
will never do it! they will never do it!" Then came the word, "Ring!
Ring!" It is an odd fact that the inscription on the bell, placed there
long before the days of the trouble, was from Leviticus: "Proclaim
liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." The
bells of Philadelphia rang and cannon boomed. As the news spread there
were bonfires and illuminations in all the colonies. On the day after
the Declaration the Virginia Convention struck out "O Lord, save the
King" from the church service. On the 10th of July Washington, who
by this time had moved to New York, paraded the army and had the
Declaration read at the head of each brigade. That evening the statue
of King George in New York was laid in the dust. It is a comment on the
changes in human fortune that within little more than a year the British
had taken Philadelphia, that the clamorous bell had been hid away for
safety, and that colonial wiseacres were urging the rescinding of the
ill-timed Declaration and the reunion of the British Empire.


CHAPTER IV. THE LOSS OF NEW YORK


Washington's success at Boston had one good effect. It destroyed Tory
influence in that Puritan stronghold. New England was henceforth of a
temper wholly revolutionary; and New England tradition holds that what
its people think today other Americans think tomorrow. But, in the
summer of this year 1776, though no serious foe was visible at any
point in the revolted colonies, a menace haunted every one of them. The
British had gone away by sea; by sea they would return. On land armies
move slowly and visibly; but on the sea a great force may pass out of
sight and then suddenly reappear at an unexpected point. This is
the haunting terror of sea power. Already the British had destroyed
Falmouth, now Portland, Maine, and Norfolk, the principal town in
Virginia. Washington had no illusions of security. He was anxious above
all for the safety of New York, commanding the vital artery of the
Hudson, which must at all costs be defended. Accordingly, in April, he
took his army to New York and established there his own headquarters.

Even before Washington moved to New York, three great British
expeditions were nearing America. One of these we have already seen at
Quebec. Another was bound for Charleston, to land there an army and to
make the place a rallying center for the numerous but harassed Loyalists
of the South. The third and largest of these expeditions was to strike
at New York and, by a show of strength, bring the colonists to reason
and reconciliation. If mildness failed the British intended to capture
New York, sail up the Hudson and cut off New England from the other
colonies.

The squadron destined for Charleston carried an army in command of a
fine soldier, Lord Cornwallis, destined later to be the defeated
leader in the last dramatic scene of the war. In May this fleet reached
Wilmington, North Carolina, and took on board two thousand men under
General Sir Henry Clinton, who had been sent by Howe from Boston in
vain to win the Carolinas and who now assumed military command of the
combined forces. Admiral Sir Peter Parker commanded the fleet, and on
the 4th of June he was off Charleston Harbor. Parker found that in order
to cross the bar he would have to lighten his larger ships. This was
done by the laborious process of removing the guns, which, of course,
he had to replace when the bar was crossed. On the 28th of June, Parker
drew up his ships before Fort Moultrie in the harbor. He had expected
simultaneous aid by land from three thousand soldiers put ashore from
the fleet on a sandbar, but these troops could give him no help against
the fort from which they were cut off by a channel of deep water. A
battle soon proved the British ships unable to withstand the American
fire from Fort Moultrie. Late in the evening Parker drew off, with
two hundred and twenty-five casualties against an American loss of
thirty-seven. The check was greater than that of Bunker Hill, for there
the British took the ground which they attacked. The British sailors
bore witness to the gallantry of the defense: "We never had such a
drubbing in our lives," one of them testified. Only one of Parker's ten
ships was seaworthy after the fight. It took him three weeks to refit,
and not until the 4th of August did his defeated ships reach New York.

A mighty armada of seven hundred ships had meanwhile sailed into the
Bay of New York. This fleet was commanded by Admiral Lord Howe and it
carried an army of thirty thousand men led by his younger brother, Sir
William Howe, who had commanded at Bunker Hill. The General was an able
and well-informed soldier. He had a brilliant record of service in the
Seven Years' War, with Wolfe in Canada, then in France itself, and in
the West Indies. In appearance he was tall, dark, and coarse. His face
showed him to be a free user of wine. This may explain some of his
faults as a general. He trusted too much to subordinates; he was
leisurely and rather indolent, yet capable of brilliant and rapid
action. In America his heart was never in his task. He was member of
Parliament for Nottingham and had publicly condemned the quarrel with
America and told his electors that in it he would take no command. He
had not kept his word, but his convictions remained. It would be to
accuse Howe of treason to say that he did not do his best in America.
Lack of conviction, however, affects action. Howe had no belief that his
country was in the right in the war and this handicapped him as against
the passionate conviction of Washington that all was at stake which made
life worth living.

The General's elder brother, Lord Howe, was another Whig who had no
belief that the war was just. He sat in the House of Lords while his
brother sat in the House of Commons. We rather wonder that the King
should have been content to leave in Whig hands his fortunes in America
both by land and sea. At any rate, here were the Howes more eager
to make peace than to make war and commanded to offer terms of
reconciliation. Lord Howe had an unpleasant face, so dark that he was
called "Black Dick"; he was a silent, awkward man, shy and harsh in
manner. In reality, however, he was kind, liberal in opinion, sober, and
beloved by those who knew him best. His pacific temper towards America
was not due to a dislike of war. He was a fighting sailor. Nearly twenty
years later, on June 1, 1794, when he was in command of a fleet in touch
with the French enemy, the sailors watched him to find any indication
that the expected action would take place. Then the word went round: "We
shall have the fight today; Black Dick has been smiling." They had it,
and Howe won a victory which makes his name famous in the annals of the
sea.

By the middle of July the two brothers were at New York. The soldier,
having waited at Halifax since the evacuation of Boston, had arrived,
and landed his army on Staten Island, on the day before Congress made
the Declaration of Independence, which, as now we can see, ended finally
any chance of reconciliation. The sailor arrived nine days later. Lord
Howe was wont to regret that he had not arrived a little earlier, since
the concessions which he had to offer might have averted the Declaration
of Independence. In truth, however, he had little to offer. Humor and
imagination are useful gifts in carrying on human affairs, but George
III had neither. He saw no lack of humor in now once more offering full
and free pardon to a repentant Washington and his comrades, though John
Adams was excepted by name¹; in repudiating the right to exist of the
Congress at Philadelphia, and in refusing to recognize the military
rank of the rebel general whom it had named: he was to be addressed in
civilian style as "George Washington Esq." The King and his ministers
had no imagination to call up the picture of high-hearted men fighting
for rights which they held dear. ¹Trevelyan, American Revolution, Part
II, vol. I (New Ed., vol. II), 261.

Lord Howe went so far as to address a letter to "George Washington Esq.
&c. &c.," and Washington agreed to an interview with the officer who
bore it. In imposing uniform and with the stateliest manner, Washington,
who had an instinct for effect, received the envoy. The awed messenger
explained that the symbols "&c. &c." meant everything, including, of
course, military titles; but Washington only said smilingly that they
might mean anything, including, of course, an insult, and refused to
take the letter. He referred to Congress, a body which Howe could not
recognize, the grave question of the address on an envelope and Congress
agreed that the recognition of his rank was necessary. There was nothing
to do but to go on with the fight.

Washington's army held the city of New York, at the southerly point
of Manhattan Island. The Hudson River, separating the island from the
mainland of New Jersey on the west, is at its mouth two miles wide. The
northern and eastern sides of the island are washed by the Harlem River,
flowing out of the Hudson about a dozen miles north of the city, and
broadening into the East River, about a mile wide where it separates New
York from Brooklyn Heights, on Long Island. Encamped on Staten Island,
on the south, General Howe could, with the aid of the fleet, land at any
of half a dozen vulnerable points. Howe had the further advantage of
a much larger force. Washington had in all some twenty thousand men,
numbers of them serving for short terms and therefore for the most part
badly drilled. Howe had twenty-five thousand well-trained soldiers, and
he could, in addition, draw men from the fleet, which would give him in
all double the force of Washington.

In such a situation even the best skill of Washington was likely only
to qualify defeat. He was advised to destroy New York and retire to
positions more tenable. But even if he had so desired, Congress, his
master, would not permit him to burn the city, and he had to make plans
to defend it. Brooklyn Heights so commanded New York that enemy cannon
planted there would make the city untenable. Accordingly Washington
placed half his force on Long Island to defend Brooklyn Heights and
in doing so made the fundamental error of cutting his army in two and
dividing it by an arm of the sea in presence of overwhelming hostile
naval power.

On the 22d of August Howe ferried fifteen thousand men across the
Narrows to Long Island, in order to attack the position on Brooklyn
Heights from the rear. Before him lay wooded hills across which led
three roads converging at Brooklyn Heights beyond the hills. On the east
a fourth road led round the hills. In the dark of the night of the 26th
of August Howe set his army in motion on all these roads, in order by
daybreak to come to close quarters with the Americans and drive them
back to the Heights. The movement succeeded perfectly. The British made
terrible use of the bayonet. By the evening of the twenty-seventh the
Americans, who fought well against overwhelming odds, had lost nearly
two thousand men in casualties and prisoners, six field pieces, and
twenty-six heavy guns. The two chief commanders, Sullivan and Stirling,
were among the prisoners, and what was left of the army had been driven
back to Brooklyn Heights. Howe's critics said that had he pressed the
attack further he could have made certain the capture of the whole
American force on Long Island.

Criticism of what might have been is easy and usually futile. It might
be said of Washington, too, that he should not have kept an army so far
in front of his lines behind Brooklyn Heights facing a superior enemy,
and with, for a part of it, retreat possible only by a single causeway
across a marsh three miles long. When he realized, on the 28th of
August, what Howe had achieved, he increased the defenders of Brooklyn
Heights to ten thousand men, more than half his army. This was another
cardinal error. British ships were near and but for unfavorable winds
might have sailed up to Brooklyn. Washington hoped and prayed that Howe
would try to carry Brooklyn Heights by assault. Then there would have
been at least slaughter on the scale of Bunker Hill. But Howe had
learned caution. He made no reckless attack, and soon Washington found
that he must move away or face the danger of losing every man on Long
Island.

On the night of the 29th of August there was clear moonlight, with fog
towards daybreak. A British army of twenty-five thousand men was only
some six hundred yards from the American lines. A few miles from the
shore lay at anchor a great British fleet with, it is to be presumed,
its patrols on the alert. Yet, during that night, ten thousand American
troops were marched down to boats on the strand at Brooklyn and, with
all their stores, were carried across a mile of water to New York. There
must have been the splash of oars and the grating of keels, orders given
in tones above a whisper, the complex sounds of moving bodies of men.
It was all done under the eye of Washington. We can picture that tall
figure moving about on the strand at Brooklyn, which he was the last
to leave. Not a sound disturbed the slumbers of the British. An army
in retreat does not easily defend itself. Boats from the British fleet
might have brought panic to the Americans in the darkness and the
British army should at least have known that they were gone. By seven in
the morning the ten thousand American soldiers were for the time safe
in New York, and we may suppose that the two Howes were asking eager
questions and wondering how it had all happened.

Washington had shown that he knew when and how to retire. Long Island
was his first battle and he had lost. Now retreat was his first great
tactical achievement. He could not stay in New York and so sent at once
the chief part of the army, withdrawn from Brooklyn, to the line of the
Harlem River at the north end of the island. He realized that his shore
batteries could not keep the British fleet from sailing up both the
East and the Hudson Rivers and from landing a force on Manhattan Island
almost where it liked. Then the city of New York would be surrounded by
a hostile fleet and a hostile army. The Howes could have performed this
maneuver as soon as they had a favorable wind. There was, we know, great
confusion in New York, and Washington tells us how his heart was torn by
the distress of the inhabitants. The British gave him plenty of time to
make plans, and for a reason. We have seen that Lord Howe was not only
an admiral to make war but also an envoy to make peace. The British
victory on Long Island might, he thought, make Congress more willing to
negotiate. So now he sent to Philadelphia the captured American General
Sullivan, with the request that some members of Congress might confer
privately on the prospects for peace.

Howe probably did not realize that the Americans had the British quality
of becoming more resolute by temporary reverses. By this time, too,
suspicion of every movement on the part of Great Britain had become
a mania. Every one in Congress seems to have thought that Howe was
planning treachery. John Adams, excepted by name from British offers of
pardon, called Sullivan a "decoy duck" and, as he confessed, laughed,
scolded, and grieved at any negotiation. The wish to talk privately with
members of Congress was called an insulting way of avoiding recognition
of that body. In spite of this, even the stalwart Adams and the suave
Franklin were willing to be members of a committee which went to meet
Lord Howe. With great sorrow Howe now realized that he had no power to
grant what Congress insisted upon, the recognition of independence, as a
preliminary to negotiation. There was nothing for it but war.

On the 15th of September the British struck the blow too long delayed
had war been their only interest. New York had to sit nearly helpless
while great men-of-war passed up both the Hudson and the East River with
guns sweeping the shores of Manhattan Island. At the same time General
Howe sent over in boats from Long Island to the landing at Kip's Bay,
near the line of the present Thirty-fourth Street, an army to cut off
the city from the northern part of the island. Washington marched in
person with two New England regiments to dispute the landing and give
him time for evacuation. To his rage panic seized his men and they
turned and fled, leaving him almost alone not a hundred yards from the
enemy. A stray shot at that moment might have influenced greatly modern
history, for, as events were soon to show, Washington was the mainstay
of the American cause. He too had to get away and Howe's force landed
easily enough.

Meanwhile, on the west shore of the island, there was an animated scene.
The roads were crowded with refugees fleeing northward from New York.
These civilians Howe had no reason to stop, but there marched, too, out
of New York four thousand men, under Israel Putnam, who got safely away
northward. Only leisurely did Howe extend his line across the island so
as to cut off the city. The story, not more trustworthy than many other
legends of war, is that Mrs. Murray, living in a country house near what
now is Murray Hill, invited the General to luncheon, and that to enjoy
this pleasure he ordered a halt for his whole force. Generals sometimes
do foolish things but it is not easy to call up a picture of Howe, in
the midst of a busy movement of troops, receiving the lady's invitation,
accepting it, and ordering the whole army to halt while he lingered over
the luncheon table. There is no doubt that his mind was still divided
between making war and making peace. Probably Putnam had already got
away his men, and there was no purpose in stopping the refugees in that
flight from New York which so aroused the pity of Washington. As it was
Howe took sixty-seven guns. By accident, or, it is said, by design of
the Americans themselves, New York soon took fire and one-third of the
little city was burned.

After the fall of New York there followed a complex campaign. The
resourceful Washington was now, during his first days of active warfare,
pitting himself against one of the most experienced of British generals.
Fleet and army were acting together. The aim of Howe was to get control
of the Hudson and to meet half way the advance from Canada by way of
Lake Champlain which Carleton was leading. On the 12th of October, when
autumn winds were already making the nights cold, Howe moved. He did
not attack Washington who lay in strength at the Harlem. That would
have been to play Washington's game. Instead he put the part of his army
still on Long Island in ships which then sailed through the dangerous
currents of Hell Gate and landed at Throg's Neck, a peninsula on the
sound across from Long Island. Washington parried this movement by so
guarding the narrow neck of the peninsula leading to the mainland that
the cautious Howe shrank from a frontal attack across a marsh. After a
delay of six days, he again embarked his army, landed a few miles
above Throg's Neck in the hope of cutting off Washington from retreat
northward, only to find Washington still north of him at White Plains.
A sharp skirmish followed in which Howe lost over two hundred men and
Washington only one hundred and forty. Washington, masterly in retreat,
then withdrew still farther north among hills difficult of attack.

Howe had a plan which made a direct attack on Washington unnecessary. He
turned southward and occupied the east shore of the Hudson River. On the
16th of November took place the worst disaster which had yet befallen
American arms. Fort Washington, lying just south of the Harlem, was the
only point still held on Manhattan Island by the Americans. In modern
war it has become clear that fortresses supposedly strong may be only
traps for their defenders. Fort Washington stood on the east bank of the
Hudson opposite Fort Lee, on the west bank. These forts could not fulfil
the purpose for which they were intended, of stopping British ships.
Washington saw that the two forts should be abandoned. But the civilians
in Congress, who, it must be remembered, named the generals and had
final authority in directing the war, were reluctant to accept the
loss involved in abandoning the forts and gave orders that every effort
should be made to hold them. Greene, on the whole Washington's best
general, was in command of the two positions and was left to use his own
judgment. On the 15th of November, by a sudden and rapid march across
the island, Howe appeared before Fort Washington and summoned it to
surrender on pain of the rigors of war, which meant putting the garrison
to the sword should he have to take the place by storm. The answer was a
defiance; and on the next day Howe attacked in overwhelming force. There
was severe fighting. The casualties of the British were nearly five
hundred, but they took the huge fort with its three thousand defenders
and a great quantity of munitions of war. Howe's threat was not carried
out. There was no massacre.

Across the river at Fort Lee the helpless Washington watched this great
disaster. He had need still to look out, for Fort Lee was itself doomed.
On the nineteenth Lord Cornwallis with five thousand men crossed the
river five miles above Fort Lee. General Greene barely escaped with
the two thousand men in the fort, leaving behind one hundred and forty
cannon, stores, tools, and even the men's blankets. On the twentieth the
British flag was floating over Fort Lee and Washington's whole force
was in rapid flight across New Jersey, hardly pausing until it had been
ferried over the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.

Treachery, now linked to military disaster, made Washington's position
terrible. Charles Lee, Horatio Gates, and Richard Montgomery were
three important officers of the regular British army who fought on the
American side. Montgomery had been killed at Quebec; the defects of
Gates were not yet conspicuous; and Lee was next to Washington the most
trusted American general. The names Washington and Lee of the twin forts
on opposite sides of the Hudson show how the two generals stood in the
public mind. While disaster was overtaking Washington, Lee had seven
thousand men at North Castle on the east bank of the Hudson, a few miles
above Fort Washington, blocking Howe's advance farther up the river. On
the day after the fall of Fort Washington, Lee received positive
orders to cross the Hudson at once. Three days later Fort Lee fell, and
Washington repeated the order. Lee did not budge. He was safe where
he was and could cross the river and get away into New Jersey when he
liked. He seems deliberately to have left Washington to face complete
disaster and thus prove his incompetence; then, as the undefeated
general, he could take the chief command. There is no evidence that he
had intrigued with Howe, but he thought that he could be the peacemaker
between Great Britain and America, with untold possibilities of ambition
in that rôle. He wrote of Washington at this time, to his friend Gates,
as weak and "most damnably deficient." Nemesis, however, overtook him.
In the end he had to retreat across the Hudson to northern New Jersey.
Here many of the people were Tories. Lee fell into a trap, was captured
in bed at a tavern by a hard-riding party of British cavalry, and
carried off a prisoner, obliged to bestride a horse in night gown and
slippers. Not always does fate appear so just in her strokes.

In December, though the position of Washington was very bad, all was
not lost. The chief aim of Howe was to secure the line of the Hudson and
this he had not achieved. At Stony Point, which lies up the Hudson about
fifty miles from New York, the river narrows and passes through what is
almost a mountain gorge, easily defended. Here Washington had erected
fortifications which made it at least difficult for a British force to
pass up the river. Moreover in the highlands of northern New Jersey,
with headquarters at Morristown, General Sullivan, recently exchanged,
and General Gates now had Lee's army and also the remnants of the force
driven from Canada. But in retreating across New Jersey Washington
had been forsaken by thousands of men, beguiled in part by the Tory
population, discouraged by defeat, and in many cases with the right to
go home, since their term of service had expired. All that remained
of Washington's army after the forces of Sullivan and Gates joined him
across the Delaware in Pennsylvania, was about four thousand men.

Howe was determined to have Philadelphia as well as New York and
could place some reliance on Tory help in Pennsylvania. He had pursued
Washington to the Delaware and would have pushed on across that river
had not his alert foe taken care that all the boats should be on the
wrong shore. As it was, Howe occupied the left bank of the Delaware with
his chief post at Trenton. If he made sure of New Jersey he could go on
to Philadelphia when the river was frozen over or indeed when he liked.
Even the Congress had fled to Baltimore. There were British successes in
other quarters. Early in December Lord Howe took the fleet to Newport.
Soon he controlled the whole of Rhode Island and checked the American
privateers who had made it their base. The brothers issued proclamations
offering protection to all who should within sixty days return to their
British allegiance and many people of high standing in New York and New
Jersey accepted the offer. Howe wrote home to England the glad news of
victory. Philadelphia would probably fall before spring and it looked as
if the war was really over.

In this darkest hour Washington struck a blow which changed the whole
situation. We associate with him the thought of calm deliberation.
Now, however, was he to show his strongest quality as a general to be
audacity. At the Battle of the Marne, in 1914, the French General Foch
sent the despatch: "My center is giving way; my right is retreating; the
situation is excellent: I am attacking." Washington's position seemed
as nearly hopeless and he, too, had need of some striking action. A
campaign marked by his own blundering and by the treachery of a trusted
general had ended in seeming ruin. Pennsylvania at his back and New
Jersey before him across the Delaware were less than half loyal to the
American cause and probably willing to accept peace on almost any terms.
Never was a general in a position where greater risks must be taken for
salvation. As Washington pondered what was going on among the British
across the Delaware, a bold plan outlined itself in his mind. Howe,
he knew, had gone to New York to celebrate a triumphant Christmas. His
absence from the front was certain to involve slackness. It was Germans
who held the line of the Delaware, some thirteen hundred of them under
Colonel Rahl at Trenton, two thousand under Von Donop farther down the
river at Bordentown; and with Germans perhaps more than any other
people Christmas is a season of elaborate festivity. On this their first
Christmas away from home many of the Germans would be likely to be
off their guard either through homesickness or dissipation. They cared
nothing for either side. There had been much plundering in New Jersey
and discipline was relaxed.

Howe had been guilty of the folly of making strong the posts farthest
from the enemy and weak those nearest to him. He had, indeed, ordered
Rahl to throw up redoubts for the defense of Trenton, but this, as
Washington well knew, had not been done for Rahl despised his enemy and
spoke of the American army as already lost. Washington's bold plan
was to recross the Delaware and attack Trenton. There were to be three
crossings. One was to be against Von Donop at Bordentown below Trenton,
the second at Trenton itself. These two attacks were designed to prevent
aid to Trenton. The third force with which Washington himself went was
to cross the river some nine miles above the town.

Christmas Day, 1776, was dismally cold. There was a driving storm of
sleet and the broad swollen stream of the Delaware, dotted with dark
masses of floating ice, offered a chill prospect. To take an army with
its guns across that threatening flood was indeed perilous. Gates and
other generals declared that the scheme was too difficult to be carried
out. Only one of the three forces crossed the river. Washington, with
iron will, was not to be turned from his purpose. He had skilled boatmen
from New England. The crossing took no less than ten hours and a great
part of it was done in wintry darkness. When the army landed on the New
Jersey shore it had a march of nine miles in sleet and rain in order
to reach Trenton by daybreak. It is said that some of the men marched
barefoot leaving tracks of blood in the snow. The arms of some were lost
and those of others were wet and useless but Washington told them that
they must depend the more on the bayonet. He attacked Trenton in broad
daylight. There was a sharp fight. Rahl, the commander, and some seventy
men, were killed and a thousand men surrendered.

Even now Washington's position was dangerous. Von Donop, with two
thousand men, lay only a few miles down the river. Had he marched at
once on Trenton, as he should have done, the worn out little force of
Washington might have met with disaster. What Von Donop did when the
alarm reached him was to retreat as fast as he could to Princeton, a
dozen miles to the rear towards New York, leaving behind his sick and
all his heavy equipment. Meanwhile Washington, knowing his danger, had
turned back across the Delaware with a prisoner for every two of his
men. When, however, he saw what Von Donop had done he returned on the
twenty-ninth to Trenton, sent out scouting parties, and roused the
country so that in every bit of forest along the road to Princeton there
were men, dead shots, to make difficult a British advance to retake
Trenton.

The reverse had brought consternation at New York. Lord Cornwallis was
about to embark for England, the bearer of news of overwhelming victory.
Now, instead, he was sent to drive back Washington. It was no easy task
for Cornwallis to reach Trenton, for Washington's scouting parties and a
force of six hundred men under Greene were on the road to harass him. On
the evening of the 2d of January, however, he reoccupied Trenton.
This time Washington had not recrossed the Delaware but had retreated
southward and was now entrenched on the southern bank of the little
river Assanpink, which flows into the Delaware. Reinforcements were
following Cornwallis. That night he sharply cannonaded Washington's
position and was as sharply answered. He intended to attack in force
in the morning. To the skill and resource of Washington he paid the
compliment of saying that at last he had run down the "Old Fox."

Then followed a maneuver which, years after, Cornwallis, a generous
foe, told Washington was one of the most surprising and brilliant in
the history of war. There was another "old fox" in Europe, Frederick the
Great, of Prussia, who knew war if ever man knew it, and he, too, from
this movement ranked Washington among the great generals. The maneuver
was simple enough. Instead of taking the obvious course of again
retreating across the Delaware Washington decided to advance, to get
in behind Cornwallis, to try to cut his communications, to threaten the
British base of supply and then, if a superior force came up, to retreat
into the highlands of New Jersey. There he could keep an unbroken
line as far east as the Hudson, menace the British in New Jersey, and
probably force them to withdraw to the safety of New York.

All through the night of January 2, 1777, Washington's camp fires burned
brightly and the British outposts could hear the sound of voices and of
the spade and pickaxe busy in throwing up entrenchments. The fires
died down towards morning and the British awoke to find the enemy camp
deserted. Washington had carried his whole army by a roundabout route to
the Princeton road and now stood between Cornwallis and his base. There
was some sharp fighting that day near Princeton. Washington had to
defeat and get past the reinforcements coming to Cornwallis. He reached
Princeton and then slipped away northward and made his headquarters at
Morristown. He had achieved his purpose. The British with Washington
entrenched on their flank were not safe in New Jersey. The only thing
to do was to withdraw to New York. By his brilliant advance Washington
recovered the whole of New Jersey with the exception of some minor
positions near the sea. He had changed the face of the war. In London
there was momentary rejoicing over Howe's recent victories, but it was
soon followed by distressing news of defeat. Through all the colonies
ran inspiring tidings. There had been doubts whether, after all,
Washington was the heaven-sent leader. Now both America and Europe
learned to recognize his skill. He had won a reputation, though not yet
had he saved a cause.



CHAPTER V. THE LOSS OF PHILADELPHIA


Though the outlook for Washington was brightened by his success in New
Jersey, it was still depressing enough. The British had taken New York,
they could probably take Philadelphia when they liked, and no place
near the seacoast was safe. According to the votes in Parliament, by the
spring of 1777 Britain was to have an army of eighty-nine thousand men,
of whom fifty-seven thousand were intended for colonial garrisons and
for the prosecution of the war in America. These numbers were in fact
never reached, but the army of forty thousand in America was formidable
compared with Washington's forces. The British were not hampered by the
practice of enlisting men for only a few months, which marred so much of
Washington's effort. Above all they had money and adequate resources.
In a word they had the things which Washington lacked during almost the
whole of the war.

Washington called his success in the attack at Trenton a lucky stroke.
It was luck which had far-reaching consequences. Howe had the fixed idea
that to follow the capture of New York by that of Philadelphia, the most
populous city in America, and the seat of Congress, would mean great
glory for himself and a crushing blow to the American cause. If to this
could be added, as he intended, the occupation of the whole valley of
the Hudson, the year 1777 might well see the end of the war. An acute
sense of the value of time is vital in war. Promptness, the quick
surprise of the enemy, was perhaps the chief military virtue of
Washington; dilatoriness was the destructive vice of Howe. He had so
little contempt for his foe that he practised a blighting caution. On
April 12, 1777, Washington, in view of his own depleted force, in a
state of half famine, wrote: "If Howe does not take advantage of our
weak state he is very unfit for his trust." Howe remained inactive and
time, thus despised, worked its due revenge. Later Howe did move, and
with skill, but he missed the rapid combination in action which was the
first condition of final success. He could have captured Philadelphia
in May. He took the city, but not until September, when to hold it had
become a liability and not an asset. To go there at all was perhaps
unwise; to go in September was for him a tragic mistake.

From New York to Philadelphia the distance by land is about a hundred
miles. The route lay across New Jersey, that "garden of America" which
English travelers spoke of as resembling their own highly cultivated
land. Washington had his headquarters at Morristown, in northern New
Jersey. His resources were at a low ebb. He had always the faith that
a cause founded on justice could not fail; but his letters at this time
are full of depressing anxiety. Each State regarded itself as in danger
and made care of its own interests its chief concern. By this time
Congress had lost most of the able men who had given it dignity and
authority. Like Howe it had slight sense of the value of time and
imagined that tomorrow was as good as today. Wellington once complained
that, though in supreme command, he had not authority to appoint even
a corporal. Washington was hampered both by Congress and by the State
Governments in choosing leaders. He had some officers, such as Greene,
Knox, and Benedict Arnold, whom he trusted. Others, like Gates and
Conway, were ceaseless intriguers. To General Sullivan, who fancied
himself constantly slighted and ill-treated, Washington wrote sharply to
abolish his poisonous suspicions.

Howe had offered easy terms to those in New Jersey who should declare
their loyalty and to meet this Washington advised the stern policy of
outlawing every one who would not take the oath of allegiance to the
United States. There was much fluttering of heart on the New Jersey
farms, much anxious trimming in order, in any event, to be safe. Howe's
Hessians had plundered ruthlessly causing deep resentment against the
British. Now Washington found his own people doing the same thing.
Militia officers, themselves, "generally" as he said, "of the lowest
class of the people," not only stole but incited their men to steal. It
was easy to plunder under the plea that the owner of the property was a
Tory, whether open or concealed, and Washington wrote that the waste
and theft were "beyond all conception." There were shirkers claiming
exemption from military service on the ground that they were doing
necessary service as civilians. Washington needed maps to plan his
intricate movements and could not get them. Smallpox was devastating his
army and causing losses heavier than those from the enemy. When pay day
came there was usually no money. It is little wonder that in this spring
of 1777 he feared that his army might suddenly dissolve and leave him
without a command. In that case he would not have yielded. Rather, so
stern and bitter was he against England, would he have plunged into the
western wilderness to be lost in its vast spaces.

Howe had his own perplexities. He knew that a great expedition under
Burgoyne was to advance from Canada southward to the Hudson. Was he to
remain with his whole force at New York until the time should come to
push up the river to meet Burgoyne? He had a copy of the instructions
given in England to Burgoyne by Lord George Germain, but he was himself
without orders. Afterwards the reason became known. Lord George Germain
had dictated the order to coöperate with Burgoyne, but had hurried off
to the country before it was ready for his signature and it had been
mislaid. Howe seemed free to make his own plans and he longed to
be master of the enemy's capital. In the end he decided to take
Philadelphia--a task easy enough, as the event proved. At Howe's elbow
was the traitorous American general, Charles Lee, whom he had recently
captured, and Lee, as we know, told him that Maryland and Pennsylvania
were at heart loyal to the King and panting to be free from the tyranny
of the demagogue. Once firmly in the capital Howe believed that he would
have secure control of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. He could
achieve this and be back at New York in time to meet Burgoyne, perhaps
at Albany. Then he would hold the colony of New York from Staten Island
to the Canadian frontier. Howe found that he could send ships up the
Hudson, and the American army had to stand on the banks almost helpless
against the mobility of sea power. Washington's left wing rested on
the Hudson and he held both banks but neither at Peekskill nor, as yet,
farther up at West Point, could his forts prevent the passage of ships.
It was a different matter for the British to advance on land. But the
ships went up and down in the spring of 1777. It would be easy enough to
help Burgoyne when the time should come.

It was summer before Howe was ready to move, and by that time he had
received instructions that his first aim must be to coöperate with
Burgoyne. First, however, he was resolved to have Philadelphia.
Washington watched Howe in perplexity. A great fleet and a great army
lay at New York. Why did they not move? Washington knew perfectly well
what he himself would have done in Howe's place. He would have attacked
rapidly in April the weak American army and, after destroying or
dispersing it, would have turned to meet Burgoyne coming southward from
Canada. Howe did send a strong force into New Jersey. But he did not
know how weak Washington really was, for that master of craft in war
disseminated with great skill false information as to his own supposed
overwhelming strength. Howe had been bitten once by advancing too far
into New Jersey and was not going to take risks. He tried to entice
Washington from the hills to attack in open country. He marched here and
there in New Jersey and kept Washington alarmed and exhausted by counter
marches, and always puzzled as to what the next move should be. Howe
purposely let one of his secret messengers be taken bearing a despatch
saying that the fleet was about to sail for Boston. All these things
took time and the summer was slipping away. In the end Washington
realized that Howe intended to make his move not by land but by sea.
Could it be possible that he was not going to make aid to Burgoyne his
chief purpose? Could it be that he would attack Boston? Washington
hoped so for he knew the reception certain at Boston. Or was his goal
Charleston? On the 23d of July, when the summer was more than half gone,
Washington began to see more clearly. On that day Howe had embarked
eighteen thousand men and the fleet put to sea from Staten Island.

Howe was doing what able officers with him, such as Cornwallis, Grey,
and the German Knyphausen, appear to have been unanimous in thinking
he should not do. He was misled not only by the desire to strike at
the very center of the rebellion, but also by the assurance of the
traitorous Lee that to take Philadelphia would be the effective signal
to all the American Loyalists, the overwhelming majority of the people,
as was believed, that sedition had failed. A tender parent, the King,
was ready to have the colonies back in their former relation and to give
them secure guarantees of future liberty. Any one who saw the fleet
put out from New York Harbor must have been impressed with the might of
Britain. No less than two hundred and twenty-nine ships set their sails
and covered the sea for miles. When they had disappeared out of sight
of the New Jersey shore their goal was still unknown. At sea they might
turn in any direction. Washington's uncertainty was partly relieved on
the 30th of July when the fleet appeared at the entrance of Delaware
Bay, with Philadelphia some hundred miles away across the bay and up the
Delaware River. After hovering about the Cape for a day the fleet again
put to sea, and Washington, who had marched his army so as to be near
Philadelphia, thought the whole movement a feint and knew not where the
fleet would next appear. He was preparing to march to New York to menace
General Clinton, who had there seven thousand men able to help Burgoyne
when he heard good news. On the 22d of August he knew that Howe
had really gone southward and was in Chesapeake Bay. Boston was now
certainly safe. On the 25th of August, after three stormy weeks at sea,
Howe arrived at Elkton, at the head of Chesapeake Bay, and there landed
his army. It was Philadelphia fifty miles away that he intended to have.
Washington wrote gleefully: "Now let all New England turn out and
crush Burgoyne." Before the end of September he was writing that he was
certain of complete disaster to Burgoyne.

Howe had, in truth, made a ruinous mistake. Had the date been May
instead of August he might still have saved Burgoyne. But at the end
of August, when the net was closing on Burgoyne, Howe was three hundred
miles away. His disregard of time and distance had been magnificent. In
July he had sailed to the mouth of the Delaware, with Philadelphia near,
but he had then sailed away again, and why? Because the passage of his
ships up the river to the city was blocked by obstructions commanded by
bristling forts. The naval officers said truly that the fleet could not
get up the river. But Howe might have landed his army at the head of
Delaware Bay. It is a dozen miles across the narrow peninsula from the
head of Delaware Bay to that of Chesapeake Bay. Since Howe had decided
to attack from the head of Chesapeake Bay there was little to prevent
him from landing his army on the Delaware side of the peninsula and
marching across it. By sea it is a voyage of three hundred miles round
a peninsula one hundred and fifty miles long to get from one of these
points to the other, by land only a dozen miles away. Howe made the
sea voyage and spent on it three weeks when a march of a day would have
saved this time and kept his fleet three hundred miles by sea nearer to
New York and aid for Burgoyne.

Howe's mistakes only have their place in the procession to inevitable
disaster. Once in the thick of fighting he showed himself formidable.
When he had landed at Elkton he was fifty miles southwest of
Philadelphia and between him and that place was Washington with his
army. Washington was determined to delay Howe in every possible way.
To get to Philadelphia Howe had to cross the Brandywine River. Time was
nothing to him. He landed at Elkton on the 25th of August. Not until the
10th of September was he prepared to attack Washington barring his way
at Chadd's Ford. Washington was in a strong position on a front of two
miles on the river. At his left, below Chadd's Ford, the Brandywine is
a torrent flowing between high cliffs. There the British would find no
passage. On his right was a forest. Washington had chosen his position
with his usual skill. Entrenchments protected his front and batteries
would sweep down an advancing enemy. He had probably not more than
eleven thousand men in the fight and it is doubtful whether Howe brought
up a greater number so that the armies were not unevenly matched. At
daybreak on the eleventh the British army broke camp at the village
of Kenneth Square, four miles from Chadd's Ford, and, under General
Knyphausen, marched straight to make a frontal attack on Washington's
position.

In the battle which followed Washington was beaten by the superior
tactics of his enemy. Not all of the British army was there in the
attack at Chadd's Ford. A column under Cornwallis had filed off by a
road to the left and was making a long and rapid march. The plan was to
cross the Brandywine some ten miles above where Washington was
posted and to attack him in the rear. By two o'clock in the afternoon
Cornwallis had forced the two branches of the upper Brandywine and was
marching on Dilworth at the right rear of the American army. Only then
did Washington become aware of his danger. His first impulse was to
advance across Chadd's Ford to try to overwhelm Knyphausen and thus
to get between Howe and the fleet at Elkton. This might, however, have
brought disaster and he soon decided to retire. His movement was ably
carried out. Both sides suffered in the woodland fighting but that night
the British army encamped in Washington's position at Chadd's Ford, and
Howe had fought skillfully and won an important battle.

Washington had retired in good order and was still formidable. He now
realized clearly enough that Philadelphia would fall. Delay, however,
would be nearly as good as victory. He saw what Howe could not see, that
menacing cloud in the north, much bigger than a man's hand, which, with
Howe far away, should break in a final storm terrible for the British
cause. Meanwhile Washington meant to keep Howe occupied. Rain alone
prevented another battle before the British reached the Schuylkill
River. On that river Washington guarded every ford. But, in the end,
by skillful maneuvering, Howe was able to cross and on the 26th of
September he occupied Philadelphia without resistance. The people were
ordered to remain quietly in their houses. Officers were billeted on the
wealthier inhabitants. The fall resounded far of what Lord Adam Gordon
called a "great and noble city," "the first Town in America," "one of
the Wonders of the World." Its luxury had been so conspicuous that the
austere John Adams condemned the "sinful feasts" in which he shared.
About it were fine country seats surrounded by parklike grounds, with
noble trees, clipped hedges, and beautiful gardens. The British believed
that Pennsylvania was really on their side. Many of the people were
friendly and hundreds now renewed their oath of allegiance to the King.
Washington complained that the people gave Howe information denied to
him. They certainly fed Howe's army willingly and received good British
gold while Washington had only paper money with which to pay. Over the
proud capital floated once more the British flag and people who did not
see very far said that, with both New York and Philadelphia taken, the
rebellion had at last collapsed.

Once in possession of Philadelphia Howe made his camp at Germantown, a
straggling suburban village, about seven miles northwest of the city.
Washington's army lay at the foot of some hills a dozen miles farther
away. Howe had need to be wary, for Washington was the same "old fox"
who had played so cunning a game at Trenton. The efforts of the British
army were now centered on clearing the river Delaware so that supplies
might be brought up rapidly by water instead of being carried fifty
miles overland from Chesapeake Bay. Howe detached some thousands of men
for this work and there was sharp fighting before the troops and the
fleet combined had cleared the river. At Germantown Howe kept about nine
thousand men. Though he knew that Washington was likely to attack him he
did not entrench his army as he desired the attack to be made. It might
well have succeeded. Washington with eleven thousand men aimed at a
surprise. On the evening of the 3d of October he set out from his camp.
Four roads led into Germantown and all these the Americans used.
At sunrise on the fourth, just as the attack began, a fog arose to
embarrass both sides. Lying a little north of the village was the solid
stone house of Chief Justice Chew, and it remains famous as the central
point in the bitter fight of that day. What brought final failure to the
American attack was an accident of maneuvering. Sullivan's brigade
was in front attacking the British when Greene's came up for the same
purpose. His line overlapped Sullivan's and he mistook in the fog
Sullivan's men for the enemy and fired on them from the rear. A panic
naturally resulted among the men who were attacked also at the same
time by the British on their front. The disorder spread. British
reinforcements arrived, and Washington drew off his army in surprising
order considering the panic. He had six hundred and seventy-three
casualties and lost besides four hundred prisoners. The British loss
was five hundred and thirty-seven casualties and fourteen prisoners.
The attack had failed, but news soon came which made the reverse
unimportant. Burgoyne and his whole army had surrendered at Saratoga.


CHAPTER VI. THE FIRST GREAT BRITISH DISASTER


John Burgoyne, in a measure a soldier of fortune, was the younger son of
an impoverished baronet, but he had married the daughter of the powerful
Earl of Derby and was well known in London society as a man of fashion
and also as a man of letters, whose plays had a certain vogue. His will,
in which he describes himself as a humble Christian, who, in spite of
many faults, had never forgotten God, shows that he was serious minded.
He sat in the House of Commons for Preston and, though he used the
language of a courtier and spoke of himself as lying at the King's feet
to await his commands, he was a Whig, the friend of Fox and others
whom the King regarded as his enemies. One of his plays describes the
difficulties of getting the English to join the army of George III. We
have the smartly dressed recruit as a decoy to suggest an easy life in
the army. Victory and glory are so certain that a tailor stands with his
feet on the neck of the King of France. The decks of captured ships swim
with punch and are clotted with gold dust, and happy soldiers play
with diamonds as if they were marbles. The senators of England, says
Burgoyne, care chiefly to make sure of good game laws for their own
pleasure. The worthless son of one of them, who sets out on the long
drive to his father's seat in the country, spends an hour in "yawning,
picking his teeth and damning his journey" and when once on the way
drives with such fury that the route is marked by "yelping dogs,
broken-backed pigs and dismembered geese."

It was under this playwright and satirist, who had some skill as a
soldier, that the British cause now received a blow from which it never
recovered. Burgoyne had taken part in driving the Americans from
Canada in 1776 and had spent the following winter in England using his
influence to secure an independent command. To his later undoing he
succeeded. It was he, and not, as had been expected, General Carleton,
who was appointed to lead the expedition of 1777 from Canada to the
Hudson. Burgoyne was given instructions so rigid as to be an insult to
his intelligence. He was to do one thing and only one thing, to press
forward to the Hudson and meet Howe. At the same time Lord George
Germain, the minister responsible, failed to instruct Howe to advance up
the Hudson to meet Burgoyne. Burgoyne had a genuine belief in the
wisdom of this strategy but he had no power to vary it, to meet changing
circumstances, and this was one chief factor in his failure.

Behold Burgoyne then, on the 17th of June, embarking on Lake Champlain
the army which, ever since his arrival in Canada on the 6th of May,
he had been preparing for this advance. He had rather more than seven
thousand men, of whom nearly one-half were Germans under the competent
General Riedesel. In the force of Burgoyne we find the ominous presence
of some hundreds of Indian allies. They had been attached to one side or
the other in every war fought in those regions during the previous one
hundred and fifty years. In the war which ended in 1763 Montcalm had
used them and so had his opponent Amherst. The regiments from the New
England and other colonies had fought in alliance with the painted
and befeathered savages and had made no protest. Now either times had
changed, or there was something in a civil war which made the use of
savages seem hideous. One thing is certain. Amherst had held his savages
in stern restraint and could say proudly that they had not committed a
single outrage. Burgoyne was not so happy.

In nearly every war the professional soldier shows distrust, if not
contempt, for civilian levies. Burgoyne had been in America before the
day of Bunker Hill and knew a great deal about the country. He thought
the "insurgents" good enough fighters when protected by trees and stones
and swampy ground. But he thought, too, that they had no real knowledge
of the science of war and could not fight a pitched battle. He himself
had not shown the prevision required by sound military knowledge. If the
British were going to abandon the advantage of sea power and fight where
they could not fall back on their fleet, they needed to pay special
attention to land transport. This Burgoyne had not done. It was only a
little more than a week before he reached Lake Champlain that he asked
Carleton to provide the four hundred horses and five hundred carts which
he still needed and which were not easily secured in a sparsely settled
country. Burgoyne lingered for three days at Crown Point, half way down
the lake. Then, on the 2d of July, he laid siege to Fort Ticonderoga.
Once past this fort, guarding the route to Lake George, he could easily
reach the Hudson.

In command at Fort Ticonderoga was General St. Clair, with about
thirty-five hundred men. He had long notice of the siege, for the
expedition of Burgoyne had been the open talk of Montreal and the
surrounding country during many months. He had built Fort Independence,
on the east shore of Lake Champlain, and with a great expenditure of
labor had sunk twenty-two piers across the lake and stretched in front
of them a boom to protect the two forts. But he had neglected to defend
Sugar Hill in front of Fort Ticonderoga, and commanding the American
works. It took only three or four days for the British to drag cannon to
the top, erect a battery and prepare to open fire. On the 5th of July,
St. Clair had to face a bitter necessity. He abandoned the untenable
forts and retired southward to Fort Edward by way of the difficult Green
Mountains. The British took one hundred and twenty-eight guns.

These successes led the British to think that within a few days they
would be in Albany. We have an amusing picture of the effect on George
III of the fall of Fort Ticonderoga. The place had been much discussed.
It had been the first British fort to fall to the Americans when the
Revolution began, and Carleton's failure to take it in the autumn of
1776 had been the cause of acute heartburning in London. Now, when the
news of its fall reached England, George III burst into the Queen's
room with the glad cry, "I have beat them, I have beat the Americans."
Washington's depression was not as great as the King's elation; he had
a better sense of values; but he had intended that the fort should hold
Burgoyne, and its fall was a disastrous blow. The Americans showed skill
and good soldierly quality in the retreat from Ticonderoga, and Burgoyne
in following and harassing them was led into hard fighting in the woods.
The easier route by way of Lake George was open but Burgoyne hoped to
destroy his enemy by direct pursuit through the forest. It took him
twenty days to hew his way twenty miles, to the upper waters of
the Hudson near Fort Edward. When there on the 30th of July he had
communications open from the Hudson to the St. Lawrence.

Fortune seemed to smile on Burgoyne. He had taken many guns and he had
proved the fighting quality of his men. But his cheerful elation had, in
truth, no sound basis. Never during the two and a half months of bitter
struggle which followed was he able to advance more than twenty-five
miles from Fort Edward. The moment he needed transport by land he
found himself almost helpless. Sometimes his men were without food and
equipment because he had not the horses and carts to bring supplies from
the head of water at Fort Anne or Fort George, a score of miles
away. Sometimes he had no food to transport. He was dependent on his
communications for every form of supplies. Even hay had to be brought
from Canada, since, in the forest country, there was little food for his
horses. The perennial problem for the British in all operations was this
one of food. The inland regions were too sparsely populated to make it
possible for more than a few soldiers to live on local supplies. The
wheat for the bread of the British soldier, his beef and his pork, even
the oats for his horse, came, for the most part, from England, at vast
expense for transport, which made fortunes for contractors. It is said
that the cost of a pound of salted meat delivered to Burgoyne on the
Hudson was thirty shillings. Burgoyne had been told that the inhabitants
needed only protection to make them openly loyal and had counted on them
for supplies. He found instead the great mass of the people hostile and
he doubted the sincerity even of those who professed their loyalty.

After Burgoyne had been a month at Fort Edward he was face to face with
starvation. If he advanced he lengthened his line to flank attack. As
it was he had difficulty in holding it against New Englanders, the most
resolute of all his foes, eager to assert by hard fighting, if need be,
their right to hold the invaded territory which was claimed also by New
York. Burgoyne's instructions forbade him to turn aside and strike them
a heavy blow. He must go on to meet Howe who was not there to be met.
A being who could see the movements of men as we watch a game of chess,
might think that madness had seized the British leaders; Burgoyne on
the upper Hudson plunging forward resolutely to meet Howe; Howe at sea
sailing away, as it might well seem, to get as far from Burgoyne as he
could; Clinton in command at New York without instructions, puzzled what
to do and not hearing from his leader, Howe, for six weeks at a time;
and across the sea a complacent minister, Germain, who believed that he
knew what to do in a scene three thousand miles away, and had drawn up
exact instructions as to the way of doing it, and who was now eagerly
awaiting news of the final triumph.

Burgoyne did his best. Early in August he had to make a venturesome
stroke to get sorely needed food. Some twenty-five miles east of the
Hudson at Bennington, in difficult country, New England militia had
gathered food and munitions, and horses for transport. The pressure of
need clouded Burgoyne's judgment. To make a dash for Bennington meant a
long and dangerous march. He was assured, however, that a surprise
was possible and that in any case the country was full of friends only
awaiting a little encouragement to come out openly on his side. They
were Germans who lay on Burgoyne's left and Burgoyne sent Colonel Baum,
an efficient officer, with five or six hundred men to attack the New
Englanders and bring in the supplies. It was a stupid blunder to send
Germans among a people specially incensed against the use of these
mercenaries. There was no surprise. Many professing loyalists, seemingly
eager to take the oath of allegiance, met and delayed Baum. When near
Bennington he found in front of him a force barring the way and had to
make a carefully guarded camp for the night. Then five hundred men, some
of them the cheerful takers of the oath of allegiance, slipped round to
his rear and in the morning he was attacked from front and rear.

A hot fight followed which resulted in the complete defeat of the
British. Baum was mortally wounded. Some of his men escaped into the
woods; the rest were killed or captured. Nor was this all. Burgoyne,
scenting danger, had ordered five hundred more Germans to reinforce
Baum. They, too, were attacked and overwhelmed. In all Burgoyne lost
some eight hundred men and four guns. The American loss was seventy.
It shows the spirit of the time that, for the sport of the soldiers,
British prisoners were tied together in pairs and driven by negroes
at the tail of horses. An American soldier described long after, with
regret for his own cruelty, how he had taken a British prisoner who had
had his left eye shot out and mounted him on a horse also without
the left eye, in derision at the captive's misfortune. The British
complained that quarter was refused in the fight. For days tired
stragglers, after long wandering in the woods, drifted into Burgoyne's
camp. This was now near Saratoga, a name destined to be ominous in the
history of the British army.

Further misfortune now crowded upon Burgoyne. The general of that day
had two favorite forms of attack. One was to hold the enemy's front and
throw out a column to march round the flank and attack his rear, the
method of Howe at the Brandywine; the other method was to advance on the
enemy by lines converging at a common center. This form of attack had
proved most successful eighteen years earlier when the British had
finally secured Canada by bringing together, at Montreal, three armies,
one from the east, one from the west, and one from the south. Now there
was a similar plan of bringing together three British forces at or near
Albany, on the Hudson. Of Clinton, at New York, and Burgoyne we know.
The third force was under General St. Leger. With some seventeen hundred
men, fully half of whom were Indians, he had gone up the St. Lawrence
from Montreal and was advancing from Oswego on Lake Ontario to attack
Fort Stanwix at the end of the road from the Great Lakes to the Mohawk
River. After taking that stronghold he intended to go down the river
valley to meet Burgoyne near Albany.

On the 3d of August St. Leger was before Fort Stanwix garrisoned by some
seven hundred Americans. With him were two men deemed potent in that
scene. One of these was Sir John Johnson who had recently inherited
the vast estate in the neighborhood of his father, the great Indian
Superintendent, Sir William Johnson, and was now in command of a
regiment recruited from Loyalists, many of them fierce and embittered
because of the seizure of their property. The other leader was a famous
chief of the Mohawks, Thayendanegea, or, to give him his English name,
Joseph Brant, half savage still, but also half civilized and half
educated, because he had had a careful schooling and for a brief day had
been courted by London fashion. He exerted a formidable influence with
his own people. The Indians were not, however, all on one side. Half of
the six tribes of the Iroquois were either neutral or in sympathy with
the Americans. Among the savages, as among the civilized, the war was a
family quarrel, in which brother fought brother. Most of the Indians on
the American side preserved, indeed, an outward neutrality. There was
no hostile population for them to plunder and the Indian usually had no
stomach for any other kind of warfare. The allies of the British, on the
other hand, had plenty of openings to their taste and they brought on
the British cause an enduring discredit.

When St. Leger was before Fort Stanwix he heard that a force of eight
hundred men, led by a German settler named Herkimer, was coming up
against him. When it was at Oriskany, about six miles away, St. Leger
laid a trap. He sent Brant with some hundreds of Indians and a few
soldiers to be concealed in a marshy ravine which Herkimer must cross.
When the American force was hemmed in by trees and marsh on the narrow
causeway of logs running across the ravine the Indians attacked with
wild yells and murderous fire. Then followed a bloody hand to hand
fight. Tradition has been busy with its horrors. Men struggled in slime
and blood and shouted curses and defiance. Improbable stories are told
of pairs of skeletons found afterwards in the bog each with a bony
hand which had driven a knife to the heart of the other. In the end the
British, met by resolution so fierce, drew back. Meanwhile a sortie
from the American fort on their rear had a menacing success. Sir John
Johnson's camp was taken and sacked. The two sides were at last glad to
separate, after the most bloody struggle in the whole war. St. Leger's
Indians had had more than enough. About a hundred had been killed and
the rest were in a state of mutiny. Soon it was known that Benedict
Arnold, with a considerable force, was pushing up the Mohawk Valley to
relieve the American fort. Arnold knew how to deal with savages. He took
care that his friendly Indians should come into contact with those of
Brant and tell lurid tales of utter disaster to Burgoyne and of a great
avenging army on the march to attack St. Leger. The result was that St.
Leger's Indians broke out in riot and maddened themselves with stolen
rum. Disorder affected even the soldiers. The only thing for St. Leger
to do was to get away. He abandoned his guns and stores and, harassed
now by his former Indian allies, made his way to Oswego and in the end
reached Montreal with a remnant of his force.

News of these things came to Burgoyne just after the disaster at
Bennington. Since Fort Stanwix was in a country counted upon as Loyalist
at heart it was especially discouraging again to find that in the main
the population was against the British. During the war almost without
exception Loyalist opinion proved weak against the fierce determination
of the American side. It was partly a matter of organization. The
vigilance committees in each State made life well-nigh intolerable to
suspected Tories. Above all, however, the British had to bear the odium
which attaches always to the invader. We do not know what an American
army would have done if, with Iroquois savages as allies, it had made
war in an English county. We know what loathing a parallel situation
aroused against the British army in America. The Indians, it should be
noted, were not soldiers under British discipline but allies; the chiefs
regarded themselves as equals who must be consulted and not as enlisted
to take orders from a British general.

In war, as in politics, nice balancing of merit or defect in an enemy
would destroy the main purpose which is to defeat him. Each side
exaggerates any weak point in the other in order to stimulate the
fighting passions. Judgment is distorted. The Baroness Riedesel, the
wife of one of Burgoyne's generals, who was in Boston in 1777, says that
the people were all dressed alike in a peasant costume with a leather
strap round the waist, that they were of very low and insignificant
stature, and that only one in ten of them could read or write. She
pictures New Englanders as tarring and feathering cultivated English
ladies. When educated people believed every evil of the enemy the
ignorant had no restraint to their credulity. New England had long
regarded the native savages as a pest. In 1776 New Hampshire offered
seventy pounds for each scalp of a hostile male Indian and thirty-seven
pounds and ten shillings for each scalp of a woman or of a child under
twelve years of age. Now it was reported that the British were offering
bounties for American scalps. Benjamin Franklin satirized British
ignorance when he described whales leaping Niagara Falls and he did not
expect to be taken seriously when, at a later date, he pictured George
III as gloating over the scalps of his subjects in America. The Seneca
Indians alone, wrote Franklin, sent to the King many bales of scalps.
Some bales were captured by the Americans and they found the scalps of
43 soldiers, 297 farmers, some of them burned alive, and 67 old people,
88 women, 193 boys, 211 girls, 29 infants, and others unclassified.
Exact figures bring conviction. Franklin was not wanting in exactness
nor did he fail, albeit it was unwittingly, to intensify burning
resentment of which we have echoes still. Burgoyne had to bear the odium
of the outrages by Indians. It is amusing to us, though it was hardly so
to this kindly man, to find these words put into his mouth by a colonial
poet:

 I will let loose the dogs of Hell,
 Ten thousand Indians who shall yell,
 And foam, and tear, and grin, and roar
 And drench their moccasins in gore:…
 I swear, by St. George and St. Paul,
 I will exterminate you all.

Such seed, falling on soil prepared by the hate of war, brought forth
its deadly fruit. The Americans believed that there was no brutality
from which British officers would shrink. Burgoyne had told his Indian
allies that they must not kill except in actual fighting and that there
must be no slaughter of non-combatants and no scalping of any but the
dead. The warning delivered him into the hands of his enemies for it
showed that he half expected outrage. Members of the British House of
Commons were no whit behind the Americans in attacking him. Burke amused
the House by his satire on Burgoyne's words: "My gentle lions, my humane
bears, my tender-hearted hyenas, go forth! But I exhort you, as you are
Christians and members of civilized society, to take care not to hurt
any man, woman, or child." Burke's great speech lasted for three and
a half hours and Sir George Savile called it "the greatest triumph of
eloquence within memory." British officers disliked their dirty, greasy,
noisy allies and Burgoyne found his use of savages, with the futile
order to be merciful, a potent factor in his defeat.

A horrifying incident had occurred while he was fighting his way to
the Hudson. As the Americans were preparing to leave Fort Edward some
marauding Indians saw a chance of plunder and outrage. They burst into a
house and carried off two ladies, both of them British in sympathy--Mrs.
McNeil, a cousin of one of Burgoyne's chief officers, General Fraser,
and Miss Jeannie McCrae, whose betrothed, a Mr. Jones, and whose brother
were serving with Burgoyne. In a short time Mrs. McNeil was handed over
unhurt to Burgoyne's advancing army. Miss McCrae was never again seen
alive by her friends. Her body was found and a Wyandot chief, known as
the Panther, showed her scalp as a trophy. Burgoyne would have been a
poor creature had he not shown anger at such a crime, even if committed
against the enemy. This crime, however, was committed against his own
friends. He pressed the charge against the chief and was prepared to
hang him and only relaxed when it was urged that the execution would
cause all his Indians to leave him and to commit further outrages. The
incident was appealing in its tragedy and stirred the deep anger of the
population of the surrounding country among whose descendants to this
day the tradition of the abandoned brutality of the British keeps alive
the old hatred.

At Fort Edward Burgoyne now found that he could hardly move. He was
encumbered by an enormous baggage train. His own effects filled, it is
said, thirty wagons and this we can believe when we find that champagne
was served at his table up almost to the day of final disaster. The
population was thoroughly aroused against him. His own instinct was
to remain near the water route to Canada and make sure of his
communications. On the other hand, honor called him to go forward and
not fail Howe, supposed to be advancing to meet him. For a long time he
waited and hesitated. Meanwhile he was having increasing difficulty in
feeding his army and through sickness and desertion his numbers were
declining. By the 13th of September he had taken a decisive step. He
made a bridge of boats and moved his whole force across the river to
Saratoga, now Schuylerville. This crossing of the river would result
inevitably in cutting off his communications with Lake George and
Ticonderoga. After such a step he could not go back and he was moving
forward into a dark unknown. The American camp was at Stillwater, twelve
miles farther down the river. Burgoyne sent messenger after messenger
to get past the American lines and bring back news of Howe. Not one
of these unfortunate spies returned. Most of them were caught and
ignominiously hanged. One thing, however, Burgoyne could do. He could
hazard a fight and on this he decided as the autumn was closing in.

Burgoyne had no time to lose, once his force was on the west bank of the
Hudson. General Lincoln cut off his communications with Canada and was
soon laying siege to Ticonderoga. The American army facing Burgoyne was
now commanded by General Gates. This Englishman, the godson of Horace
Walpole, had gained by successful intrigue powerful support in Congress.
That body was always paying too much heed to local claims and jealousies
and on the 2d of August it removed Schuyler of New York because he was
disliked by the soldiers from New England and gave the command to Gates.
Washington was far away maneuvering to meet Howe and he was never able
to watch closely the campaign in the north. Gates, indeed,
considered himself independent of Washington and reported not to the
Commander-in-Chief but direct to Congress. On the 19th of September
Burgoyne attacked Gates in a strong entrenched position on Bemis
Heights, at Stillwater. There was a long and bitter fight, but by
evening Burgoyne had not carried the main position and had lost more
than five hundred men whom he could ill spare from his scanty numbers.

Burgoyne's condition was now growing desperate. American forces barred
retreat to Canada. He must go back and meet both frontal and flank
attacks, or go forward, or surrender. To go forward now had most
promise, for at last Howe had instructed Clinton, left in command at New
York, to move, and Clinton was making rapid progress up the Hudson. On
the 7th of October Burgoyne attacked again at Stillwater. This time he
was decisively defeated, a result due to the amazing energy in attack
of Benedict Arnold, who had been stripped of his command by an intrigue.
Gates would not even speak to him and his lingering in the American camp
was unwelcome. Yet as a volunteer Arnold charged the British line madly
and broke it. Burgoyne's best general, Fraser, was killed in the fight.
Burgoyne retired to Saratoga and there at last faced the prospects of
getting back to Fort Edward and to Canada. It may be that he could have
cut his way through, but this is doubtful. Without risk of destruction
he could not move in any direction. His enemies now outnumbered him
nearly four to one. His camp was swept by the American guns and his
men were under arms night and day. American sharpshooters stationed
themselves at daybreak in trees about the British camp and any one
who appeared in the open risked his life. If a cap was held up in view
instantly two or three balls would pass through it. His horses were
killed by rifle shots. Burgoyne had little food for his men and none for
his horses. His Indians had long since gone off in dudgeon. Many of
his Canadian French slipped off homeward and so did the Loyalists. The
German troops were naturally dispirited. A British officer tells of the
deadly homesickness of these poor men. They would gather in groups of
two dozen or so and mourn that they would never again see their native
land. They died, a score at a time, of no other disease than sickness
for their homes. They could have no pride in trying to save a lost
cause. Burgoyne was surrounded and, on the 17th of October, he was
obliged to surrender.

Gates proposed to Burgoyne hard terms--surrender with no honors of war.
The British were to lay down their arms in their encampments and to
march out without weapons of any kind. Burgoyne declared that, rather
than accept such terms, he would fight still and take no quarter. A
shadow was falling on the path of Gates. The term of service of some of
his men had expired. The New Englanders were determined to stay and see
the end of Burgoyne but a good many of the New York troops went off.
Sickness, too, was increasing. Above all General Clinton was advancing
up the Hudson. British ships could come up freely as far as Albany and
in a few days Clinton might make a formidable advance. Gates, a timid
man, was in a hurry. He therefore agreed that the British should march
from their camp with the honors of war, that the troops should be taken
to New England, and from there to England. They must not serve again
in North America during the war but there was nothing in the terms to
prevent their serving in Europe and relieving British regiments for
service in America. Gates had the courtesy to keep his army where it
could not see the laying down of arms by Burgoyne's force. About five
thousand men, of whom sixteen hundred were Germans and only three
thousand five hundred fit for duty, surrendered to sixteen thousand
Americans. Burgoyne gave offense to German officers by saying in his
report that he might have held out longer had all his troops been
British. This is probably true but the British met with only a just
Nemesis for using soldiers who had no call of duty to serve.

The army set out on its long march of two hundred miles to Boston. The
late autumn weather was cold, the army was badly clothed and fed, and
the discomfort of the weary route was increased by the bitter antagonism
of the inhabitants. They respected the regular British soldier but at
the Germans they shouted insults and the Loyalists they despised as
traitors. The camp at the journey's end was on the ground at Cambridge
where two years earlier Washington had trained his first army. Every day
Burgoyne expected to embark. There was delay and, at last, he knew
the reason. Congress repudiated the terms granted by Gates. A tangled
dispute followed. Washington probably had no sympathy with the quibbling
of Congress. But he had no desire to see this army return to Europe and
release there an army to serve in America. Burgoyne's force was never
sent to England. For nearly a year it lay at Boston. Then it was marched
to Virginia. The men suffered great hardships and the numbers fell by
desertion and escape. When peace came in 1783 there was no army to take
back to England; Burgoyne's soldiers had been merged into the American
people. It may well be, indeed, that descendants of his beaten men have
played an important part in building up the United States. The irony of
history is unconquerable.



CHAPTER VII. WASHINGTON AND HIS COMRADES AT VALLEY FORGE


Washington had met defeat in every considerable battle at which he was
personally present. His first appearance in military history, in
the Ohio campaign against the French, twenty-two years before the
Revolution, was marked by a defeat, the surrender of Fort Necessity.
Again in the next year, when he fought to relieve the disaster to
Braddock's army, defeat was his portion. Defeat had pursued him in
the battles of the Revolution--before New York, at the Brandywine, at
Germantown. The campaign against Canada, which he himself planned, had
failed. He had lost New York and Philadelphia. But, like William III of
England, who in his long struggle with France hardly won a battle
and yet forced Louis XIV to accept his terms of peace, Washington, by
suddenness in reprisal, by skill in resource when his plans seemed
to have been shattered, grew on the hard rock of defeat the flower of
victory.

There was never a time when Washington was not trusted by men of real
military insight or by the masses of the people. But a general who does
not win victories in the field is open to attack. By the winter of 1777
when Washington, with his army reduced and needy, was at Valley Forge
keeping watch on Howe in Philadelphia, John Adams and others were
talking of the sin of idolatry in the worship of Washington, of its
flavor of the accursed spirit of monarchy, and of the punishment which
"the God of Heaven and Earth" must inflict for such perversity. Adams
was all against a Fabian policy and wanted to settle issues forever by a
short and strenuous war. The idol, it was being whispered, proved after
all to have feet of clay. One general, and only one, had to his credit
a really great victory--Gates, to whom Burgoyne had surrendered at
Saratoga, and there was a movement to replace Washington by this
laureled victor.

General Conway, an Irish soldier of fortune, was one of the most
troublesome in this plot. He had served in the campaign about
Philadelphia but had been blocked in his extravagant demands for
promotion; so he turned for redress to Gates, the star in the north. A
malignant campaign followed in detraction of Washington. He had, it was
said, worn out his men by useless marches; with an army three times
as numerous as that of Howe, he had gained no victory; there was high
fighting quality in the American army if properly led, but Washington
despised the militia; a Gates or a Lee or a Conway would save the cause
as Washington could not; and so on. "Heaven has determined to save your
country or a weak general and bad counsellors would have ruined it"; so
wrote Conway to Gates and Gates allowed the letter to be seen. The words
were reported to Washington, who at once, in high dudgeon, called
Conway to account. An explosion followed. Gates both denied that he had
received a letter with the passage in question, and, at the same time,
charged that there had been tampering with his private correspondence.
He could not have it both ways. Conway was merely impudent in reply to
Washington, but Gates laid the whole matter before Congress. Washington
wrote to Gates, in reply to his denials, ironical references to "rich
treasures of knowledge and experience" "guarded with penurious reserve"
by Conway from his leaders but revealed to Gates. There was no irony in
Washington's reference to malignant detraction and mean intrigue. At
the same time he said to Gates: "My temper leads me to peace and harmony
with all men," and he deplored the internal strife which injured the
great cause. Conway soon left America. Gates lived to command another
American army and to end his career by a crowning disaster.

Washington had now been for more than two years in the chief command and
knew his problems. It was a British tradition that standing armies were
a menace to liberty, and the tradition had gained strength in crossing
the sea. Washington would have wished a national army recruited by
Congress alone and bound to serve for the duration of the war. There
was much talk at the time of a "new model army" similar in type to the
wonderful creation of Oliver Cromwell. The Thirteen Colonies became,
however, thirteen nations. Each reserved the right to raise its own
levies in its own way. To induce men to enlist Congress was twice
handicapped. First, it had no power of taxation and could only ask the
States to provide what it needed. The second handicap was even greater.
When Congress offered bounties to those who enlisted in the Continental
army, some of the States offered higher bounties for their own levies
of militia, and one authority was bidding against the other. This
encouraged short-term enlistments. If a man could re-enlist and again
secure a bounty, he would gain more than if he enlisted at once for the
duration of the war.

An army is an intricate mechanism needing the same variety of agencies
that is required for the well-being of a community. The chief aim is, of
course, to defeat the enemy, and to do this an army must be prepared to
move rapidly. Means of transport, so necessary in peace, are even more
urgently needed in war. Thus Washington always needed military engineers
to construct roads and bridges. Before the Revolution the greater part
of such services had been provided in America by the regular British
army, now the enemy. British officers declared that the American army
was without engineers who knew the science of war, and certainly the
forts on which they spent their skill in the North, those on the lower
Hudson, and at Ticonderoga, at the head of Lake George, fell easily
before the assailant. Good maps were needed, and in this Washington
was badly served, though the defect was often corrected by his intimate
knowledge of the country. Another service ill-equipped was what we
should now call the Red Cross. Epidemics, and especially smallpox,
wrought havoc in the army. Then, as now, shattered nerves were sometimes
the result of the strain of military life. "The wind of a ball," what we
should now call shell-shock, sometimes killed men whose bodies appeared
to be uninjured. To our more advanced knowledge the medical science of
the time seems crude. The physicians of New England, today perhaps the
most expert body of medical men in the world, were even then highly
skillful. But the surgeons and nurses were too few. This was true
of both sides in the conflict. Prisoners in hospitals often suffered
terribly and each side brought charges of ill-treatment against the
other. The prison-ships in the harbor of New York, where American
prisoners were confined, became a scandal, and much bitter invective
against British brutality is found in the literature of the period. The
British leaders, no less than Washington himself, were humane men, and
ignorance and inadequate equipment will explain most of the hardships,
though an occasional officer on either side was undoubtedly callous in
respect to the sufferings of the enemy.

Food and clothing, the first vital necessities of an army, were often
deplorably scarce. In a land of farmers there was food enough. Its
lack in the army was chiefly due to bad transport. Clothing was another
matter. One of the things insisted upon in a well-trained army is a
decent regard for appearance, and in the eyes of the French and the
British officers the American army usually seemed rather unkempt. The
formalities of dress, the uniformity of pipe-clay and powdered hair, of
polished steel and brass, can of course be overdone. The British army
had too much of it, but to Washington's force the danger was of having
too little. It was not easy to induce farmers and frontiersmen who at
home began the day without the use of water, razor, or brush, to appear
on parade clean, with hair powdered, faces shaved, and clothes neat. In
the long summer days the men were told to shave before going to bed that
they might prepare the more quickly for parade in the morning, and to
fill their canteens over night if an early march was imminent. Some
of the regiments had uniforms which gave them a sufficiently smart
appearance. The cocked hat, the loose hunting shirt with its fringed
border, the breeches of brown leather or duck, the brown gaiters or
leggings, the powdered hair, were familiar marks of the soldier of the
Revolution.

During a great part of the war, however, in spite of supplies brought
from both France and the West Indies, Washington found it difficult to
secure for his men even decent clothing of any kind, whether of military
cut or not. More than a year after he took command, in the fighting
about New York, a great part of his army had no more semblance of
uniform than hunting shirts on a common pattern. In the following
December, he wrote of many men as either shivering in garments fit only
for summer wear or as entirely naked. There was a time in the later
campaign in the South when hundreds of American soldiers marched stark
naked, except for breech cloths. One of the most pathetic hardships
of the soldier's life was due to the lack of boots. More than one of
Washington's armies could be tracked by the bloody footprints of his
barefooted men. Near the end of the war Benedict Arnold, who knew
whereof he spoke, described the American army as "illy clad, badly fed,
and worse paid," pay being then two or three years overdue. On the
other hand, there is evidence that life in the army was not without its
compensations. Enforced dwelling in the open air saved men from diseases
such as consumption and the movement from camp to camp gave a broader
outlook to the farmer's sons. The army could usually make a brave
parade. On ceremonial occasions the long hair of the men would be tied
back and made white with powder, even though their uniforms were little
more than rags.

The men carried weapons some of which, in, at any rate, the early days
of the war, were made by hand at the village smithy. A man might take
to the war a weapon forged by himself. The American soldier had this
advantage over the British soldier, that he used, if not generally, at
least in some cases, not the smooth-bore musket but the grooved rifle
by which the ball was made to rotate in its flight. The fire from this
rifle was extremely accurate. At first weapons were few and ammunition
was scanty, but in time there were importations from France and also
supplies from American gun factories. The standard length of the barrel
was three and a half feet, a portentous size compared with that of the
modern weapon. The loading was from the muzzle, a process so slow that
one of the favorite tactics of the time was to await the fire of the
enemy and then charge quickly and bayonet him before he could reload.
The old method of firing off the musket by means of slow matches
kept alight during action was now obsolete; the latest device was the
flintlock. But there was always a measure of doubt whether the weapon
would go off. Partly on this account Benjamin Franklin, the wisest man
of his time, declared for the use of the pike of an earlier age rather
than the bayonet and for bows and arrows instead of firearms. A soldier,
he said, could shoot four arrows to one bullet. An arrow wound was more
disabling than a bullet wound; and arrows did not becloud the
vision with smoke. The bullet remained, however, the chief means of
destruction, and the fire of Washington's soldiers usually excelled that
of the British. These, in their turn, were superior in the use of the
bayonet.

Powder and lead were hard to get. The inventive spirit of America was
busy with plans to procure saltpeter and other ingredients for making
powder, but it remained scarce. Since there was no standard firearm,
each soldier required bullets specially suited to his weapon. The men
melted lead and cast it in their own bullet-molds. It is an instance of
the minor ironies of war that the great equestrian statue of George III,
which had been erected in New York in days more peaceful, was melted
into bullets for killing that monarch's soldiers. Another necessity was
paper for cartridges and wads. The cartridge of that day was a paper
envelope containing the charge of ball and powder. This served also as
a wad, after being emptied of its contents, and was pushed home with a
ramrod. A store of German Bibles in Pennsylvania fell into the hands of
the soldiers at a moment when paper was a crying need, and the pages of
these Bibles were used for wads.

The artillery of the time seems feeble compared with the monster weapons
of death which we know in our own age. Yet it was an important factor in
the war. It is probable that before the war not a single cannon had been
made in the colonies. From the outset Washington was hampered for lack
of artillery. Neutrals, especially the Dutch in the West Indies, sold
guns to the Americans, and France was a chief source of supply during
long periods when the British lost the command of the sea. There was
always difficulty about equipping cavalry, especially in the North. The
Virginian was at home on horseback, and in the farther South bands of
cavalry did service during the later years of the war, but many of
the fighting riders of today might tomorrow be guiding their horses
peacefully behind the plough.

The pay of the soldiers remained to Washington a baffling problem. When
the war ended their pay was still heavily in arrears. The States were
timid about imposing taxation and few if any paid promptly the levies
made upon them. Congress bridged the chasm in finance by issuing paper
money which so declined in value that, as Washington said grimly, it
required a wagon-load of money to pay for a wagon-load of supplies. The
soldier received his pay in this money at its face value, and there
is little wonder that the "continental dollar" is still in the United
States a symbol of worthlessness. At times the lack of pay caused mutiny
which would have been dangerous but for Washington's firm and tactful
management in the time of crisis. There was in him both the kindly
feeling of the humane man and the rigor of the army leader. He sent
men to death without flinching, but he was at one with his men in their
sufferings, and no problem gave him greater anxiety than that of pay,
affecting, as it did, the health and spirits of men who, while unpaid,
had no means of softening the daily tale of hardship.

Desertion was always hard to combat. With the homesickness which led
sometimes to desertion Washington must have had a secret sympathy,
for his letters show that he always longed for that pleasant home in
Virginia which he did not allow himself to revisit until nearly the end
of the war. The land of a farmer on service often remained untilled,
and there are pathetic cases of families in bitter need because the
breadwinner was in the army. In frontier settlements his absence
sometimes meant the massacre of his family by the savages. There is
little wonder that desertion was common, so common that after a reverse
the men went away by hundreds. As they usually carried with them their
rifles and other equipment, desertion involved a double loss. On one
occasion some soldiers undertook for themselves the punishment of
deserters. Men of the First Pennsylvania Regiment who had recaptured
three deserters, beheaded one of them and returned to their camp with
the head carried on a pole. More than once it happened that condemned
men were paraded before the troops for execution with the graves dug and
the coffins lying ready. The death sentence would be read, and then, as
the firing party took aim, a reprieve would be announced. The reprieve
in such circumstances was omitted often enough to make the condemned
endure the real agony of death.

Religion offered its consolations in the army and Washington gave much
thought to the service of the chaplains. He told his army that fine as
it was to be a patriot it was finer still to be a Christian. It is an
odd fact that, though he attended the Anglican Communion service before
and after the war, he did not partake of the Communion during the
war. What was in his mind we do not know. He was disposed, as he said
himself, to let men find "that road to Heaven which to them shall seem
the most direct," and he was without Puritan fervor, but he had deep
religious feeling. During the troubled days at Valley Forge a neighbor
came upon him alone in the bush on his knees praying aloud, and stole
away unobserved. He would not allow in the army a favorite Puritan
custom of burning the Pope in effigy, and the prohibition was not
easily enforced among men, thousands of whom bore scriptural names from
ancestors who thought the Pope anti-Christ.

Washington's winter quarters at Valley Forge were only twenty miles from
Philadelphia, among hills easily defended. It is matter for wonder that
Howe, with an army well equipped, did not make some attempt to destroy
the army of Washington which passed the winter so near and in acute
distress. The Pennsylvania Loyalists, with dark days soon to come, were
bitter at Howe's inactivity, full of tragic meaning for themselves. He
said that he could achieve nothing permanent by attack. It may be so;
but it is a sound principle in warfare to destroy the enemy when this
is possible. There was a time when in Washington's whole force not
more than two thousand men were in a condition to fight. Congress
was responsible for the needs of the army but was now, in sordid
inefficiency, cooped up in the little town of York, eighty miles west
of Valley Forge, to which it had fled. There was as yet no real federal
union. The seat of authority was in the State Governments, and we need
not wonder that, with the passing of the first burst of devotion which
united the colonies in a common cause, Congress declined rapidly in
public esteem. "What a lot of damned scoundrels we had in that second
Congress" said, at a later date, Gouverneur Morris of Philadelphia to
John Jay of New York, and Jay answered gravely, "Yes, we had." The body,
so despised in the retrospect, had no real executive government, no
organized departments. Already before Independence was proclaimed there
had been talk of a permanent union, but the members of Congress had
shown no sense of urgency, and it was not until November 15, 1777, when
the British were in Philadelphia and Congress was in exile at York, that
Articles of Confederation were adopted. By the following midsummer many
of the States had ratified these articles, but Maryland, the last
to assent, did not accept the new union until 1781, so that Congress
continued to act for the States without constitutional sanction during
the greater part of the war.

The ineptitude of Congress is explained when we recall that it was
a revolutionary body which indeed controlled foreign affairs and the
issues of war and peace, coined money, and put forth paper money but
had no general powers. Each State had but one vote, and thus a small and
sparsely settled State counted for as much as populous Massachusetts
or Virginia. The Congress must deal with each State only as a unit; it
could not coerce a State; and it had no authority to tax or to coerce
individuals. The utmost it could do was to appeal to good feeling, and
when a State felt that it had a grievance such an appeal was likely to
meet with a flaming retort.

Washington maintained towards Congress an attitude of deference
and courtesy which it did not always deserve. The ablest men in the
individual States held aloof from Congress. They felt that they had more
dignity and power if they sat in their own legislatures. The assembly
which in the first days had as members men of the type of Washington and
Franklin sank into a gathering of second-rate men who were divided into
fierce factions. They debated interminably and did little. Each member
usually felt that he must champion the interests of his own State
against the hostility of others. It was not easy to create a sense of
national life. The union was only a league of friendship. States which
for a century or more had barely acknowledged their dependence upon
Great Britain, were chary about coming under the control of a new
centralizing authority at Philadelphia. The new States were sovereign
and some of them went so far as to send envoys of their own to negotiate
with foreign powers in Europe. When it was urged that Congress should
have the power to raise taxes in the States, there were patriots who
asked sternly what the war was about if it was not to vindicate the
principle that the people of a State alone should have power of taxation
over themselves. Of New England all the other States were jealous and
they particularly disliked that proud and censorious city which already
was accused of believing that God had made Boston for Himself and all
the rest of the world for Boston. The religion of New England did not
suit the Anglicans of Virginia or the Roman Catholics of Maryland, and
there was resentful suspicion of Puritan intolerance. John Adams said
quite openly that there were no religious teachers in Philadelphia to
compare with those of Boston and naturally other colonies drew away from
the severe and rather acrid righteousness of which he was a type.

Inefficiency meanwhile brought terrible suffering at Valley Forge,
and the horrors of that winter remain still vivid in the memory of the
American people. The army marched to Valley Forge on December 17, 1777,
an

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2704