As September ended, George Washington—stubborn, angry, indignant, and sleep deprived—was steeped in misery. His worst nightmare had materialized: he was doomed to fail because he hadn’t been given adequate means to succeed. He needed a confidant, and Lund Washington remained the recipient of choice for his jeremiads: “In short, such is my situation, that if I were to wish the bitterest curse to an enemy on this side of the grave, I should put him in my stead with my feelings . . . In confidence I tell you that I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.”⁶³ Mount Vernon again offered sustenance for his weary mind, and he pictured the new room under construction there. “The chimney in the new room should be exactly in the middle of it, the doors and everything else to be exactly answerable and uniform,” he advised Lund. “In short, I would have the whole executed in a masterly manner.”⁶⁴

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

An Indecisive Mind

ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 12 General Howe applied renewed pressure on the Continental Army as 150 British ships sailed up the East River, slipping through pea-soup fog, and deposited four thousand men on the boggy turf of Throg’s Neck, a peninsula on the Westchester shore. This marshy spot lay due east of Harlem Heights, and Washington again brooded that the wily British might entrap his embattled army as part of “their former scheme of getting to our rear.”¹ While the intervening ground had numerous stone fences to deflect British advances, Washington couldn’t take any chances. In this dismal season of defeats, he marched his endangered men eighteen miles north to the village of White Plains. He would long recall the hardships suffered by sick soldiers forced to limp along or be carried, so critical was the wagon shortage. The least fortunate were discharged as unfit for service and left behind as common vagrants to beg by the wayside on the road home. The plight of these pauperized soldiers, marooned on country lanes, only compounded the difficulties of recruitment.

On this northward march, the battle-weary soldiers found comfort in gallows humor. Joseph Plumb Martin told of a sojourn on Valentine’s Hill, “where we continued some days, keeping up the old system of starving.” When the soldiers resumed their march toward White Plains, they left behind a weighty iron kettle. “I told my mess-mates that I could not carry our kettle any further. They said they would not carry it any further. Of what use was it? They had nothing to cook and did not want anything to cook with.”² Behind the macabre humor lay the somber reality of starving men having to swipe food from farmers’ fields to survive. Deprived of tents and blankets, soldiers burrowed beneath heaps of autumn leaves to stay warm on cool nights.

Around this time, Washington welcomed back General Charles Lee, who had acquired something of a halo after defeating a British expedition to South Carolina. Lee had prevailed upon Congress to compensate him for time lost to civilian pursuits, awarding him $30,000. In private, Lee repaid their generosity by reviling them as “cattle” and urging Washington to flout their orders.³ Lee’s popularity in Congress only stoked his vanity and encouraged the delusion that he was being groomed as Washington’s successor. Blind to this conceited rival, Washington renamed one of the twin forts on the Hudson—the one on the Jersey shore, opposite Fort Washington—Fort Lee.

Once at White Plains, the Continental Army found shelter on elevated ground above the Bronx River. The best it could manage for breastworks was to uproot cornstalks from local fields, then pile them high with freshly turned earth stuffed in between. On the morning of October 28 Washington surveyed Chatterton’s Hill, a steeply wooded bluff, threaded by streams and ravines that tumbled down to the river below. Belatedly recognizing its strategic importance, Washington decided to fortify it. While he was on this plateau, a breathless messenger raced up to him. “The British are on the camp, sir!” he reported to Washington, who at once told his generals, “Gentlemen, we have now other business than reconnoitering.”⁴ He assigned sixteen hundred men under General Alexander McDougall, entrenched behind stone walls, to hold the hill.

The Americans soon faced thirteen thousand British and Hessian soldiers who must have looked brilliantly invincible in autumn sunlight as they stepped forward in smart columns. As General Heath recalled, “The sun shone bright, their arms glittered, and perhaps troops never were shown to more advantage.” Amid this impressive display of force, British artillery fire began to darken the fine, crisp air. In the evocative words of a Pennsylvania soldier: “The air groaned with streams of cannon and musket shot; the hills smoked and echoed terribly with the bursting of shells; the fences and walls were knocked down and torn to pieces, and men’s legs, arms, and bodies mangled with cannon and grape shot all around us.”⁵

The bloodiest combat unfolded at Chatterton’s Hill. In the first wave of attacks, Captain Alexander Hamilton, positioned with two fieldpieces on a rocky ledge, sprayed the invading forces with deadly fire, driving them back. After regrouping, the British grenadiers and Hessian soldiers forded the Bronx River and bravely clambered up the wooded slope under a thick hail of bullets. Their artillery set fire to autumn leaves, creating a thick canopy of smoke. As they rushed through burning grass, the Hessians hoisted their cartridge boxes above their heads so as not to blow themselves up. In the end, enemy soldiers succeeded in dislodging the American forces as the militia lost heart and ran. Their fright was understandable as cannonballs flew thick and fast. One Connecticut soldier recalled how a cannonball “first took the head of Smith, a stout heavy man and dash[e]d it open, then it took off Chilson’s arm, which was amputated . . . it then took Taylor across the bowels, it then struck Serg[ean]t Garret of our company on the hip [and] took off the point of the hip bone . . . What a sight that was to see within a distance of six rods those men with their legs and arms and guns and packs all in a heap.”⁶

For all that, the British and the Hessians suffered 276 casualties, or twice as many as the Americans. Once again General Howe dawdled after victory and bungled a major opportunity. In later testimony before Parliament, he traced his sluggish behavior to an aversion to unnecessary combat losses but also cited unnamed “political reasons”—perhaps his preference for a negotiated solution rather than outright conquest of the Continental Army.

Both sides continued to place a premium on commanding the Hudson River. The twin American outposts of Fort Washington and Fort Lee, combined with obstructions sunk in the river, were supposed to bar British ships. This assumption represented a triumph of hope over experience. On October 9, with Washington on hand to witness it, the British tested American defenses by sending three warships up the river. While American guns blasted away from both shores, killing nine British sailors, the ships coasted by largely intact, their movement unimpeded by submarine obstacles and a boom flung across the river. “To our surprise and mortification,” Washington told Hancock, the ships passed “without receiving any apparent damage from our forts, though they kept up a heavy fire from both sides.”⁷ Nonetheless Congress refused to end reliance on this porous barrier and demanded that the river defenses be reinforced.

Of the two Hudson River stockades, Fort Washington was the more impressive, a huge pentagonal earthwork straddling the highest spot on Manhattan Island. Its defenses meandered across a rocky bluff stretching from present-day 181st to 186th streets. The fort had several significant defects. Without an internal water source, it had to rely on the Hudson River hundreds of feet below. Built on solid rock, it scarcely possessed any topsoil from which to dig trenches, and it lacked such rudimentary amenities as a powder magazine, palisades, or barracks. Its guns, permanently trained on the Hudson River, couldn’t pivot to deal with land-based threats. Worst of all, it held only twelve hundred men and could not shelter the three thousand patriot soldiers who might need to seek asylum there. Most soldiers had to be posted outside the defensive perimeter, defeating the very idea of a fortress.