Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (12 page)

His ships nudged south by a cold wind, Carleton probed carefully along the lake’s clutter of islands and coves, expecting to meet with Arnold’s fleet around every headland. He went to anchor for the night about fifteen miles south of the river, five miles north of the Americans’ concealed ships.

The brisk north breeze continued the next morning. Snow whitened the peaks of the Adirondack Mountains to the west. Arnold called a council of war on the
Congress.
His second in command, General David
Waterbury, a Connecticut militia leader, argued that the channel behind Valcour was a trap, the British fleet too powerful to oppose. He favored a fighting retreat to the south, where they could protect the bastion at Ticonderoga as ordered. Arnold overruled him. He would fight where he was.

Arnold had an uncanny ability to inspire men. The heat of his passion kindled their own. Neither he nor his nervous subordinates could imagine the wild ferocity of an all-out naval battle, yet he made the coming fight appear to them something that no man would want to miss.

Carleton’s fleet came down the lake that morning, ready for battle but still unsure where they might encounter the Americans. His flagship
Maria
led the flotilla, followed by the majestic
Inflexible
and three other warships. Weighed down by a single large cannon in the bow, each of the two dozen gunboats nodded to every wave. Bringing up the rear were more than four hundred Indians paddling thirty-foot-long war canoes. Sailors rowed longboats loaded with provisions. The squadron stretched out as the wind hurried the warships southward and the rowers strained their backs to keep up.

Carleton came even with Valcour Island. Where were the Americans? Arnold kept his fleet arrayed in an arc across the hidden channel, ready to aim all his firepower on any vessel that entered. When the first British ships were two miles past, he sent a small squadron onto the lake to incite the fleet. Spotting the American schooner
Royal Savage,
the British vessels immediately came about. Now they had to beat back into the wind to join battle, a difficult feat for the square-rigged
Inflexible,
nearly impossible for the flat-bottomed
Thunderer.
But the forty-foot-long gunboats were able to pivot nimbly and open fire.

The
Royal Savage
never regained the channel. Blasted by British guns, she lost part of her rigging and ground to a halt on a submerged rock ledge at the end of the island. She would be captured and recaptured several times during the day.

Powerful in the open water, the
Inflexible
was a helpless giant when attempting to thread a narrow channel. The more maneuverable schooners
Maria
and
Carleton
approached to within a few hundred yards of the American line and opened fire. The British gunboats joined in, their ordnance operated by skilled German artillerymen.

Eighteenth-century naval battles were unimaginably violent. Ships could support the weight of huge cannon and carry them to an intimate range. Guns with the power to throw a cannonball a mile blasted enemy vessels from less than a hundred yards. The confined interiors of the ships turned hellish. The firing in close quarters numbed men’s ears; smoke
burned their eyes. Cannonballs punched through hulls with an explosion of splinters, lacerating limbs. Decks turned slippery with blood.

As the air screamed, Arnold, his face blackened by gunpowder, ran from gun to gun on the
Congress,
carefully
aiming the cannon. He pointed one heavy piece and barked the order to fire. The explosion sent a five-inch iron ball hurling across the water. It passed directly between two men on the quarterdeck at the
Maria.
The shock wave knocked Guy Carleton’s younger brother Thomas to the deck and left him bleeding from both ears. This was no fluke—men were sometimes killed by near misses. Carleton himself, although unhurt physically, was stunned by this supersonic angel of death. He allowed Commodore Pringle to direct the ship back down the channel. The
Maria
did not stop until she was safely two miles up the lake.

Carleton had neglected to draw up any plan of battle in advance. Each British captain was left to improvise. As the afternoon progressed, the fight turned into a waterborne melee, with British gunboats and American galleys and gondolas darting forward to fire, returning to the line to reload. By now, Indians were shooting from both banks, waiting to capture or tomahawk any American forced ashore.

The enemy “continued a very hot fire with round and grape-shot,” Arnold reported.
9
Smoke wafted on the wind. The noise of the firing echoed down the lake. The raw militia fifty miles away at Crown Point knew from the distant booms that the fate of the lake—and their own fate—hung in the balance.

At five o’clock, Arnold watched as the captain of the mighty
Inflexible
finally managed to zigzag his ship into the channel. The firing from both sides reached a mad crescendo as the ship’s big guns pounded the American line.

Only darkness brought an end to the shrieking madness. Carleton’s ships and gunboats pulled back and formed a line across the mouth of the channel. For a time, Arnold could make them out in the light of the flames that had engulfed the
Royal Savage.
Then all faded to blackness. An autumnal fog unrolled a deep quiet over the water.

* * *

Arnold called his captains to a war council in his cabin. A makeshift surgery during the fighting, the room still reeked of human blood. The reports were all bad: Every ship had been damaged, one gondola was sinking, a dozen cannonballs had pierced the
Congress.
The men had expended three-quarters of their gunpowder during the seven-hour battle. Crewmen and officers lay dead. The survivors could not continue the fight.
The battered fleet, all summer in the making, was doomed. They had to surrender.

No, Arnold told them. They would escape. As the fog thickened, he ordered every captain to mark the stern of his craft with white chalk and to hang a shrouded lantern so that its light fell only on this smudge. By following the boat in front, the ships could maintain a line, hug the shore and perhaps sneak past the enemy.

The escape resembled Washington’s daring retreat after the Battle of Long Island six weeks earlier. The rowers muffled their oars. The men held their breath. As they glided through the dark, they could hear voices and laughter from the enemy ships. By morning they were seven miles south of Valcour Island.

Carleton awoke to the amazing news that Arnold had “given us the slip.” His naval officers were humiliated. They struggled south against a head wind, determined to finish the upstart American fleet.

As darkness fell on the day after the battle, Arnold’s fleeing crewmen continued to row through stinging sleet. Weary muscles could not propel the heavy craft fast enough. The British armada bore down on them the next day. General Waterbury, aboard the galley
Washington,
wanted permission to remove his wounded and blow up the ship. Arnold refused. But as the
Inflexible
came within range and its guns began to pound his vessel, Waterbury lowered his flag in surrender.

Arnold was determined not to give up. He traded shots with seven enemy ships as he worked his galley southward. Finally, he steered the
Congress
and the remaining gondolas into a bay too shallow for the pursuing vessels. The British continued to fire. Seeing the war suddenly arrive on his doorstep, local farmer Benjamin Kellogg decided to flee with his family. Rowing a boat into the bay, they “fell in between Arnold’s fleet and the British fleet,” his daughter Sally later remembered, “but happy for us the balls went over us. We heard them whis.” The family made it to Fort Ticonderoga.
10

Arnold’s men dumped their guns overboard and ran the boats onto the beach. He ordered them to set fire to the vessels with their flags still flying defiantly. He organized the 150 men who had escaped and took off through the woods, carrying the wounded on litters cut from sails. The next day, he reached Crown Point, indefensible against the approaching navy. He ordered the docks and barracks burned and the position abandoned. By four o’clock, he was at Fort Ticonderoga, having endured three days without sleeping or eating.

Benedict Arnold had been beaten. Eighty men were dead, many more wounded, one hundred and twenty taken prisoner. Most of the fleet was
gone, only five vessels remained afloat. The British, in just a few days, had taken complete control of Lake Champlain. Some criticized Arnold for what they saw as a costly disaster. One officer wrote a facetious letter noting that “General Arnold, our evil genius to the north, has, with a good deal of industry, got us clear of all our fine fleet.”
11

But battles are not decided by comparing casualty lists—they are won and lost in the minds of the commanders. Arnold’s ambitious effort to build a fleet on the lake had forced Carleton to do the same. The battle at Valcour Island, like the cannonball that had skimmed past his head, had rattled the British general’s nerves. The fighting had damaged the British fleet and checked his momentum. Instead of looking forward toward Albany, he now looked back to his supply line from Canada. Instead of dreaming about trading war stories with General Howe in New York City, he imagined himself caught in a prolonged winter siege of Fort Ticonderoga. After two weeks of indecision, the cautious Carleton called off the invasion. He would wait until next year.

In order to buy time, Arnold had first built, then sacrificed, America’s first navy. The crushing blow from the north, though painful, had glanced off. Relieved of the pressure, Gates could now release needed troops to aid Washington’s beleaguered army in New York.

History was kinder to Arnold’s effort at Valcour Island than were some of his contemporaries. The nineteenth-century naval strategist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote: “Save for Arnold’s flotilla, the British would have settled the business. The little American navy was wiped out, but never had any force, big or small, lived to better purpose.”
12

The war would go on.

Eight

An Indecisive Mind

1776

Nathanael Greene was for burning New York City to the ground to keep it from falling to the British. Congress would not stand for such a move. After the devastating loss on Long Island, Washington had to decide whether to hold the city or relinquish it to the enemy. He saw the military logic of a retreat before a superior force. “On the other hand, to abandon a City, which has been by some deemed defensible . . . has a tendency to dispirit the troops.”
1
He worried about his own reputation, noting that “declining an engagement subjects a general to reproach.”
2

During the second week in September 1776, even as he tried to monitor the fraught events unfolding on the border of Canada, Washington admitted that his army had to clear out. He started the bulk of the men marching toward Harlem Heights, a defensible ridge across Manhattan Island ten miles north of the city limits.

Part way up the island, nervous, untried troops were guarding an inviting landing spot along the East River at Kips Bay. They watched as four massive British warships made their way up the river and dropped anchor two hundred yards away. They could count the black holes of seventy-four large cannon scowling at them from the ships’ sides. Crowds of British and Hessian soldiers were gathering on the opposite shore.

The next morning, September 15, these same recruits peered over their ramparts as the thousands of enemy soldiers embarked in a flotilla of rowboats. The late-summer day turned sultry and stagnant. Sailors began
to maneuver the crowded boats into the river, pausing near the center of the channel. The defenders could make out the faces of their enemies.

“All of a sudden there came such a peal of thunder from the British shipping that I thought my head would go with the sound,” remembered Joseph Plumb Martin, one of the privates waiting in the shallow trenches the troops had dug to defend the beach.
3

“So terrible and incessant a roar of guns,” another observer declared, “few even in the army and navy had ever heard before.”
4

Cannonballs tore into the mounds of earth in front of the troops, lifting spouts of sand and plowing great gaps. The guns’ mind-numbing detonations deranged the defenders’ senses and shattered their determination to resist. They panicked. “The demons of fear and disorder,” Martin remembered, “seemed to take full possession of all and everything that day.”

The German and British invaders stepped ashore under a pall of heavy smoke without losing a man. “I saw a Hessian sever a rebel’s head from his body,” a British officer reported, “and clap it on a pole in the entrenchments.”
5

Washington came galloping down from his headquarters four miles to the north. Five thousand of his men remained in New York City, along with tons of supplies and scores of heavy cannon. If the defenders allowed the British to march across the island and block the army’s retreat, the loss would be fatal. The enemy must be stopped.

“I used every means in my power to rally and get them in some order,” he reported to Congress, “but my attempts were fruitless and ineffectual.” This was an understatement. Washington’s usual tight control slipped and his “ungovernable passions” took over. He became a “harum Starum ranting Swearing fellow.” He screamed orders. He dashed his hat onto the ground. “Distressed and enraged,” an observer noted, he “drew his sword and snapped his pistols” to check the fleeing men. “Are these the men,” he shouted, “with which I am to defend America?”
6
As advancing enemy troops came within musket range of the American commander in chief, Washington’s alarmed aides had to yank the reins of his horse to rush him to safety.

“I could wish the transactions of this day blotted out of the annals of America,” wrote a patriot officer. “Nothing appeared but fright, disgrace, and confusion.”
7

Washington sent orders to hurry the evacuation of troops up the west side of the island. Israel Putnam, by means of “extraordinary exertions,” organized a hasty departure, forcing Henry Knox to leave behind some of his cannon. Fortunately for Washington, General Howe moved at his
usual cautious pace. Rather than rush the advance guard across to the Hudson and cut the island in half, he waited until another nine thousand of his troops could be ferried across the East River. The delay gave Old Put the time he needed. The American troops managed to reach the safety of their lines at Harlem Heights just before night descended and the British sealed the largely empty trap.

Washington blamed the rout on the “disgraceful and dastardly conduct” of the troops. Others recognized that it was not the men but the officers who were to blame. “The bulk of the officers of the army are a parcel of ignorant, stupid men,” Henry Knox wrote to his brother, “who might make tolerable soldiers but bad officers.”
8
He began to push for the establishment of an academy to train professional military leaders, a cause he would champion for years to come.

The loyalist residents of New York City welcomed the redcoats enthusiastically. Some carried British soldiers on their shoulders and acted like “overjoyed Bedlamites” at the return of legitimate authority to the city.

The day after the Kips Bay fiasco, a skirmish south of Harlem Heights suddenly flamed into a full-scale battle. The clash provided Nathanael Greene with his first taste of combat. After years of studying and dreaming about war, after listening to the roar of the battle of Long Island from his sick bed, he now found himself in the middle of a chaotic, nerve-jangling fight. He and General Putnam rallied their men. The British fell back and were soon running up a slope opposite the Heights, seeking protection under the guns of British warships on the river. Washington gave orders for his troops to break off the chase lest they should stray too close to the main British line. In the fight, they had killed or wounded almost 400 enemy soldiers, losing only 150 of their own men.

The Americans came back elated. For now, they had stopped running, had given the enemy a beating. “They find that if they stick to these mighty men,” Knox noted, “they will run as fast as other people.”
9
Washington wrote of the engagement, “It seems, to have greatly inspired the whole of our Troops.”

For the next few weeks, the two armies stared at each other from lines that stretched across Manhattan. From Harlem Heights, the Americans watched New York City burn on September 21, the fire touched off by “Providence—or some honest fellow,” Washington noted. The blaze reduced nearly a quarter of the town to ashes. Daniel Morgan and some of his companions from the Quebec expedition, on their way to being exchanged for British prisoners, watched the inferno from ships in the harbor. They saw the towering steeple of Trinity church, erected in 1698
with the help of the pious pirate Captain Kidd, turn to a “pyramid of fire” before it crashed to the ground.

Washington now made the odd decision to hold his position on Harlem Heights. If the enemy were to land troops north of Manhattan and cut off the Americans’ escape route over Kings Bridge, the army would again be trapped. They could be surrounded and defeated or isolated and starved to death. Nathanael Greene, for one, wanted to get out: “Tis our business to . . . take post where the Enemy will be Obligd to fight us and not we them.”
10

The burden of command weighed on Washington. “In confidence,” he wrote to his cousin Lund, “I tell you that I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.” He was, he admitted, “wearied to death.”

Desertions, expiring enlistments, illness, and battle casualties had cut his army in half since midsummer. After a brief hiatus, the violence resumed. On October 9, three British warships sailed up the Hudson River, straight through the barriers that the rebels had constructed in the water, past the guns of Fort Washington on the eastern and Fort Lee on the western heights. “To our surprise and mortification,” Washington wrote, “they ran through without the least difficulty.” Three days later, Howe landed troops on the mainland, threatening to trap Washington’s forces.

General Charles Lee had just returned from helping thwart the British attack on Charleston. His appearance relieved many in the army who valued his experienced opinion. Alarmed, he pointed out that remaining in Manhattan was worse than folly. The troops must withdraw north before the enemy cut them off. They had to start now.

A council of war agreed. The officers decided to abandon all but the narrow northern tip of Manhattan, which was safely dominated by the guns of Fort Washington. Lord Stirling, who along with General Sullivan had returned to the army in a prisoner exchange, immediately led an occupying force to White Plains, fifteen miles north of Manhattan.

On October 28, Howe attacked the Americans dug in on high ground near White Plains village. Fall foliage filled the limpid day with gold, vermilion, and bright orange. The British and German soldiers had seen nothing like a northeast autumn. Their own scarlet and blue coats added to the spectacle. Their polished bayonets glittered in the harvest-scented air.

The battle began with a thunderous bombardment. “The air groaned with streams of cannon and musket shot.”
11
It ended with Hessians pushing the Americans off a nearby hill and chasing them through a forest of burning leaves. The British won, but endured 250 casualties, twice as many as the rebels. The Americans pulled back and awaited a renewed attack that never came. On November 5, the British withdrew. Where were they headed now?

Washington divided his army. General Lee would remain with seven thousand troops near White Plains, ready to react to British movements. Another four thousand men would guard the strategic Hudson Highlands to the northwest in order to prevent the enemy from moving up the river. They would also protect the ferry crossings essential to coordinating the American forces. Washington and Lord Stirling would cross to the west
side of the Hudson and march two thousand men south, joining Greene’s brigade at Fort Lee. Washington suspected that New Jersey, and ultimately the capital at Philadelphia, were Howe’s targets.

* * *

Commanding Forts Lee and Washington, which straddled the Hudson at the north end of Manhattan, Nathanael Greene had anticipated his superior’s concern. He had directed his men to establish a string of supply depots on the road to Philadelphia, which ran south through Newark to Brunswick, then straight across the state to Trenton, which lay a day’s march from the capital. It was the type of initiative and foresight that heightened Washington’s confidence in the young general.

That confidence was about to be put to the test. The British had proven they could run ships up the Hudson past the guns overlooking the river. Howe’s army was now ranging north of Manhattan. Yet Greene still insisted that Fort Washington be held. He figured the British would never dare to thrust into New Jersey with an armed post at their rear. If they besieged Fort Washington, it would take them until December at the earliest to prevail against its high dirt walls and guns. If worse came to worst, Greene could easily ferry the garrison across the river.

Washington was not so sure. When more British ships slipped up the river in early November, he wrote to Greene, “If we cannot prevent vessels passing up, and the Enemy are possessed of the surrounding country, what valuable purpose can it answer” to hold the fort? Then he conceded, “But, as you are on the Spot, I leave it to you.” Greene was confident. “I can not conceive the garrison to be in any great danger,” he wrote back. “The men may be brought off at any time.”
12

Within days, Howe was massing fourteen thousand troops around upper Manhattan. In response, Greene sent more men across the river from New Jersey, bringing the total American force around Fort Washington to 2,800. This was reckless folly, but Greene could not see it. The immediate commander of the fort, Colonel Robert Magaw encouraged Greene in his error. “We have labored like Horses and completed a Fort said to be one of the Strongest in America,” he boasted.
13
A thirty-five-year-old bachelor lawyer from the Pennsylvania frontier, Magaw loved to fight. But like Greene, he had only been soldiering for a year. Both men consulted wishes rather than reality in assessing the situation.

On November 13, Washington arrived to look over the terrain in person. He would later speak of “warfare in my mind,” but he did not countermand Greene’s strategy. Two days later, catching up on paperwork at his headquarters in Hackensack, the commander received an urgent
message. The British, under a flag of truce, had delivered Magaw a demand to surrender Fort Washington in two hours. If he refused, all the defenders would be put to the sword. Such threats were traditional intimidation tactics in sieges and were allowed under the customs of war.

Washington galloped the five miles to Fort Lee. He was starting to cross the river under a darkening sky when he met Generals Greene and Putnam returning. Magaw had refused to surrender. “Activated by the most glorious cause that mankind ever fought in,” the fort’s commander had written to Howe, “I am determined to defend this post to the last extremity.” There was nothing to do for the moment.