Part 2 (1/2)

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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 pa.s.sion for a grave and solemn doc.u.ment. He was, however, the princ.i.p.al speaker in its support.

There is pa.s.sion in the Declaration from beginning to end, and not the restrained and chastened pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 doc.u.ment. The King is accused of abolis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sertion of human right. We should speak in terms of reverence of a doc.u.ment which became a cla.s.sic 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 d.i.c.kinson 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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

Was.h.i.+ngton'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 pa.s.s 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 princ.i.p.al town in Virginia. Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 hara.s.sed 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 a.s.sumed 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 s.h.i.+ps. 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 s.h.i.+ps before Fort Moultrie in the harbor. He had expected simultaneous aid by land from three thousand soldiers put ash.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps was seaworthy after the fight. It took him three weeks to refit, and not until the 4th of August did his defeated s.h.i.+ps reach New York.

A mighty armada of seven hundred s.h.i.+ps 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 coa.r.s.e. 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 pa.s.sionate conviction of Was.h.i.+ngton 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 d.i.c.k”; 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 d.i.c.k 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 Was.h.i.+ngton and his comrades, though John Adams was excepted by name * 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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.

* Trevelyan, ”American Revolution”, Part II, vol. I (New Ed., vol. II), 261.

Lord Howe went so far as to address a letter to ”George Was.h.i.+ngton Esq.

&c. &c.,” and Was.h.i.+ngton agreed to an interview with the officer who bore it. In imposing uniform and with the stateliest manner, Was.h.i.+ngton, who had an instinct for effect, received the envoy. The awed messenger explained that the symbols ” &c. &c.” meant everything, including, of course, military t.i.tles; but Was.h.i.+ngton 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.

Was.h.i.+ngton'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. Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton.

In such a situation even the best skill of Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 s.h.i.+ps were near and but for unfavorable winds might have sailed up to Brooklyn. Was.h.i.+ngton hoped and prayed that Howe would try to carry Brooklyn Heights by a.s.sault. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 sh.o.r.e 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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.

Was.h.i.+ngton 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 sh.o.r.e 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 pa.s.sed up both the Hudson and the East River with guns sweeping the sh.o.r.es 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. Was.h.i.+ngton 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, Was.h.i.+ngton was the mainstay of the American cause. He too had to get away and Howe's force landed easily enough. Meanwhile, on the west sh.o.r.e 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 Was.h.i.+ngton was now, during his first days of active warfare, pitting himself against one of the most experienced of British generals.