Chapter III

SECOND TURN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WHEEL; ITS ECCENTRIC BUT ONWARD
MOVEMENTS.
1776–1780.

English Hawks gather around New York.—Washington watches them.—About an
Esquire.—The Way the Germans took Brooklyn the first Time.—How they
returned, not to their Mutton, but to Kalbfleisch.—Difficulty of
reaching New York from Brooklyn in 1776.—Washington takes a Trip to
Harlem.—The British also.—Red Eyes and Disfigured Faces the
Consequence.—Lord Howe attempts to get around the American Squire.—The
slight Unpleasantness at White Plains.—The different Uses of the
Croton Water in 1776 and now.—The Amount of Whiskey it took in 1869 to
qualify the Water in New York.—Washington ventures into New
Jersey.—Set-to at Fort Lee.—Washington across Rivers.—Philadelphia
covered.—Homesickness of Agricultural Lads.—What befell Lee at a
Tavern.—Washington crosses the Delaware and drops Christmas Presents
into German Stockings.—The Effects of Yankee Doodle on Lafayette, De
Kalb, Kosciusko, Pulaski, and others.—Friends of America in England,
Fox, Hume, etc.—Friends of England in America.—The Statue and Statutes
of George III. repealed.—Battle of Princeton.—The Germans obtain Cider
and Sausages at Danbury.—Colonel Meigs tickles the Feet of Long
Island, and makes Congress laugh.—Colonel Prescott is obliged to rise
very early one Morning at Newport.—Silas Deane and B. Franklin in
France.—What followed.—Burgoyne tries to find a back-stair Passage to
New York.—Strong Gates in his Way near Saratoga.—Still-Water runs
deep.—Brandy-Wine an unpalatable Drink.—French Treaty with America in
1778.—The Wheel moves in Water and turns out French Names.—Crossing
New Jersey, Lord Howe collides with Washington at Monmouth.—Count
d’Estaing is prevented by an Injunction off the New York Bar from
entering New York.—Coquetting, but no Engagement, near
Newport.—Buzzard’s Bay and its Roosts.—Little Egg Harbor and its
Nests,—what was laid there.—The Benefits of the Wyoming
Massacre.—Guerilla War in the South.—Savannah trounced.—Horse-Neck and
Putnam’s Home-Stretch down it.—Count d’Estaing’s Yachting.—Spain
hankers for Gibraltar.—England as a Pawnbroker.—Paul Jones and his
Whip.

While the wise men at Philadelphia were making the Fourth of July a precedent for the future by their very readable and taking Declaration of Independence, the English kites were gathering from the north, south, and east around New York. Lord Howe, from Halifax; Sir Henry Clinton, from Charleston; and Admiral Howe, from England, drawn together by focalizing orders, settled down with their separate flocks on Staten Island,—one of the lintels of the gateway to the metropolis,—numbering together twenty-four thousand old hawks which had often whetted their beaks before in Spanish, German, and Dutch blood.

Washington had about seventeen thousand agricultural lads, armed with every possible and impossible accoutrement, contrivance, and weapon, to watch the well-trained brood. Lord Howe, being a royal commissioner as well as a general, understood letter-writing well; and his first care was to pen an epistle to the American commander. Upon its composition he bestowed as much care as a young man upon his first letter to the coy damsel whom he would conciliate; but upon the address he spent far greater pains. As despatched, it read “George Washington, Esquire.” Carried to the General, he declined to receive it. Not that he was not an “Esq.,” for all Americans are born such of course; but being a Squire in a military court whose proceedings were likely to be recorded, he conceived himself to be entitled to different honors.

Defeated in his pen addresses, the British general tried another stroke. On the 22d of August, 1776, landing on Long Island, he commenced a march by three separate detachments towards Brooklyn, which, after a severe battle on the 27th of August, he took. It was the first invasion by the Germans of that quiet, pleasant, New York dormitory. Then the inhabitants took it very hard. Now, however, they have become so much accustomed to the German irruptions, that they have ceased to be astonished at their own frequent captures. We may add that the Hessians did not at that time elect Herr Martin Kalbfleisch mayor of Brooklyn. They waited nearly ninety years, and then returned, not to their mutton, but to their veal.

The gathering in of one thousand dead and wounded from the Long Island hills was not the kind of harvesting that the agricultural lads expected; and as they had only engaged for a short job, many of them went back on the 28th to their own farms. Washington not liking to be sandwiched with the rest of his forces, numbering some fourteen thousand, between Howe’s Germans and the East River, contrived during the misty night of the 29th of August to get over the river to New York,—an exploit much vaunted then among military men, but rendered very easy in our time by the Union Ferry Company’s boats. The country recruits who are now transported every Sunday across the same river to Beecher’s church, when there again transported, and after the service transported back again, show what changes have occurred in the facilities for moving large bodies of men over the East River since the battle of Long Island.

Howe’s Hessians threatening to emigrate en masse to New York, General Washington, on the 10th of September, made room for them by taking his young army to the upper part of Manhattan Island, giving them an opportunity to see the rustic beauties of Harlem and the country around the present High Bridge. As it sometimes happens in war, as well as in peace, that different gentlemen take a fancy to the same piece of ground, whose possession and value are enhanced thereby, General Howe’s desire to become possessed of the same real estate in the actual occupation of Washington, reached such a pitch that he sent a large party of military friends to seize it, even if by so doing they were obliged to dispossess its occupant. The friends of the Squire, however, resented this violent attempt so spiritedly that, as it has often fallen out since, the visitors to Harlem went back to New York with very red eyes and faces unkindly disfigured.

Lord Howe next attempted to get around the Squire by sending a part of his force, now increased to thirty-five thousand men, into the lower district of Westchester to see how Harlem and the Continentals looked from the rear, and the other part on a lively picnic up the Hudson River; but the wary leader of the Americans had seen, when surveying or hunting in Virginia and Ohio, too many traps set by Indians and white trappers to be caught between the steel jaws of this English one. So he pulled his men away from the cautiously planted contrivance and took them several miles to the northeast, on the Bronx River. He allowed several of them, however, to go up to White Plains, where, to his chagrin, they were set upon by a large British party and very disagreeably handled.

General Washington now scattered his force all along the Hudson River from the city of New York up as high as Peekskill, his camp soups giving off a flavor into Anthony’s nose. Some of the water used in cooking and drinking was dipped from the Croton River. Thus early was the Croton put into American service. At that time, we may add, the fluid was employed to qualify and reduce the whiskey; now the whiskey is thought to be weak enough to qualify and reduce the water. Ninety-three years have thus united to furnish the same number of reasons as the composing elements, contrary as they may seem to each other, for mixing the fire and water. One may judge of the extent to which the Croton is now used from the fact that during 1868, the amount of liquors retailed at the opening throat of the aqueduct cost over $150,000,000. We need not add how, during all this period, fusil-oil went down.

General Washington in November following ventured over into New Jersey, and, like so many from the New York side since, was having a good time at Fort Lee, when a body of Englishmen and Handeckers came down towards them in a very rough way, and the excursionists thought it prudent to retire, leaving their provender behind them. But for these little surprises, war would lose some of its briskest features. Washington was now compelled to retreat, with numbers daily diminishing, before foes superior in numbers and constantly augmenting as they pursued. In fact, he was obliged to bridge or ford the principal rivers or streams in Northern New Jersey; thus furnishing the best precedent which the Camden and Amboy Railroad engineers have ever had for carrying people across New Jersey soil and waters in a bad temper. Newark, New Brunswick, and Princeton fell into the hands of the enemy. Some people assert that they are in them still.

December 8, 1776, Washington passed over the Delaware River to cover Philadelphia, which now had much need of a lid, for it was in a terrible stew. The country lads, as these reverses pressed upon them, took a homesickness which nothing but their mothers and their own homes could cure. Only about three thousand remained, shivering and tentless, and lying near the inhospitable track of the New York and Philadelphia Railroad. Lord Cornwallis but waited for a cold night to bridge over the Delaware to enable him to take the Squire and his dwindling posse of men.

Trenton was the knife-balance of American fate. Upon a nicely poised point it swung tremblingly for a weary, anxious fortnight.

General Sullivan, having succeeded the waspish Lee, who was one night captured at a tavern in Baskingridge by a party more spirit-ed than his own, led, through the gloomy days of mid-December, a force of four thousand men, provided with ammunition, across the country to Washington. Timely indeed was the reinforcement; for Washington, although just made by a Congressional decree supreme manager of the war, had more need of powder than power.

Christmas eve, 1776, was a very jolly one in the British camp. The commander, officers, and men, all thought that the American fiddle was broken and about to be hung up forever; and so, in their Saxon and Teutonic joy, they hung up their stockings. The shrewd American Squire, borrowing old Santa Claus’s coach and horses, and filling the former with bullets and powder, crossed the Delaware about midnight and suddenly dropped his presents through the camp of his foreign visitors. Never were the Hessians so taken by Christmas gifts. In fact, fourteen hundred of them were so overcome by the novel presence of Washington, that they gave themselves up to American hospitality and followed their new friends across the river to their now merry quarters.

The American fiddle was mended again; and its strains of Yankee Doodle were heard across the Atlantic by a young French marquis, only nineteen years of age, of a very old family, with a very young wife, and an income of $40,000 a year,—an income in those pre-Erie and pre-petroleum times highly respectable. Other Frenchmen also listened to, and, like Lafayette, were moved by, the touching airs of freedom, which passed the Rhine also, and were drunk in with his hock by the Prussian Steuben, a military martinet and schoolmaster, much needed in our militia schoolhouse. The Baron was then generalissimo of his serene, discomposable highness, the Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, whose magnificent titles would, if printed on a straight strip of paper, have easily reached across his principality; but sounding as they were, they did not fill the ear of Steuben like the notes from that repaired fiddle. The lively adagio airs also struck upon the sensitive vibrating soul of De Kalb, a noble of Alsace, lifting it to highest impulses, which carried him through four years of patriotic service, and even bore him in lofty triumph across the death channel in 1780, when at the battle of Camden he was carried away from the daring front, loaded with eleven bullets in various parts of his body.

These same free airs fell upon those straight, upright Poles, Kosciusko and Pulaski, and so vivifying them by warming heats, that through the whole war they bore most fragrant fruit, until at last they stood as that vintage so ripely planted in Mrs. Browning’s verse,

“Where the sun with a golden mouth doth blow
Blue bubbles of grapes down a vineyard row,”—

the blue grapes of blistered steel.

Even in England thousands of hearts warmed to the American cause. In Parliament, Charles James Fox, Earl Chatham, Edmund Burke, the virtuous Lord Camden, and others; out of it, David Hume the historian, Edward Gibbon, whose studies of the rise as well as the fall of Rome had led him down into the crypt of history, and countless able, learned, and good, others as true to state as to individual freedom, gave vent and weighty shape to the well-considered convictions of the injustice of the attempt to compel the Colonies to submit to impositions unassented to by themselves. But while in England there were advocates of colonial freedom, in the Colonies there were friends of Parliamentary oppression. These last were infiltrated more or less through all the United settlements; but they gathered in notable volume in and about the then considerable village of New York,—numbering about 26,000 inhabitants,—where all the vigilant zeal of Alexander Hamilton, an ardent, eloquent young lawyer, recently arrived from his native West Indies, the equally vigorous but cooler patriotism of John Jay, and the alert wisdom of other Sons of Liberty were needed, to make head against the Tory current whose momentum and velocity, quickened by wealth, social position, and official experience, swept with force and volumed power through the island city. Rude indeed was the shock given to the Manhattan loyalists by the overthrow in the Bowling Green of the leaden statue of George III., and the conversion of its characteristically heavy metal into lively Continental bullets. The popular repeal of this loyal statue was soon followed in Congress by the repeal of more important representatives of royalty,—leaden-typed statutes.

The year 1777 opened with the battle of Princeton, fought under the leadership of Washington and Cornwallis, whereby two hundred English and Germans were put under sodded trenches, to furnish in after times, in addition to their use in well-rounded school-boys’ periods, a special resort for the students of Nassau Hall, accompanied by such persuadable female companions—Dutch, American, English, or German—as might relish history studied under the advantageous lights of a pair of admiring eyes.

In a few days after this battle, all New Jersey was cleared of British and Hessians, who dispersed in various directions, and sought to keep up their courage for several succeeding months by raids upon those peaceful, drowsy villages, Danbury in Connecticut, and Peekskill on the Hudson, and harrying off some of the delights of a German stomach,—winter apples, cider, and sausages. On the other hand, Colonel Meigs tickled the feet of Long Island one night in May, and touched up some British corns on its Sag Harbor toe, making even the grave Congress to laugh outright in a broad vote of thanks; while Colonel Barton, early one morning in July, took, in spite of his guards, the British Major-General Prescott out of his bed, where he was cuddling up to escape the Rhode Island fogs, and bore him off through his own troops, and even through a large British fleet lying off the main-land,—a little surprise party highly relished by the visitors and their colonial friends.

The arrival in France, in the autumn of 1776, of Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate to Congress, and of Benjamin Franklin, as commissioners, soon raised the gates which had barred French supplies of men and means from flowing into the service of the Colonies. Louis XVI. and Vergennes, his Foreign Minister, had neither forgotten the great fight for the American belt, nor the wrench which French pride had suffered by the tossing of the prize, but fifteen years ago, into the eager hands of its uncivil rival. They were, therefore, more than ready to help the ward escape from her self-constituted guardian, and to send her secretly such instruments as would file off her bolts, cut away the prison-like fences around her suspiciously guarded dwelling-place, and enlarge her straitening liberties. They had even, in the spring of 1777, secretly encouraged, while pretending to prevent, the armed emigration of Lafayette and others to America.

Just about the time that these French gentlemen, with Baron De Kalb, touched foot on American soil at Georgetown, South Carolina, an Englishman named Burgoyne, whose acquaintance we made at Bunker Hill, two years ago, came on shore at Quebec. Entering the Colonies by that favorite back-stairs, Lake Champlain, he turned the well-known and well-worn knob, Ticonderoga, and got himself and his attendants fairly inside the American door-yard. Advancing, he came to a small place called Stillwater, where he tripped his toe over a little hillock, called a breastwork, raised by Kosciusko, aided by that crack rifleman, Morgan, and pitched forward faint and weak from this unexpected accident. Still, his English robustness of strength and pluck was such as to make him quite confident of being able to reach, without difficulty, the wing of the house, called Albany, and thence gaining access to its centre, New York, where he expected to meet Sir William Howe, and with him to succeed in bringing back once more the spirited young American heiress to the selfish love of her late champion. But quite to his surprise he discovered before him, near Saratoga Springs, Gates through which he must pass in order to make any progress,—Gates so strong that, unless he could force their Polish locks, their American hinges, and solid, iron-riveted timbers, he must perish for want of food. The Gates were not passed; and October 17, 1777, he gave himself up, with 5,791 officers and men, and forty-six hundred muskets. Forty-two pieces of brass cannon also passed at that time to the Americans,—brass which gave them thenceforward more confidence and cheek. Much need, too, of it had they; for in the preceding two months, Washington, with thirteen thousand men, following Howe and Cornwallis southward, with a body of eighteen thousand men under their command, met them a few miles south of Philadelphia, on a little, dispirited stream called the Brandywine, and there drank the disagreeable dregs of a defeat, made even more distasteful by the fact that it was the first American drink which Lafayette and Pulaski had an opportunity of sipping in this country. Exceedingly nauseated by this drink, they all took another draught October 4th at Germantown; but this decoction proved equally unpalatable. It required all the beneficial effects of the Saratoga water to correct the disturbed action produced by the Brandywine and the Germantown potion.

The fury of George III. at the close of the campaign of 1777 was perfectly Hanoverian. He had been led to expect the speedy submission of the Colonies; but he had reluctantly discovered that early disasters had only stiffened the gristle of discontent into the bone of unconquerable resistance. His obstinacy, however, in prosecuting the war was met by equal firmness on the part of the Colonies in defending their rights. If, like one of his predecessors, who, irritated by the resistance of Scotland to his royal wishes, threatened to make that country a royal hunting-ground, George III. threatened to make a shooting-park of North America, the colonists, in the spirit of the Scottish nobleman who, in reply to the menace, answered, “In that case, may it please your Majesty, I must be home to uncouple the hounds,” were fully determined to muzzle the royal pack, and to increase their own war-dogs.

Parliament, however, curbed by the strong arm of popular sentiment, found it best to hold in check the royal passion and resentment. It even slipped from the leash, not the savage bloodhounds of strife, but three very sleek-looking house-pets, called Peace Commissioners, who came with nice little dainty titbits in their mouths, pardons and promises, to drop around the American door-yard.

Too late!—these royal poodles and King Charles spaniels. America had outgrown pets, petting, and even pantalettes. She had come of age, and deliberately made up her mind to leave the uncomfortable homestead and to do for herself. She had a good friend in France, who encouraged her independent notions, and who, on the 6th of February, 1778, told everybody—England, America, and the other nations—that she was ready to stand by the plucky Colonies. This declaration, usually termed a treaty of alliance and commerce, was received with great joy by America, and with keen resentment by England. Russia, always our friend from the first, clapped France on the back for her conduct, and the people of Europe, out of dislike to England, sided with the Colonies, and applauded their new friend.

The old rivals, England and France, again scowled, flushed up, and clinched.

During the rest of our Revolution French names are turned up by the wheel, which had so far run entirely on land, side by side with American. It was now at times to be put into water, and to dip its blades into an element which, troubled by navigation acts, had separated us from England, but which now, blessed by a treaty of amity, was to unite us to the country of Lafayette.

At the opening of the crocuses, in the spring of 1778, Lord Howe and his brother, the Admiral, were in the Quaker City, a city which, though mainly made up of the disciples of peace, wielded both pen and musket in favor of war for peace. A French fleet, commanded by Count d’Estaing, sailed from France to pen up in the Delaware the English brothers with their fleet and army; but these some Howe getting at once wind of this intention and into their own sails, contrived to escape to New York. Part of the British forces took the land route to New York, courageously braving the dangers incident to New Jersey travelling. A little accident befell them on the route, June 28th, about eighteen miles south of Philadelphia, at a small place then called Monmouth, where, colliding with Washington and the artillery train of which he was conductor, they lost three hundred men. The American loss was only seventy,—very trifling for a genuine American collision. It was in this battle that General Charles Lee became insubordinate, lost his reason, and was cast on the lee shore of patriotic duty,—a misfortune which, eighty-three years later, happened to another general of the same name.

The French fleet, finding on its arrival at Philadelphia, that the Howes had gone to New York, followed suit thitherward; but on reaching Sandy Hook, it was defeated in its intended action against them by an injunction raised by the New York bar, and so proceeded to that fashionable watering-place, Newport. Admiral Howe soon after took a notion to go to the same place, and, being reinforced by several ships, set out with his squadron. D’Estaing, intermitting his study of the “Round Tower,” “The Spouting Rock,” and “The Dumplings,” sailed out like a generous foe, to meet him half-way. The fleets, long in ogling sight, and loath to leave each other, were yet kept apart by those adverse winds and rough seas which sometimes in naval war, as in love, neither blow nor run smooth, and which, at least in this case,—as sometimes happens with lovers,—prevented an engagement.

In September, General Clinton, who had superseded Lord Howe, sent out two marauding expeditions, one to Buzzard’s Bay, which burnt seventy American ships roosting there on their anchors; the other against Little Egg Harbor, which took a considerable amount of stores laid there, over which much British cackling was had.

The massacre at Wyoming by Colonel John Butler and his Indian allies—only palliated by the plea that, while it cruelly put out of existence some three hundred settlers, it called into being the beautiful “Gertrude of Wyoming”—and the barbarities committed by another band of Tories and savages at Cherry Valley, raised the hair on the head of many in Europe as well as in America.

Towards the South the war now turns. The French and English fleets, having sailed for the West Indies, thus relieving Sir Henry Clinton of a natural anxiety about New York, he despatched thence, in November of the same year, a force of two thousand men against Georgia. Savannah, just then preparing to receive her first bran-new city charter, and feeling like a boy who is promised his first pair of long pantaloons to cover his lengthening proportions, was taken in hand by Clinton’s military schoolmaster and humiliated by a gentle spanking. Her sandy bottom, however, stood the trouncing well. She had the hardihood even to look right pleased and content when it was soon after told her that an expedition sent out against Port Royal, South Carolina, had been soundly ferruled.

The year 1779 opened with, and shut upon, a lively guerrila war, carried on through Georgia and South Carolina by small bodies of troops, so light as almost to seem feathered, led by Moultrie, Pickens, and other partisan officers, who teased and worried the enemy by incessant scratches and irritating stings, especially annoying in the summer-time and amid a warm climate.

PUTNAM’S HOME-STRETCH DOWN HORSE-NECK.
(p. 293)
]

At the North the British forces spent themselves on small excursions out of New York, very much as many people still do, and with the same result,—exhausting their own means and boring the people up the Sound and Hudson River. On one of these excursions under Governor Tryon, an attack by fifteen hundred men was made in March, 1779, upon Horse-Neck, one of Putnam’s outposts, a high, steep hill defended by one hundred and fifty men and two old rusty field-pieces. The powder failing, these loud-talking mouthpieces of the little party were almost silenced, when a cavalry charge was ordered upon the small band at the top of the hill. Putnam’s troops were directed to withdraw behind a morass inaccessible to cavalry, when Putnam himself, staying behind to serve the hard old swivels with the few grains of powder freshly discovered, and, finding himself closely pressed by assailants, leaped upon his horse and launched himself down the precipitous ledge amid a tempest of bullets and stones. It was neck or nothing; and he won by a neck,—his own,—which, had the horse given out, would probably have been stretched.

In September of this year Count d’Estaing returned from the West Indies with his fleet; and having in vain tried to recapture Savannah, took French leave of it and of America, having had a yachting trip in American waters with the usual yachting experience,—a good deal of getting up, a deal of getting down, large consumption of provisions and liquors, high hopes in idle state-rooms, and low performances on deck.

Spain, now conceiving a violent taste for Gibraltar, Jamaica, and the two Floridas,—for the taking of which by England aforetime she was of course very critical upon Albion,—seized the opportunity of Britain’s multiplying engagements with America and France, to let her know that she desired an immediate return of these forced loans. England of course insisted that, if she was an international pawnbroker, she was not obliged to surrender articles taken in until she chose to give them up, or until payment was made with shot and shell. She resented and resisted the demand; resisted it when Spain stepped up to her coast with a large fleet, resisted it successfully for three years at the Gibraltar Rock itself, and resisted it wherever Spanish gentlemen appeared to assert it, either on sea or land.

Meanwhile, on the 23d of September, 1779, Paul Jones, a Scotchman by birth, and who, like his apostolic namesake, had been “in shipwrecks often” and “in perils in the sea,” the first who ever displayed the American flag, now sailing the good ship “Bon Homme Richard,”—an old Indiaman converted into a war vessel,—after capturing with this old lugger twenty-three merchantmen, at last fell in with two heavy English frigates. Lashing his own ship to the larger one, he so laid on other strings that at the end of two hours he had thoroughly whipped both,—a whipping whose stinging recollections brought the color for a long time into even the ruddy cheek of Mr. Bull.