Meanwhile, deserters from the American side were telling the British that Washington’s army was tired and unpaid, that there was too little clothing to keep warm, and that most of the men longed to go home.
A memorable story of an incident that occurred at about this time may or may not be entirely reliable, but portrays vividly the level of tension among the troops and Washington’s own pent-up anger and exasperation. It was told years afterward by Israel Trask, the ten-year-old boy who had enlisted with his father and in whose eyes Washington seemed almost supernatural.
A snowball fight broke out on Harvard Yard between fifty or more backwoods Virginia riflemen and an equal number of sailors from the Marblehead regiment. The fight quickly turned fierce, with “biting and gouging on the one part, and knockdown on the other part with as much apparent fury as the most deadly enmity could create,” according to Trask. Hundreds of others rushed to the scene. Soon more than a thousand men had joined in a furious brawl. Then Washington arrived:
I only saw him and his colored servant, both mounted [Trask remembered]. With the spring of a deer, he leaped from his saddle, threw the reins of his bridle into the hands of his servant, and rushed into the thickest of the melee, with an iron grip seized two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arm’s length, alternating shaking and talking to them.
Seeing this, the others took flight “at the top of their speed in all directions from the scene of the conflict.” If Trask’s memory served, the whole row, from start to finish, lasted all of fifteen minutes and nothing more came of it.
On November 25, the British sent several boatloads of the ragged poor of Boston, some 300 men, women, and children, across the Back Bay, depositing them on the shore near Cambridge for the rebels to cope with.
They were a heartrending sight. Many were sick and dying, “the whole in the most miserable and piteous condition,” wrote Washington. According to one explanation, General Howe was making room in Boston for the reinforcements expected to arrive anytime. But it was also said that numbers of the sick had been sent “with [the] design of spreading the smallpox through this country and camp,” an accusation Washington refused to believe. But when another 150 desperate people were dispatched from Boston, as smallpox continued unabated there, Washington described the disease as a “weapon of defense they are using against us.”
Nearly all his efforts and those of his senior officers were concentrated now on trying to hold the army together. The Connecticut troops, whose enlistments were to expire on December 9, were counting the days until they could start for home. Nothing, it seemed, could change their minds.
A stirring summons to renewed devotion to the cause of liberty, as strong and eloquent an appeal to the men in the ranks, “the guardians of America,” as had yet been seen in print, appeared in the New England Chronicle, signed simply “A Freeman.” Not only did it celebrate the Glorious Cause, but it spoke of a break with Britain soon to come and a future “big with everything good and great,” when Americans would decide their own salvation.
Your exertions in the cause of freedom, guided by wisdom and animated by zeal and courage, have gained you the love and confidence of your grateful countrymen; and they look to you, who are experienced veterans, and trust that you will still be the guardians of America. As I have the honor to be an American, and one among the free millions, who are defended by your valor, I would pay the tribute of thanks, and express my gratitude, while I solicit you to continue in your present honorable and important station. I doubt not America will always find enough of her sons ready to flock to her standard, and support her freedom; but experience proves that experienced soldiers are more capable of performing the duties of the camp, and better qualified to face the enemy, than others; and therefore every friend of America will be desirous that most of the gentlemen who compose the present army may continue in the service of their country until “Liberty, Peace, and Safety” are established. Although your private concerns may call for your assistance at home, yet the voice of your country is still louder, and it is painful to heroic minds to quit the field when liberty calls, and the voice of injured millions cries “To arms! to arms!” Never was a cause more important or glorious than that which you are engaged in; not only your wives, your children, and distant posterity, but humanity at large, the world of mankind, are interested in it; for if tyranny should prevail in this great country, we may expect liberty will expire throughout the world. Therefore, more human glory and happiness may depend upon your exertions than ever yet depended upon any of the sons of men. He that is a soldier in defense of such a cause, needs no title; his post is a post of honor, and although not an emperor, yet he shall wear a crown—of glory—and blessed will be his memory!
The savage and brutal barbarity of our enemies in burning Falmouth, is a full demonstration that there is not the least remains of virtue, wisdom, or humanity, in the British court; and that they are fully determined with fire and sword, to butcher and destroy, beggar and enslave the whole American people. Therefore we expect soon to break off all kind of connection with Britain, and form into a Grand Republic of the American United Colonies, which will, by the blessing of heaven, soon work out our salvation, and perpetuate the liberties, increase the wealth, the power and the glory of this Western world.
Notwithstanding the many difficulties we have to encounter, and the rage of our merciless enemies, we have a glorious prospect before us, big with everything good and great. The further we enter into the field of independence, our prospects will expand and brighten, and a complete Republic will soon complete our happiness.
But reenlistments were alarmingly few. Of eleven regiments, or roughly 10,000 men, fewer than 1,000 had agreed to stay. Some stimulus besides love of country must be found to make men want to serve, Washington advised Congress. Paying the troops a few months in advance might help, he wrote, but again he had no money at hand. By late November, he could report that only 2,540 of his army had reenlisted. “Our situation is truly alarming, and of this General Howe is well apprised…. No doubt when he is reinforced he will avail himself of the information.”
Washington was a man of exceptional, almost excessive self-command, rarely permitting himself any show of discouragement or despair, but in the privacy of his correspondence with Joseph Reed, he began now to reveal how very low and bitter he felt, if the truth were known. Never had he seen “such a dearth of public spirit and want of virtue” as among the Yankee soldiers, he confided in a letter to Reed of November 28. “These people” were still beyond his comprehension. A “dirty, mercenary spirit pervades the whole,” he wrote. “Could I have foreseen what I have and am like to experience, no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.”
For six long months there had been hardly a shred of good news, no single event to lift the spirits of the army, no sign to suggest better days might lie ahead.
The next day, amazingly, came “glad tidings.” A privateer, the schooner Lee, under the command of Captain John Manley, had captured an enemy supply ship, the brig Nancy, off Cape Ann, north of Boston. The ship was loaded with military treasure—a supply of war material such as Congress could not be expected to provide for months to come, including 2,500 stands of arms, cannon, mortars, flints, some forty tons of shot, and 2,000 bayonets—nearly everything needed but powder.
The Lee was one of the first of several armed schooners Washington had sent out to prey on enemy shipping. It was a first triumph for his new “navy,” and John Manley, a first hero. It was an “instance of divine favor, for nothing surely ever came more apropos,” Washington wrote immediately to Joseph Reed.
***
WITH THE END of enlistments only days away, concern grew extreme. “Our people are almost bewitched about getting home,” wrote Lieutenant Hodgkins to his wife Sarah. “I hope I and all my townsmen shall have virtue enough to stay all winter as volunteers, before we will leave the line without men. For our a
ll is at stake, and if we do not exert ourselves in this Glorious Cause, our all is gone.”
“I want you to come home and see us,” she wrote. “I look for you almost every day, but I don’t allow myself to depend on anything, for I find there is nothing to be depended upon but trouble and disappointments.”
“I want to see you very much,” she said in other letters, warning him that if he did not “alter” his mind about staying with the army, it would be “such a disappointment that I can’t put up with it.”
The troops were called repeatedly into formation to be addressed by officers and chaplains. A Connecticut soldier who had decided nothing could keep him from going home, described how his regiment was called out time and again to hear speeches. “We was ordered to form a hollow square,” wrote Simeon Lyman in his diary, “and General Lee came in and the first words was, ‘Men I do not know what to call you; [you] are the worst of all creatures,’ and [he] flung and cursed and swore at us…and our lieutenants begged us to stay.” But for Simeon Lyman, like nearly all the regiment, December 9 was his last day as a soldier. On Sunday, December 10, he wrote:
In the morning we was ordered to parade before the general’s door, and we was counted off and dismissed, and we we[nt] to the lieuten[ant] and he gave us a dram, and then we marched off.
General Lee stood and watched, finding a measure of encouragement only in the response of the troops who remained:
Some of the Connecticutians who were homesick could not be prevailed on to tarry, which means in the New England dialect to serve any longer. They accordingly marched off bag and baggage, but in passing through the lines of the regiments, they were so horribly hissed, groaned at, and pelted that I believe they wished their aunts, grandmothers, and even sweethearts, to whom the days before they were so much attached, [were] at the devil’s own palace.
Washington pleaded with Congress and the provincial governments to send more men with all possible speed. And new recruits did continue to arrive, though only in dribs and drabs.
There was still no news from the expedition to Quebec, and no word from Colonel Knox. When General Schuyler at Albany wrote to bemoan his tribulations, Washington responded, “Let me ask you, sir, when is the time for brave men to exert themselves in the cause of liberty and their country, if this is not?” He understood the troubles Schuyler faced, “but we must bear up against them, and make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish.”
***
EARLIER IN THE FALL, Washington had written to his wife Martha to say he would welcome her company in Cambridge, if she did not think it too late in the season for such a journey. Six hundred miles on dreadful roads by coach could be punishing even in fair weather, and especially for someone unaccustomed to travel, no matter her wealth or status.
On December 11, after more than a month on the road, Martha Washington arrived, accompanied by her son John Custis, his wife Eleanor, George Lewis, who was a nephew of Washington, and Elizabeth Gates, the English wife of General Gates. Joseph Reed, who had looked after the generals’ ladies during their stop in Philadelphia, offered the thought, after seeing them on their way, that they would be “not a bad supply…in a country where wood is scarce.”
Sarah Mifflin, the wife of Colonel Thomas Mifflin, a young aide-decamp, also arrived. The handsome colonel belonged to one of Philadelphia’s most prominent families, and with his beautiful, stylish wife added a distinct touch of glamour to Washington’s circle, while Elizabeth Gates caused something of a sensation, going about Cambridge in a mannish English riding habit.
Martha Washington, who had never been so far from home or in the midst of war, wrote to a friend in Virginia that the boom of cannon seemed to surprise no one but her. “I confess I shudder every time I hear the sound of a gun…. To me that never see anything of war, the preparations are very terrible indeed. But I endeavor to keep my fears to myself as well as I can.”
In the meantime, after much debate, the Congress at Philadelphia had passed a directive to Washington to destroy the enemy forces in Boston, “even if the town must be burnt.” John Hancock, whose stone mansion on Beacon Hill overlooking the Common was one of the prominent features on the skyline, had spoken “heartily” for the measure.
Work on fortifications continued without letup, and despite freezing winds and snow, the work improved. Washington kept moving the lines nearer and nearer the enemy. A newly completed bastion at Cobble Hill, below Prospect Hill and fully a half mile nearer to Boston, was described in the Providence Gazette as “the most perfect piece of fortification that the American army has constructed during the present campaign.”
***
ON DECEMBER 24, a storm swept across the whole of the province. In the vicinity of Boston, temperatures dropped to the low twenties, and a foot of snow fell. Christmas Day, a Monday, was still bitterly cold, but clear, and the troops continued with their routine as on any day.
On December 30, several British ships arrived in the harbor, presumably bringing reinforcements.
“This is the last day of the old enlisted soldiers’ service,” wrote a greatly distressed Nathanael Greene to Congressman Samuel Ward the following day, December 31. “Nothing but confusion and disorder reign.”
We have suffered prodigiously for want of wood. Many regiments have been obliged to eat their provisions raw for want of firing to cook, and notwithstanding we have burned up all the fences and cut down all the trees for a mile around the camp, our suffering has been inconceivable…. We have never been so weak as we shall be tomorrow.
On New Year’s Day, Monday, January 1, 1776, the first copies of the speech delivered by King George III at the opening of Parliament back in October were sent across the lines from Boston. They had arrived with the ships from London.
The reaction among the army was rage and indignation. The speech was burned in public by the soldiers and had stunning effect everywhere, as word of its contents rapidly spread. Its charges of traitorous rebellion, its ominous reference to “foreign assistance,” assuredly ended any hope of reconciliation or a short war. It marked a turning point as clear as the advent of the new year.
“We have consulted our wishes rather than our reason in the indulgence of an idea of accommodation,” Nathanael Greene wrote in another fervent letter to Samuel Ward in Philadelphia.
Heaven hath decreed that tottering empire Britain to irretrievable ruin and thanks to God, since Providence hath so determined, America must raise an empire of permanent duration, supported upon the grand pillars of Truth, Freedom, and Religion, encouraged by the smiles of Justice and defended by her own patriotic sons…. Permit me then to recommend from the sincerity of my heart, ready at all times to bleed in my country’s cause, a Declaration of Independence, and call upon the world and the great God who governs it to witness the necessity, propriety and rectitude thereof.
The effect of the King’s speech on Washington was profound. If nothing else could “satisfy a tyrant and his diabolical ministry,” he wrote to Joseph Reed, “we were determined to shake off all connections with a state so unjust and unnatural. This I would tell them, not under covert, but in words as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness.”
Meanwhile, that New Year’s Day, the great turnover of the army commenced, as new regiments arrived and the old departed “by hundreds and by thousands…in the very teeth of an enemy,” as General Heath noted.
Yet substantial numbers who had been in the lines stayed on, including many who had served since Bunker Hill, like Samuel Webb of Connecticut and young John Greenwood, the fifer. Joseph Hodgkins would stay, for all that he and his wife longed for each other. So would the artist John Trumbull and Dr. James Thacher. Many, like Lieutenant Jabez Fitch of Connecticut, would go home, but reenlist a little later in the new year. How many of the “old army” would fight on is impossible to know, but it may have been as many as 9,000.
At the Cambridge headquarters, Washington declared in his general orders for New Y
ear’s Day the commencement of a “new army, which in every point of view is entirely continental.” And thus the army, though still 90 percent a New England army, had a name, the Continental Army.
He stressed the hope that “the importance of the great Cause we are engaged in will be deeply impressed upon every man’s mind.” Everything “dear and valuable to freemen” was at stake, he said, calling on their patriotism to rally morale and commitment, but also expressing exactly what he felt.
With the crash of a 13-gun salute, he raised a new flag in honor of the birthday of the new army—a flag of thirteen red and white stripes, with the British colors (the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew) represented in the upper corner. When the British in Boston saw it flying from Prospect Hill, they at first mistook it for a flag of surrender.