Washington the Soldier

by Henry B. Carrington

On the twenty-eighth day of April the whole army in New York amounted to ten thousand two hundred and thirty-five men, of whom eight thousand three hundred and three were present and fit for duty. Washington’s Orderly Book, of this period, rebukes certain disorderly conduct of the soldiers in these memorable words: “Men are not to carve out remedies for themselves. If they are injured in any respect, there are legal ways to obtain relief, and just complaints will always be attended to and redressed.”

At this time, Rhode Island called for protection of her threatened ports, and two regiments of her militia were taken into Continental Pay. Washington was also advised that Great Britain had contracted with various European States for military contingents; that the sentiment in Canada had changed to antipathy, and that continual disaster attended all operations in that department. On the twenty-fourth he wrote to Schuyler: “We expect a very bloody summer at Canada and New York; as it is there, I presume, that the great efforts of the enemy will be aimed; and I am very sorry to say that we are not, in men and arms, prepared for it.”

General Putnam was placed in command at New York, and General Greene took charge of the defences on Brooklyn Heights and of their completion. On the first day of June Congress resolved that six thousand additional troops should be employed from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New York, to reënforce the army in Canada, and that two thousand Indians should be hired for this same field of service. To this proposition General Schuyler keenly replied: “If this number, two thousand, can be prevented from joining the enemy, it is more than can be expected.”

As early as the fifteenth of February Congress had appointed Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll, as Commissioners to visit Canada and learn both the exact condition of the army and the temper of the people. Rev. John Carroll, afterwards Archbishop of Maryland, accompanied them, and reported that “negligence, mismanagement, and a combination of unlucky incidents had produced a disorder that it was too late to remedy.” Ill-health compelled the immediate return of Franklin, but the other Commissioners remained until the evacuation of Canada. The scourge of small-pox, to which General Thomas became a victim, and other diseases, together with the casualties of the service, had cost more than five thousand lives within two months, and the constant change of commanders, ordered by Congress, hastened the Canadian campaign to a crisis. Scattered all the way from Albany to Montreal there could have been found companies of the regiments which Congress had started for Canada, and which Washington and the country could so poorly spare at such an eventful and threatening period. General Sullivan had been succeeded by General Gates, but with no better results. Sullivan had under-estimated the British forces, and when apprised of the facts, of which the American Commander-in-Chief had not been advised in time, he wrote: “I now only think of a glorious death, or a victory obtained against superior numbers.” The following letter of Washington addressed to Congress, enclosing letters intimating the desire of General Sullivan to have larger command, indicates Washington’s judgment of the situation, and is in harmony with his habitual discernment of men and the times throughout the war. He says: “He (Sullivan) is active, spirited, and zealously attached to our cause. He has his wants and his foibles. The latter are manifested in his little tincture of vanity which now and then leads him into embarrassments. His wants are common to us all. He wants experience, to move on a large scale; for the limited and contracted knowledge which any of us have in military matters, stands in very little stead, and is quickly overbalanced by sound judgment and some acquaintance with men and books, especially when accompanied by an enterprising genius, which I must do General Sullivan the justice to say, I think he possesses. Congress will therefore determine upon the propriety of continuing him in Canada, or sending another, as they shall see fit.”

Already the St. Lawrence river was open to navigation. On the first of June, General Riedesel arrived with troops from Brunswick, and General Burgoyne with troops from Ireland, swelling the command of General Carleton to an aggregate of nine thousand nine hundred and eighty-four effective men; and British preparations were at once made to take the offensive, and expel the American force from Canada. Before the last of June the “invasion of Canada” came to an end, and the remnants of the army, which had numbered more than ten thousand men, returned, worn out, dispirited, and beaten.

Washington had been stripped of troops and good officers at a most critical period, against his remonstrance; and Congress accounted for the disaster by this brief record: “Undertaken too late in the fall; enlistments too short; the haste which forced immature expeditions for fear there would be no men to undertake them, and the small-pox.”

Gradually the principal officers and many of the returning troops joined the army at New York. The occupation of New York, the fortification and defence of Brooklyn Heights, the tardy withdrawal of the army to Harlem Heights, with a constant and stubborn resistance to the advancing British army and its menacing ships-of-war, have always been treated as of questionable policy by writers who have not weighed each of those incidents as did Washington, by their effect upon the Continental army, as a whole, and in the light of a distinctly framed plan for the conduct of the war. This plan was harmonious and persistently maintained from his assumption of command until the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, in 1781.

Operations in Massachusetts, and elsewhere, south as well as north, from the first, proved that the heat of patriotic resistance must be maintained and developed by action; that, as at Bunker Hill and before Boston, passive armies lose confidence, while active duty, even under high pressure, nerves to bolder courage and more pronounced vigor.

The correspondence of Washington and his Reports, as well as letters to confidential friends which have been carefully considered in forming an estimate of his career as a Soldier, evolve propositions that bear upon the operations about New York. The prime factor in the Colonial resistance was, to fix the belief irrevocably in the popular mind, in the very heart of the Colonists, that America could, and would, resist Great Britain, with confidence in success. The inevitable first step was to challenge her mastery of the only base from which she could conduct a successful war. To have declined this assertion of Colonial right, or to have wavered as to its enforcement, would have been a practical admission of weakness and the loss of all prestige thus far attained.

It was well known to Washington that the British Government was so related to Continental rivals that about forty thousand troops would be the extreme limit of her contributions to subdue America. It will appear from official tables, appended to this narrative, that, during the entire war, the British force of every kind, throughout America, exceeded this number slightly in only one year; and that Washington’s plans, from time to time submitted to Congress, were based upon requisitions fully competent to meet the largest possible force which could be placed in the field by Great Britain.