And just then and there occurred an incident of the war which made an indelible impress upon the great heart of the American Commander-in-Chief; and that was the execution of one of his confidential messengers, who had been sent to report upon the British movements on Long Island—young Nathan Hale. The Rev. Edward Everett Hale, of Roxbury, Boston, furnishes the following outline of service which had greatly endeared Captain Hale to Washington:
“Just after the Battle of Lexington, at a town-meeting, with the audacity of boyhood, he cried out, ‘Let us never lay down our arms till we have achieved independence!’ Not yet two years out of Yale College, he secured release from the school he was teaching in New London; enlisted in Webb’s Regiment, the 7th Connecticut; by the first of September was promoted from Lieutenant to Captain; and on the fourteenth, marched to Cambridge. He shared in the achievement at Dorchester Heights, and his regiment was one of the first five that were despatched to New London, and thence to New York, by water. On the twenty-ninth of August, 1776, while the garrison of Brooklyn Heights was being hurried to the boats, Hale, with a sergeant and four of his men, attempted to burn the frigate Phœnix; and did actually capture one of her tenders, securing four cannon. At a meeting of officers, Washington stated that ‘he needed immediate information of the enemy’s plans.’ When dead silence ensued, Hale, the youngest of the Captains, still pale from recent sickness, spoke out: ‘I will undertake it. If my country demands a peculiar service, its claims are imperious.’ During the second week in September, taking his Yale College diploma with him, to pass for a school-master, he procured the desired information; but his boat failed to meet him. A British boat answered the signal, and his notes, written in Latin, exposed him. He was taken to New York on that eventful twenty-first of September, when five hundred of its buildings were burned; was summarily tried, and executed the next day at the age of twenty-one. His last sentence, when in derision he was allowed to speak as he ascended the gallows, was simply this: ‘I only regret that I have but one life to give to my country.’”
He had become a member of Knowlton’s Connecticut Rangers; and the Beekman House and Rutger’s apple orchard, where he was hanged from a tree, located by Lossing near the present intersection of East Broadway and Market streets, were long regarded with interest by visitors in search of localities identified with the Revolutionary period of Washington’s occupation of New York.
In resuming our narrative, we find the American army spending its first night upon Harlem Heights. Rain fell, but there were no tents. The men were tired and hungry, but there were no cooking utensils; and only short rations, at best. They realized that through a perfectly useless panic they had sacrificed necessaries of life. For four weeks the army remained in this position, not unfrequently engaging the British outposts, and on several occasions, with credit, making sallies or resisting attack; but the fresh troops, as ever before, had to mature slowly, under discipline. After a brilliant action on the sixteenth, in which Colonel Knowlton, who had distinguished himself at Bunker Hill, was killed, as well as Colonel Leich, and where Adjutant-General Reed, of Washington’s staff, equally exposed himself—“to animate,” as he said, “troops who would not go into danger unless their officers led the way,” the Commander-in-Chief issued an order of which the following is an extract: “The losses of the enemy, yesterday, would undoubtedly have been much greater if the orders of the Commander-in-Chief had not in some instances been contradicted by inferior officers, who, however well they meant, ought not to presume to direct. It is therefore ordered, that no officer commanding a party, and having received orders from the Commander-in-Chief, depart from them without orders from the same authority; and as many may otherwise err, the army is now acquainted that the General’s orders are delivered by his Adjutant-General, or one of his aides-de-camp, Mr. Tighlman, or Colonel Moylan, the Quartermaster-General.”
At this time, Massachusetts sent her drafted men under General Lincoln. General Greene assumed command in New Jersey. Generals Sullivan and Stirling, exchanged, resumed their old commands.
The army Return of October fifth indicated a total rank and file of twenty-seven thousand seven hundred and thirty-five men, of whom eight thousand and seventy-five were sick, or on a furlough; and requiring to complete these regiments, eleven thousand two hundred and seventy-one men. On the eighth of October, General Moore, commanding the Camp of Instruction (called the “Flying Camp,” because of its changeable location) in New Jersey, reported a total force of six thousand five hundred and forty-eight men.
On the ninth of October, the frigates Phœnix and Roebuck safely passed the forts as far north as Dobb’s Ferry. It became evident that General Putnam’s methods would not control the Hudson River route of British advance. Sickness increased in the camps. The emergency forced upon Washington the immediate reorganization of the medical department; and he ordered an examination of applicants before allowing a commission to be issued and rank conferred. Such had been the laxity of this necessary class of officers, that General Greene reported his surgeons as “without the least particle of medicine”; adding: “The regimental surgeons embezzle the public stores committed to their care, so that the regimental sick suffer, and should have the benefit of a general hospital.” Washington issued an order, after his own very lucid style, deploring the fact that “the periodical homesickness, which was common just before an anticipated engagement, had broke out again with contagious virulence.”
The want of discipline, however, was not wholly with the rank and file. Adjutant-General Reed, in writing to his wife, expressed his purpose to resign, for he had seen a captain shaving one of his men before the house; and added: “To enforce discipline in such cases, makes a man odious and detestable, a position which no one will choose.” And Colonel Smallwood, afterwards General, and one of the best soldiers of the war, in writing to the Maryland Council of Safety, complains of “the ignorance and inattention of officers who fail to realize the importance of that discipline which is so excellent in the Commander-in-Chief”; adding: “It would be a happy day for the United States if there was as much propriety in every department under him.”
At this period, General Howe again wrote to Lord Germaine, that he “did not expect to finish the campaign until spring”; “that the Provincials would not join the British army”; and called for more foreign troops, and eight additional men-of-war. The monotony of these frequent requisitions of the British Commander-in-Chief makes a tiresome story; but like the successive appeals of Washington—to Congress, Provincial Councils and Committees of Safety—they form an indispensable part of the narrative of those facts which tested Washington’s character as a Soldier.
Having observed increased activity of the British shipping in the East River, and indications that Howe would abandon a direct attack upon his fortified position upon Harlem Heights, Washington prepared for the contingency of more active duty elsewhere, and announced October eleventh as the day for a personal inspection of every company under his command.