Another excursion from New York by Tarleton, into Westchester County, about the middle of August, was reciprocated under Washington’s orders, with decided éclat and success. On the nineteenth of August, Col. Henry Lee crossed the Hackensack; moved down the Hudson River, and at half-past two o’clock in the morning, at low tide, captured Paulus Hook, where Jersey City now stands, nearly opposite Clinton’s New York headquarters. Not a shot was fired by the storming party. Only the bayonet was used. The Americans lost twenty, and the British lost fifteen, besides one hundred and fifty taken prisoners.
For many months Washington had been watching for an opportunity of sufficient relief from British activity, to punish the Indians who perpetrated their outrages in the Wyoming Valley; and as early as the sixth of March, he tendered to General Gates the command of an expedition for that purpose. In this assignment he enclosed an order for him to assume General Sullivan’s command at Providence, in case he declined the expedition. General Gates, then at Boston, thus replied: “Last night, I had the honor of your Excellency’s letter. The man who undertakes the Indian service should enjoy youth and strength, which I do not possess. It therefore grieves me that your Excellency should offer me a command to which I am entirely unequal. In obedience to your command I have forwarded your letter to General Sullivan; and that he may not be one moment delayed, I have desired him to leave the command with General Greene until I arrive in Providence.”
General Sullivan marched from Eastern Pennsylvania, reaching Wyoming Valley on the thirty-first of July, and Tioga Point, N.Y., on the eighth of August, with a force of five thousand men. Gen. James Clinton joined him from the northern army. The brigades of Generals Poor, Hand, and Maxwell, Parr’s Rifle Corps, and Proctor’s Artillery, all familiar to the reader, formed the invading force. On the twenty-ninth day of August, the Battle of Chemung was fought, near the present city of Elmira, and the towns of the Six Nations were laid waste, including orchards, gardens, houses, clothing, and provisions, indiscriminately. There was nothing in this punishment of the Six Nations which commended the American cause to their favor; but they did not regard the details of these ravages as a part of Washington’s instructions. When the War for Independence closed, and their alliance with the United States became a fixed fact, Washington represented their ideal of the great soldier—“He had made the power of Britain to yield to his arms.” Governor Blackstone, Chief of the Senecas, Cornplanter, and Halftown, the famous trio who made the treaty with Washington, were ever known as “the friends of Washington.” A silver medal presented to Governor Blackstone, which bore the simple inscription “Second Presidency of George Washington,” was long esteemed as a most precious relic. Handsome Lake, known as the “Peace Prophet,”—brother of Tecumseh,—made as a tribute to Washington one of the most impressive utterances of his mission among the Six Nations. Even as late as the Eleventh United States Census, 1890, Washington’s name, alone of all the American Presidents, was not found among the children’s names of the Six Nations; so greatly was he held in reverence. They also engrafted into their religion the myth that “he occupies a mansion at the gate of Paradise, where he becomes visible to all who enter its portals and ascend to the Great Spirit, and both recognizes and returns the salute of all who enter.”
This devotion of his Indian admirers is hardly less valuable than the tributes of Frederick the Great and other European soldiers and statesmen to the qualities of Washington as a Soldier; and it permanently redeems the name of Washington from any responsibility for the excessive desolation with which the Six Nations were visited in the expedition of 1779.
On the twenty-fifth of August, while Sullivan was upon this Indian expedition, Admiral Arbuthnot arrived with reënforcements of three thousand men, and relieved Sir George Collier in naval command. On the twenty-first of September, Sir Andrew Hammond arrived with an additional force of fifteen hundred men, from Cork, Ireland. At this juncture, Count d’Estaing, having captured St. Vincent and Granada in the West Indies, suddenly made his appearance off the coast of Georgia. Spain had joined France in war against Great Britain; so that the whole line of British posts, from Halifax to St. Augustine, was exposed to such naval attacks as would divert the attention of Great Britain from the designs of her allied enemies against her West India possessions.
Washington, upon the arrival of these British reënforcements, strengthened West Point with additional works; but Clinton, even with his large naval force, did not venture an attack upon that post, as had been his intention when making requisition for more troops.
On the twenty-fifth of October, 1779, General Clinton abandoned Newport, R.I.; then Verplanck Point; then Stony Point: and for the first time since Washington landed in New York, in 1776, the whole of New England and the entire stretch of the Hudson River, was unvexed by British steel or British keel.
CHAPTER XXVI.
SHIFTING SCENES.—TEMPER OF THE PEOPLE.—SAVANNAH.
If the mind weary of the recital of events which by night and by day burdened the soul and tasked the energies of the American Commander-in-Chief to their utmost strain, it cannot but be refreshed by evidence of his abiding confidence and patience in the cause of American Independence, as the theatre of war enlarged and gradually placed every colony under the weight of British pressure. The issue of two hundred millions of paper money had indeed been authorized, and a loan was invited abroad; but, as ever, men were wanted, and were not forthcoming. Even the States which had longest borne the brunt of battle, and had only just been relieved from its immediate dangers, seemed to weary under the reaction of that relief, as if the storm had passed by, never again to sweep over the same surface. It was also very natural as well as true, that the pledge of French intervention and the gleam of the oriflamme of France, did, in a measure, compose anxiety and lessen the sense of local responsibility for such a contribution of troops from every section as would make the nation as independent of France as of Great Britain.
There was a sense of weariness, a tendency to fitful strokes of local energy, without that overwhelming sense of need which first rallied all sections to a common cause. Congress also seemed, at times, almost to stagger under its load. But Washington, who sometimes grew weary and groaned in spirit, and sometimes panted with shortened breath while toiling upward to surmount some new obstruction, never, never staggered. For him, there were “stepping-stones in the deepest waters.” For him, though tides might ebb and flow, the earth itself forever kept its even course about the guiding sun; and for him, the sun of Liberty was the light of the soul. Every circling year but added blessings from its glow, and energy from its power. The intensity of his emotion when he penned those solemn truthful words to Harrison, showed but the impulse of a spiritual power which the times demanded, but would neither comprehend nor brook if from other sources than Washington’s majestic will and presence. From the summit of his faith, he clearly indicated with pen-point the driveling selfishness which postponed triumph and made the chariot-wheels drag so heavily through the advancing war.