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.