The Kendall House
A white house with solid vertigris blinds stands comfortably beside the Post road. There is a little old cannon on the lawn, a sad bell-mouthed field piece with its jaw jutted fiercely out to bark at any British man-o’-war that presumes to come back up the Hudson. A green ridge rises behind the house, setting it off like Wedgwood ware, and a gentle brook idles down the slope toward the river.
Set in a jog of the stone wall at the highway is a memorial tablet which has evidently gone unnoticed by the gentlemen who write histories for primary schools—who are supposed to watch the fires on our national shrines, and to toss a bright epithet, an apt name, or a bit of patriotic tinder on the coals. In missing this Dobbs Ferry house they are clearly guilty of neglect of duty. It has a story that goes clear down to the stuff every American believes he is made of. If we borrow a stock phrase from the supply of the school historian and call this house the “Birthplace of Victory” we shall not be far from the fact, nor serving ill a spot which recalls with rich significance the travail in which our nation was born.
In 1780 there were three invading British armies rooted on the Atlantic coast: Clinton had driven Washington off Manhattan island in 1776 and had already held the city for four years; Cornwallis made Yorktown a base for expeditions into Virginia and the Carolinas, and Tarleton held Charleston. For four years the enemy had hoped to effect a junction between his forces in Canada and those in New York, and the Hudson was to be his highway. For four years Washington had hovered like an eagle over the river, wheeling now into Westchester, now swooping upon Jersey. Inadequately equipped, he dared not take the offensive. He had to be content to wait for the time when Clinton might relax his vigilance upon the city, then to strike, brilliantly and savagely, but the sum of these maneuvers was only to harass the enemy, not to unseat him. Twice since Washington’s time has his fortitude been matched in our history: once by Lincoln, and once by Lee. Once, in our own lifetime, it has been equalled by the French nation. It was from France, in 1780, that our relief ultimately came.
After four years of war, with British patrols making frequent raids through Yonkers and over the upper acres of the Philipse estate, with British warships plying up and down the Hudson at will past the silenced batteries of Forts Washington and Lee, with the Cowboys and Skinners of both armies making life wretched throughout the neutral ground in which Dobbs Ferry lay, the village was in ill temper. It lies opposite the northern end of the Palisades, and while the British held New York it was the most southerly ferry safe for American despatch riders from Westchester County to Jersey and the south—a vital link in the chain of communication between the scattered states. So Dobbs Ferry saw plenty of skirmishing. Earthworks were thrown up in the village; the remains of an ancient redoubt may be discovered today after patient search near Broadway and Livingston Avenue, and the Livingston mansion, the most pretentious house in town, asked neither exemption nor privilege and surrounded itself with trenches. No one knew when the enemy might advance in force up the Albany Post Road, and in Dobbs Ferry’s 1780-temper, no one proposed to let him march without a fight.
Word had gone through the states that Lafayette, the gay French lad who came over to fight with Washington, had gone home. “He’s young,” men said. “It was only a lark for him. He’s had enough. ‘Leave of absence’ was it! ‘French leave,’ more likely.” Lafayette was young, but he had not had enough. How a youth of twenty-two petitioned the court of France for an army, a fleet and a generous loan for the states we need not inquire. He got everything he asked and came back to tell General Washington so and to confer upon him Louis Sixteenth’s commission as lieutenant-general of the Armies of France and admiral of His Majesty’s Navy.
In 1918 the United States transport Leviathan, seven days out of New York, made the harbor of Brest and set ten thousand fighting men ashore. In the harbor of Newport, Rhode Island, on July 11, 1780 eleven French warships and thirty-two transports, three months out of Brest, set six thousand fighting men of France upon American soil. Ponder on those figures: six thousand men are the complement of two modern regiments, the half of a bitter day’s casualty list; six thousand men were the Army of France, the Army of Deliverance. After they had thawed a cool reception, they were welcomed as such, and while the Comte de Rochambeau, at their head, was fêted by the dignitaries of Newport, his disciplined troops pitched their tents in the Rhode Island orchards, and as their commander proudly reported to their King, never even robbed the fruit-trees!
Cumulative bad luck camped down simultaneously on the American cause. Scurvy among the French troops prevented their moving to attack New York. Clinton made a demonstration against them at Newport until Washington frightened him back indoors. Rochambeau found difficulty in conveying his ideas of strategy to American headquarters in Jersey, and it took all of Lafayette’s tact to keep the forces in contented alliance. At last, when the summer was nearly gone, Washington arranged a council of war at Hartford.
The operations of the allied armies planned at that conference hinged upon the co-operation of a second French land force and the French fleet. The land force was even then bottled up in Brest by British warships, the French admiral was in the West Indies and showed no signs of coming north. To make matters worse, there was brewing over on the Hudson a plot which Washington later called “one of the severest strokes that could have been meditated against us.” It was so well known among the British that it now seems incredible that no hint of warning had filtered through the Neutral Ground to American headquarters. London gossip predicted openly throughout the summer a coup which would shortly bring this upstart rebellion to its knees.
One morning in late September four farmer boys from Westchester undertook to watch the Albany post-road north of Tarrytown, and to see that no Tory patrols drove stolen cattle southward. They halted a well-dressed civilian and searched him. In his stockings they found a plan of the fortifications at West Point, an inventory of ammunition, full directions for attacking and taking the forts, and a résumé of General Washington’s most recent statement of the condition and prospects of the American cause. It was suspicious enough to find these papers on an unknown civilian, but when he proved to be Major John André, adjutant-general of the British Army, and when inspection showed that the last two documents were in the handwriting of Benedict Arnold, an American major-general in command at West Point, the matter smelled rankly of treason.