The British Are Coming

Even as he immersed himself in tactical minutiae, Washington recognized that a commander in chief must be a capable strategist; that brass spyglass had to focus on the horizon as much as on the local battlefield. War, he knew, was a struggle of political wills. Winning a war did not require winning every battle; the French war had proved that. Tactical developments often had little influence on strategic success. And Washington was—instinctively, brilliantly—a political general: in the month following his departure from Philadelphia, he wrote seven letters to Congress, acknowledging its superior authority while maneuvering to get what he needed. He used all the tools of a deft politico: flattery, blandishment, reason, contrition. More letters went to colonial governors. Congress had adopted the New England militia as a national force, to be augmented with regiments from other colonies, and he was aware that placing a southerner in command of this predominately northern army was a fragile experiment in continental unity.

The coming weeks and months required intimacy with his army, building the mystical bond between leader and led. Who were they? What did they believe? Why did they fight? How long would they fight? Washington would personify the army he commanded, no small irony given the despair and occasional contempt it caused him. That army would become both the fulcrum on which the fate of the nation balanced and the unifying element in the American body politic, a tie that bound together disparate interests of a republic struggling to be born. It was the indispensable institution, led by the indispensable man, and the coupling of a national army with its commander marked the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution. “Confusion and discord reigned in every department,” Washington wrote in late July. “However we mend every day, and I flatter myself that in a little time we shall work up these raw materials into good stuff.”

Raw indeed. “We were all young,” a twenty-one-year-old captain would write, “and in a manner unacquainted with human nature, quite novices in military matters, had everything to learn, and no one to instruct us who knew any better than ourselves.” If mostly literate, they were barely educated. “What I had learnt,” wrote Stephen Olney, a soldier from Rhode Island, “was mostly rong.” The camps were full of Old Testament names: Joshua, Jabez, Ezekiel, Amos, Caleb, Nathan, Nehemiah. Guided by that ancient text, many concluded that Gage was Pharaoh, if not the Antichrist, confronted by a Chosen People who in the past three months had killed or wounded fourteen hundred British Philistines. Some, of course, were here for the six and two-thirds dollars paid each month to privates, more money than a farm laborer might earn. Others were animated by an inchoate patriotism on behalf of a nation that did not yet exist. And more than one sought “to make a man of himself,” as was said of seventeen-year-old Jeremiah Greenman, also from Rhode Island.

“Discipline,” Washington had written in 1757, “is the soul of an army.” Certainly this army was still looking for its soul. American troops, one visitor claimed, were “as dirty a set of mortals as ever disgraced the name of a soldier.” Each man lived in “a kennel of his own making.” No two companies drilled alike, and together on parade they were described as the finest body of men ever seen out of step. Their infractions were legion: singing on guard duty, voiding “excrement about the fields perniciously,” promiscuous shooting for the sake of noise, a tendency by privates to debate their officers, “unnecessary drum beating at night,” insolent “murmuring,” pilfering thirty bushels of cherries, thirty barrels of apples, and five hundred cabbages from one Chelsea farmer alone. When a small reward was offered for each British cannonball retrieved so that they could be reused, “every ball, as it fell, was surrounded with a great number of men to see who would get it first,” a lieutenant in Roxbury reported. Several lost their feet before the bounty was canceled.

The junior officers were not much better, notably those who used soldiers for personal farm labor, or falsified company returns to draw extra provisions, or pointed cocked pistols at their sergeants. Some officers, a Washington aide wrote in mid-August, were “not only ignorant and litigious but scandalously disobedient.” Many regiments elected their captains, lieutenants, and even lowly subalterns, often on the basis of civilian friendships, social rank, or political influence; the army was said to suffer from a “nightmare of liberty,” inimical to executive power. As for senior officers, few issues plagued Washington more than the endless jockeying for rank. Brigadier generals sulked and bickered all summer over seniority. When one threatened to resign in a snit, Lee wrote him in late July, “For God Almighty’s sake … for the sake of your country, of mankind, and let me add of your own reputation, discard such sentiments.” John Trumbull, a soldier, artist, and the son of Connecticut’s governor, wrote while serving in Roxbury, “Officers grumbling about rank and soldiers about pay, everyone thinking himself ill-used and imposed upon.”

For hours and days on end, Washington rode from Chelsea to Roxbury and back—inspecting, correcting, fuming—then returned to Vassall House to issue another raft of detailed, exhortatory commands. In the three months following his arrival in Cambridge, the commander in chief on five occasions, in general orders, condemned excessive drinking. Four times he demanded better hygiene. Thirteen times he pleaded for accurate returns from subordinate commanders to gauge the size and health of the army. Company rolls were to be called twice daily, and orders read aloud to ensure comprehension, if not obedience. No man was to appear on sentry duty who was “not perfectly sober and tolerably observing,” nor was anyone to appear in formation “without having on his stockings and shoes.” Fines were levied: a shilling for swearing, two shillings sixpence for unauthorized gunplay. Courts-martial dealt swift justice to erring officers. More than two dozen would be convicted in Washington’s first months of command, for offenses ranging from cowardice or other misbehavior at Bunker Hill—five officers found guilty—to defrauding men of their pay, embezzling provisions, and stabbing a subordinate. Most were cashiered in disgrace.

Washington’s conceptions of military justice had been shaped by his years under stern British command. In the spring of 1757 alone, he had approved floggings averaging six hundred lashes each—enough to cripple a man, or even kill him—and presided over courts-martial that imposed more than a dozen death sentences. Such draconian measures were impossible in an army saturated with democratic principles, and Congress stayed his hand by restricting floggings to thirty-nine stripes (soon to be increased to a hundred, at his insistence). If a bit less vindictive, the cat-o’-nine-tails still fell routinely across the backs of convicted men tied to a whipping post known as the “adjutant’s daughter.” “Saw two men whipt for stealing,” a corporal wrote. “O what a pernicious thing it is for a man to steal and cheat his feller nabors, and how provoking to God!” A deserter was not hanged or jailed but sentenced to clean latrines for a week while wearing a sign printed with his offense. A felonious sergeant was drummed from camp with the epithet “MUTINY” on his back.

“My greatest concern is to establish order, regularity & discipline,” Washington wrote Hancock. “My difficulties thicken every day.” In truth, an immensely wealthy man to the manner born, with scores of slaves to tend his business in his absence, could hardly comprehend the sacrifice made by most of his men in leaving their families, shops, and farms in high season. For that vital link between commander and commanded to be welded imperishably, Washington would have to know in his bones—and the men would have to know that he knew—what was risked and what was lost in serving at his side.

Many small, private tragedies, unseen by his spyglass, would play out over the coming months and years. “News of the death of my child,” Lieutenant Benjamin Craft told his journal on August 14. “I hope it will have a sanctifying effect on me and my poor wife. I hope God will enable us to bear all he shall lay upon us.” Many were lonely, and fretful for the families they had forsaken. Captain Nathan Peters had recently lost two young children when he left his surviving one-year-old and his pregnant wife, Lois, in Medfield. She was to run their saddlery while he went to war. “Pray write every opportunity, for I live very lonesome,” Lois wrote him that summer. “Without some money we cannot carry on the trade any longer, for we have laid out all the money we had for leather.… My heart aches for you and all our friends there.… Our corn looks well.”

Yet Washington complained in August of “an unaccountable kind of stupidity … among the officers of the Massachusetts part of the army, who are nearly of the kidney with the privates.” New England troops generally “are an exceeding dirty & nasty people,” he wrote in confidence to Lund Washington, his cousin and the manager of Mount Vernon. “I need not,” he added, “make myself enemies among them by this declaration.” In short, His Excellency faced “so many great and capital errors & abuses … that my life has been nothing else (since I came here) but one continued round of annoyance & fatigue.”

The army surely had far to travel, but so, too, did its commander.

Aggressive and even reckless, Washington longed for a decisive, bloody battle that would cause Britain to lose heart and sue for a political settlement. That appeared unlikely in Boston, where “it is almost impossible for us to get to them,” he wrote. Instead, the summer and fall would be limited to skirmishes, raids, and sniping. “Both armies kept squibbing at each other,” wrote the loyalist judge Peter Oliver, “but to little purpose.”

American whaleboats continued to bedevil Admiral Graves, who warned “all seafaring people” that rebels were trying to lure British ships into shoal water with “false lights.” After raiders burned part of the tall stone lighthouse on Little Brewster Island, a rocky speck eight miles east of Boston, Graves sent carpenters guarded by almost three dozen marines to make repairs and relight the beacon. At two a.m. on Monday, July 31, a British sergeant roused the detachment there with a strangled cry, “The whaleboats are coming!” More than three hundred baying Yankees in thirty-three boats, led by Major Benjamin Tupper of Rhode Island, pulled for the shoreline. Marines stumbled to the water’s edge, “though not without great confusion,” a British midshipman recorded, “many of them in liquor and totally unfit.”

Rebel musket balls peppered the wharf and the stone tower, killing a marine lieutenant and several others. A few workmen escaped by swimming toward warships in Lighthouse Channel, but most were captured, along with twenty-four marines. Raiders seized the lantern and lamp oil, then set fire to the outbuildings, the keeper’s house, and the tower staircase before rowing to the mainland to receive Washington’s praise for their “gallant and soldierlike behavior.” One patriot observed that “the once formidable navy of Britain [is] now degraded to a level with the corsairs of Barbary.” The British Army tended to agree. “The admiral [is] thought much to blame,” Gage’s aide reported, while General Burgoyne was even harsher in a letter to London: “It may be asked in England, ‘What is the admiral doing?’ … I can only say what he is not doing.” Graves seethed, and plotted his revenge against the rebels.

Yet squibbing would not winkle the British from Boston, nor provoke them to give battle. Moreover, Washington could hardly wage a protracted campaign, given that his army was short of virtually everything an army needed: camp kettles, entrenching tools, cartridge boxes, straw, bowls, spoons. “The carpenters will be obliged to stand still for want of nails,” a supply officer warned, while another advised in late July, “We are in want of soap for the army.” American troops—badly housed, badly clothed, and badly equipped—were at war with the world’s greatest commercial and military power, long experienced in expeditionary administration. As an ostensible national government, Congress had begun to improvise the means to fight that war, from printing money and raising regiments to collecting supplies. But the effort thus far seemed disjointed and often half-baked. Although Congress had appointed quartermaster and commissary chiefs, the jobs were neither defined nor supported, and other critical supply posts—notably for ordnance and clothing—would not be created for another eighteen months.

Simply feeding the regiments around Boston had become perilous. Commissary General Joseph Trumbull, a Harvard-educated merchant and another of the Connecticut governor’s sons, frantically tried to organize butchers, bakers, storekeepers, and purchasing agents. Coopers were needed to make barrels for preserved meat, and salt—increasingly scarce—was wanted to cure it. Forage, cash, and firewood also grew scarce; an inquiry found that much of the “beef” examined was actually horse. To feed the army through the following spring, Trumbull told Washington, he needed 25,000 barrels of flour, 13,000 barrels of salt beef and pork, 28,000 bushels of peas or beans, 11 tons of fresh beef three times a week, and 22,000 pints of milk, plus 200 barrels of beer or cider, every day, at a total cost of £200,000. By late September, as prices spiraled and supply agents rode to New York to beg for flour, Trumbull worried that by spring the army would face starvation and thus have to disband. “A commissary with twenty thousand gaping mouths open full upon him, and nothing to stop them with,” he wrote, “must depend on being devoured himself.”

But no shortage was as perilous as that discovered in early August. Washington’s staff calculated that an army of twenty thousand men, in thirty-nine regiments with a hundred cannons, required two thousand barrels of gunpowder—a hundred tons. Powder was the unum necessarium, as John Adams wrote, the one essential. Each pound contained roughly seven thousand grains, enough for a volley from forty-eight muskets. A big cannon throwing a 32-pound ball required eleven or twelve pounds of powder per shot; an 18-pounder used six or seven pounds. A survey taken soon after Washington’s arrival reported 303 barrels in his magazines, or fifteen tons—enough to stave off a British attack, but too little for cannonading. “We are so exceedingly destitute,” he told Hancock, “that our artillery will be of little use.”

Precisely how destitute became clear from the report laid before the war council that convened at Vassall House on Thursday, August 3. The earlier gunpowder estimate had erroneously included stocks used at Bunker Hill and in various prodigal skirmishes over the summer. Despite generous shipments to Cambridge from other colonies, the actual supply on hand, including the powder in all New England magazines, totaled 9,937 pounds, less than five tons, or enough for about nine rounds per soldier. Washington was gobsmacked. “The general was so struck that he did not utter a word for half an hour,” Brigadier General John Sullivan told the New Hampshire Committee of Safety. “Everyone else was equally surprised.” When he finally regained his tongue, Washington told his lieutenants that “our melancholy situation” must “be kept a profound secret.” This dire news, he added, was “inconceivable.”

More orders fluttered from the headquarters, along with desperate pleas. “Our situation in the article of powder is much more alarming than I had the most distant idea of,” Washington wrote Congress on Saturday. “The existence of the army, & the salvation of the country, depends upon something being done for our relief, both speedy and effectual.” Every soldier’s cartridge box was to be inspected each evening; some regiments levied one-shilling fines for each missing round. Civilians were asked “not to fire a gun at beast, bird, or mark without real necessity.” Even the camp reveille gun should be silenced. Desperate raids were contemplated, to Halifax or Bermuda. Pleading “the most distressing want,” Massachusetts requested powder from New York, which replied that it, too, was “afflicted and astonished,” with less than a hundred pounds for purchase.

A rebel schooner from Santo Domingo, in the West Indies, sailed up the Delaware River in late July under a false French flag with almost seven smuggled tons hidden in the hold beneath molasses barrels. Loaded into a half dozen wagons, the powder was promptly sent north with an armed escort. A second consignment of five tons soon followed, and by late August Washington had enough for twenty-five rounds per soldier, still a paltry amount. War could not be waged with an occasional smuggled windfall, yet not a single American powder mill existed when the rebellion began. Mills operating during the French war had fallen into disrepair or been converted to produce flour or snuff. Of particular concern was the shortage of saltpeter—potassium nitrate, typically collected from human and animal dung, and the only scarce ingredient in gunpowder. Identified as a strategic commodity in the medieval Book of Fires for the Burning of Enemies, saltpeter had been imported to Europe from India through Venice for centuries; imperial Britain bought almost two thousand tons a year. The saltpeter was kneaded with small portions of sulfur and charcoal, then pulverized, dusted, glazed, and dried to make gunpowder.

Saltpeter recipes soon appeared in American newspapers and pamphlets for patriots willing to collect the “effluvia of animal bodies” from outhouses, barns, stables, tobacco yards, and pigeon coops, preferably “moistened from time to time with urine.” Massachusetts offered £14 per hundred pounds, triple the price paid by Britain for Indian saltpeter. “I am determined never to have saltpeter out of my mind,” John Adams declared in October. “It must be had.”

Yet it would not be had in sufficient quantities to supply Washington’s magazines, which also lacked bayonets, good muskets, cartridge paper, bullet lead, and even shaped flints. In the next two years, at least 90 percent of American gunpowder, or the saltpeter to make it, would somehow have to come from abroad. For now, the shortage required “a very severe economy,” as one Washington aide wrote, curtailing tactical operations and imposing a quiescent status quo on the siege of Boston. By early fall, virtually all American cannons had fallen silent but for a single 9-pounder on Prospect Hill, fired occasionally in ornery defiance.

As Washington grappled with his powder problems, another shock jolted the American camp. On Tuesday, October 3, nine generals gathered for a war council with the commander in chief in a large front room at Vassall House. Outside the south windows, autumn colors tinted the elm trees, and the distant Charles glistened with a pewter hue. Wasting no time, Washington informed the council that an anonymous, encrypted “letter in characters,” addressed to a British major, had been intercepted in Newport, Rhode Island, and brought to the Cambridge headquarters. The original courier, a woman described by her former husband as “a very lusty woman much pitted with smallpox,” had been apprehended and bundled to Cambridge on the rump of a horse for interrogation.

Washington dramatically placed the pages on a table. An unbroken, nonsensical sequence of letters covered the first sheet for twenty-six lines, then spilled onto a second page. After the letter’s capture, he said, two copies had been sent for decipherment to trusted men with a knack for puzzles. This code substituted a different letter for each letter in the alphabet; it could be solved by identifying the most frequently used symbols in the cipher and assuming they represented the most common letters in English, starting with e, then t, then a, then o, and so forth. Both decryptions had been completed the previous night, and the solutions were identical.

Washington laid one of the translations before his lieutenants. The letter, more than 850 words long, provided details on American strength, artillery in New York, Bunker Hill casualties, troop numbers in Philadelphia, ammunition supplies, and recruiting. “Eighteen thousand brave & determined with Washington and Lee at their head are no contemptible enemy,” the writer had advised. “Remember I never deceived you.… A view to independence grows more and more general.… Make use of every precaution or I perish.”

From clues in the letter and a confession extracted from that lusty, pitted courier the secret author had been identified as Dr. Benjamin Church, recently appointed as the army’s surgeon general. He had been arrested, Washington said, and was confined to a room on the second floor of his hospital headquarters, just down the street from Vassall House. A search of his papers had yielded no incriminating evidence.

The next day, Dr. Church—forty-one, florid, and impeccably tailored—appeared under guard before the war council. He seemed an unlikely turncoat. A Mayflower descendant, Harvard-educated and medically trained in London, a writer of elegy and satire who could quote Virgil in Latin, he was an expert on smallpox inoculation, a physician for the public almshouse, and a radical firebrand who had performed the postmortem examinations of Boston Massacre victims. As a member of the Committee of Safety, he had supported Benedict Arnold’s attack on Ticonderoga and personally escorted Washington into Cambridge three months earlier. True, he had long had a reputation for high living—“much drove for money,” it was said—with a fine house in Boston, a country estate, and various mistresses.

Church quickly admitted authorship, but he insisted the letter was a ruse “to influence the enemy to propose immediate terms of accommodation.” His intent, if foolish and indiscreet, was to gull “the enemy with a strong idea of our strength” in order to forestall a British attack. Little information had been disclosed that Gage’s officers could not read in the newspapers. “I can honestly appeal to heaven for the purity of my intentions,” Church insisted. “I have served faithfully. I have never swerved from my duty through fear or temptation.” After questioning from each general, he was dismissed and marched back to confinement.

Not a man believed him, least of all Washington. “Good God!” John Adams wrote upon hearing the news. “What shall we say of human nature?” The infamous letter, Adams conceded, “is the oddest thing imaginable. There are so many lies in it, calculated to give the enemy a high idea of our power and importance.… Don’t let us abandon him for a traitor without certain evidence.” But what should be done? British statutes dating to the fourteenth century clearly defined treasonous offenses, including “imagining the death of our lord the king,” mounting a rebellion, or seducing the queen. Yet the articles of war recently adopted in Philadelphia failed to address espionage or treason. Uncertain about how best to proceed, Congress sacked Church as surgeon general on October 14 and instructed Massachusetts to decide his fate.

At ten a.m. on Friday, October 27, Church was bundled into a chaise by the county sheriff and escorted by twenty soldiers with fife and drum three miles to the Watertown meetinghouse. Members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, of which Church was an elected delegate, filled many of the hundred boxes on the ground floor. Spectators packed an upstairs gallery, and armed guards stood at each exit. Summoned by the doorkeeper, Church strode down the aisle to a wooden bar below the pulpit. The Speaker, James Warren, read a dispatch from Washington describing the war council’s conclusion that Church was guilty of “holding a criminal correspondence with the enemy.” The infamous letter was produced, and the decryption read.

For more than an hour, Church parried the accusations, invoking the Magna Carta, habeas corpus, and his pure heart. He claimed that he had refused a guinea a day to betray the American cause and that he had merely intended to confuse, if not dupe, the British. The letter was “innocently intended, however indiscreetly executed,” just a “piece of artifice,” ultimately intended for his brother-in-law, a loyalist newspaper publisher. And how, he asked, could he have conducted a criminal correspondence if the letter had not reached the British? General Greene, watching from the gallery, wrote his wife that night, “With art and ingenuity … he veiled the villainy of his conduct and by implication transformed vice into virtue.” Church “appeared spotless as an angel of light,” William Tudor, the judge advocate general, told John Adams.