Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (20 page)
Even armed free negroes were a worry. Could they be trusted not to spread the seeds of insurrection among the unfree? In February 1776
Congress instructed Washington that, whilst free negroes might be retained, no more should be enlisted.”26
Recent scholarship, such as Schama’s, has cast new light on a major turning point in American attitudes about the Revolution. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the last colonial governor of Virginia, issued a promise of outright liberty to all slaves who escaped and joined the British army. Clearly designed as a tactical maneuver rather than an abolitionist landmark, Dunmore’s pledge became official British policy. To many slaves, Schama points out, “the vaunted war for liberty was . . . a war for the perpetuation of servitude.”27 Inspired by Governor Dunmore’s promise, tens of thousands of slaves sought freedom with the British and were organized into British fighting units. Once Washington became desperate enough for more bodies, the Continental army became the most racially integrated American fighting force until the time of the Vietnam War.
z
| 159 \
America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
a f e w w e e k s before George Washington reached the Cambridge front, the dashing captain of a force of Connecticut’s militia had marched into the patriot camp. Arriving eight days after the battles of Lexington and Concord, their elected captain made an immediate impression on the Massachusetts troops and patriot leaders. A thirty-four-year-old apothecary, successful merchant, sea captain, and devoted member of the Sons of Liberty, he led the Foot Guards, impressively outfitted in their scarlet coats, with smart efficiency. He soon met with Joseph Warren and other leaders of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, the de facto American government in Massachusetts. Given a secret military mission and a promotion, he left Cambridge on May 3.
He would remain in close correspondence with Warren over the weeks leading up to the battle of Bunker Hill.
After that battle and Warren’s untimely death, when both Massachusetts and the Congress failed to provide a pension for the martyred doctor’s children, the young officer announced that he would see to it that Dr. Joseph Warren’s orphaned children were properly provided for. This principled young officer’s name was Benedict Arnold.
| 160 \
| timeline \
1776 Thomas Paine anonymously publishes
Common Sense;
this forty-six-page pamphlet becomes a huge seller and is credited with creating popular support for independence.
In January, Colonel Henry Knox arrives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with cannons captured from Fort Ticonderoga. In March, the British evacuate Boston. Washington takes the main force of his army to New York, anticipating that the British will make the city its operational base.
In May, French king Louis XVI secretly begins to arm the Americans; Spain also supports the American rebels.
In June, a large British armada sails into New York harbor. By August, more than thirty thousand British troops and Hessian mercenaries have landed in New York.
Congress votes for independence on July 4.
On August 27–29, the British crush Washington’s forces in the battle of Long Island.
The battle of Trenton takes place on December 25–26. In a surprise attack, Washington defeats a British-Hessian garrison at Trenton, New Jersey. The victory boosts morale for the struggling Continental army. A second important victory is won at Princeton, New Jersey, on January 3, 1777
.
1777 On January 15, residents of the New Hampshire Grants declare an independent republic called New Connecticut. In July, the republic is renamed Vermont and adopts a constitution banning slavery and promising universal male suffrage.
In the battle of Saratoga on September 19, the first of two key battles | 162 \
| timeline \
fought in upstate New York, American forces under General Daniel Morgan and militia colonel Henry Dearborn defeat Burgoyne’s forces.
At Saratoga on October 7, American forces defeat British General Burgoyne. On October 17, Burgoyne surrenders his fifty-seven-hundred-man army, which is marched to Boston upon swearing not to serve again in America. News of the victory encourages European support for the American revolutionary cause. In December, France officially recognizes American independence.
Washington leads his army into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on December 17.
1778 France declares war against Britain on July 10. Later that month, a French fleet arrives off the New England coast.
1780 On September 23, British major John André is captured near Tarrytown, New York, carrying plans for Arnold’s surrender of West Point. Arnold flees and André is convicted as a spy and executed on October 2.
1781
The combined American and French army begins a siege of the British forces at Yorktown, Virginia, on September 28. On October 19, General Cornwallis surrenders to Washington at Yorktown.
1782 On February 27, the House of Commons votes against waging further war in America. In March, the prime minister, Lord North, resigns and is succeeded by Lord Rockingham, who seeks immediate negotiations with the Americans. Peace talks begin in Paris in April.
1783 The Treaty of Paris is signed on September 3, formally ending the Revolutionary War. On December 4, as the last British troops board ships in New York, George Washington takes leave of his officers at Fraunces Tavern.
| 163 \
Colonel Washington appears at Congress in uniform and by his great experience and abilities in military matters is of much service to us.
—John Adams,
in Philadelphia, to his wife, Abigail (1775)
Arnold has betrayed us! Whom can we trust now?
—George Washington
(September 1780)
| 165 \
a
Lake Champlain—May 1775
The vermonters were drunk. the men had been assigned to commandeer a schooner belonging to a local Tory, Major Philip Skene. A wealthy British officer, Skene owned a substantial chunk of the real estate bordering southern Lake Champlain, the slender thread of water separating what is now Vermont and upstate New York. 1 These midnight raiders were also supposed to scrounge up any other boats they could find on the lake. Instead, their foray had uncovered a private cellar that belonged to the self-styled “Governor” Skene. Finding the cellar stocked with “choice liquors,” the men quickly abandoned the search for boats.2
It was about three o’clock in the morning on May 10, 1775, just three weeks after the battles of Lexington and Concord. America’s first offensive against a British target in the nascent and still undeclared Revolution was off to an inauspicious beginning—if it would begin at all. In a cove on Lake Champlain’s eastern shore, more than two hundred members of an American raiding party were hunkered down in a gloomy rain. They didn’t know what had become of the thirty or so men who had been dispatched to “liberate” Philip Skene’s boats. This raiding party needed those boats to carry them across Lake Champlain.
As the darkness that would cover their attack began to drift toward dawn, the joint commanders of the raid conferred. Should they post-pone the attack? The two officers did not like or trust each other.
They disagreed, and one of the men stoically and perhaps melodra-
| 167 \
America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
matically declared that he would go it alone if necessary. Then, out of the darkness, a single thirty-foot scow appeared on the lake’s ink-black waters. Instead of securing enough boats to carry all 230 men across Champlain, the drunken boatmen had managed to produce only one, capable of holding about forty men. The two commanders agreed that they would press on with the attack with as many men as they could ferry across the lake in the next hour. As the weather worsened, the overloaded scow twice crossed Champlain’s ice-cold, wind-whipped chop. From the cove in what is today Shoreham, Vermont, the boat delivered fewer than ninety men to the New York side of the lake.
Stitched together out of militiamen from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the future Vermont, this patchwork raiding party made its way to the target—the imposing citadel of Fort Ticonderoga. Looming above Lake Champlain, Fort Ticonderoga, along with its smaller sister, Fort Amherst, some twelve miles to the north at Crown Point, was a valuable prize standing on blood-soaked ground. Although un-dermanned and suffering from years of neglect, the two British garrisons were stocked with gunpowder, cannons, and other artillery pieces that the ill-equipped and dysfunctional patriot army camped outside Boston so desperately needed.
Holding Fort Ticonderoga, once called the “Gibraltar of North America,” and the smaller fort at Crown Point would also mean securing control of a crucial waterway that linked Quebec and Montreal with New York City. Scraped out by the Ice Age glaciers, Lake Champlain and its adjoining valley of rich farmland and dairy pastures are wedged between New York’s Adirondacks and Vermont’s Green Mountains. From eastern Canada, boats carrying troops could travel down the St. Lawrence and Richelieu rivers to Lake Champlain, then sail south on the roughly 110-mile-long lake. A short portage | 168 \
Arnold’s Boot
from Lake Champlain’s southernmost tip brought an army to nearby Lake George in New York, and once across that lake, it was a mere eight-mile march to the Hudson River, just above Albany.
This largely water route was far more manageable for an army with horses and artillery than negotiating the several hundred miles of northern New York’s rugged Adirondack wilderness. It was also the fastest route between Massachusetts and Canada. Guns placed at Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point could easily stop any boats that reached the southern stretch of Lake Champlain, where it narrows to its thin-nest point. Although still unsettled frontier wilderness for the most part, the area’s strategic value had been the reason for several devastating battles fought by the British and French around Lake Champlain and Lake George during the French and Indian War.
In August 1757, French forces under General Montcalm had defeated the British at Fort William Henry on Lake George. After surrendering the fort, a number of British civilians and “paroled”
soldiers—soldiers who had agreed not to fight again for eighteen months under the European gentleman’s code of military honor— had been killed by the Abenaki and other Indian allies of the French; countless others were taken captive. The exact number of dead in this “massacre” remains uncertain, but has been reliably estimated at between 70 and 184 British and Americans, as well as many more Indians allied with the British and black servants killed or taken prisoner. 3 But American and British wartime propaganda quickly inflated those numbers to more than a thousand, creating a wave of panic in New England and New York. More significantly, the “massacre” changed the rules of engagement between British and French during the rest of the war and further demonized native Americans. Finally, the incident also inspired the fictionalized ver-
| 169 \
America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
sion of events at the center of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1825 novel
The Last of the Mohicans.
A year later, in July 1758, a British counterattack on what was then called Fort Carillon, on Lake Champlain, had resulted in a disastrous bloodbath. Some twenty thousand British soldiers, the largest force yet assembled in North America, was ordered into an all-out frontal assault on Carillon’s four thousand French and Indian defenders. The seven-hour battle saw wave upon wave of redcoated British soldiers decimated by French artillery as they attempted to cross the earth-works in front of Fort Carillon, littered with a forest of felled and sharpened trees. More than two thousand British soldiers died in what was called “one of the most incredible incidents of bravery and stupidity in the annals of the British army.”4 The French later abandoned Fort Carillon and the British moved in, renaming it Ticonderoga and then spending millions to fortify its defenses. After more than a decade of relative peace in what had become a colonial backwater, Fort Ticonderoga had fallen into disrepair. Now, taking this granite-walled citadel and securing Lake Champlain were crucial to any patriot hopes of containing Great Britain’s might.
With two-thirds of their total force left behind on the other side of the lake, the two American commanders were relying on surprise instead of superior numbers. They led the assault party, clambering up the steep slope from the lake shore. It was well past four in the morning when the raiders finally reached the main gate of the lightly guarded fort. Some forty British soldiers manned the garrison, most of them “invalids,” soldiers who were injured or otherwise unfit for regular army duty, along with some of their families. Despite a warning sent to Fort Ticonderoga a month earlier from Boston by General Gage, only a single sentry was posted, and he was asleep. Racing for | 170 \
Arnold’s Boot
the wicket gate, a small entryway through the fort’s larger wooden door, both American commanders later claimed they had been first through the broken entry. Taking credit for victory (or being denied it) and assigning blame for disaster were going to be central themes in the turbulent futures of these two American soldiers—both of whom would be called traitors.
As the Americans swept into the fort, the startled sentry attempted to get off a shot, but in the early morning rain, his damp musket mis-fired. The British soldier threw down his weapon and raced for the barracks to raise the alarm. He was chased and caught by some of the Green Mountain Boys, led by one of the American commanders, Colonel Ethan Allen. A second sentry appeared and fired at Allen himself but missed. He rushed at Allen with his bayonet fixed, but the six-foot-tall, powerful backwoodsman swung his sword, striking the man a glancing blow on his head, which was protected by a comb that kept his powdered white hair in place.
Allen demanded that the man bring them to the fort’s comman-dant, Captain Delaplace. But the junior of the two British officers at Ticonderoga, Lieutenant Jocelyn Feltham, was the first to emerge and confront the Americans. With time enough only to grab his jacket, the half-naked Feltham had tried unsuccessfully to awaken Captain Delaplace. Breeches in hand, the young officer audaciously, if improb-ably, challenged the eighty or so musket-bearing Americans standing before him: “By what authority have you entered His Majesty’s fort?”