Читать книгу Homegrown Terror - Eric D. Lehman - Страница 12

Resist Even Unto Blood

BENEDICT ARNOLD and his New Haven militia got as far as Massachusetts before they ran into a Connecticut patriot named Samuel Parsons. A member of the General Assembly, Parsons had ridden to Boston early and was coming back to report on the conflict. Arnold mentioned the cannon at Fort Ticonderoga at the southern end of New York’s Lake Champlain, where the British garrison might not have yet heard the alarm of revolution. Parsons rode south and met his friend in the legislature, Silas Deane. Through a clever and possibly illegal financial maneuver, Deane and a few other legislators got the money and sent notice to Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, and an ambush, led by Allen and Arnold, was born.¹

Events moved quickly. Recruitment began in Connecticut and Arnold and his allies moved across Massachusetts, collecting troops. Meanwhile, Ethan Allen gathered his own partisans, refusing to wait for the others. When Arnold heard this news, he was furious, through either personal ambition or worry that the entire operation would be blown. Riding alone through the hills of western Massachusetts, he joined former Connecticut man–turned-transient Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. The two egotistical men clashed immediately over command. But they both had enough presence of mind to put their differences aside and lead the motley soldiers through thick pine forests over the border of New York and sixty miles north past Lake George to the frontier outpost of Fort Ticonderoga.

In the dark early morning of May 9 they quietly crept within a mile of the fort. A small band of Americans padded through the forest along the cliff side and to the gate, where a lonely British sentinel stood guard. Before he could fire his flintlock, Ethan Allen knocked it to the ground and the band rushed the gates, scrambled across the courtyard, and ran up a flight of stairs to the captain’s quarters. Allen pounded on the door and a lieutenant appeared holding up his pants with one hand. Allen told him to “deliver to me the Fort instantly,” and the sleepy lieutenant asked what authority he had, apparently unaware of the situation in Boston. “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” Allen replied. The more diplomatic Arnold broke in, “Come, give up your arms and you’ll be treated like a gentleman.” Without much choice the British complied.²

Two days later they took the nearby lakeside fort at Crown Point. On May 12 the prisoners, including a major, a captain, and two lieutenants, were sent to Governor Trumbull. On their arrival, Trumbull immediately solicited the Continental Congress, pledging “support of the Grand American Cause” and urging for the “regular establishment of our Army around Boston.” Inside, he sent a second, more circumspect letter, in which he told the Congress that the real message will be delivered by the carrier, one that told them of the Ticonderoga expedition, “an affair of so great Importance,” and begged that Congress would “take it up.”³

But Arnold moved more quickly than letters and slow-moving machinations of the Continental Congress. He cataloged the cannons and prepared them for transport to the siege of Boston, while Eleazar Oswald arrived at Ticonderoga. Oswald had been born in England and had been in America only since 1770, but he had married an American girl in New York City and believed strongly in the goals of the Revolution. After moving to Connecticut, he had joined the New Haven Governor’s Foot Guard with Arnold, and now he brought more recruits and a sloop they had commandeered. With this ship at his disposal, Arnold rechristened it Liberty and sailed north across Lake Champlain with fifty men for almost a hundred miles, taking the Canadian outpost of Fort Saint-Jean just before the British had a chance to reinforce it.⁴ He wrote to Trumbull that “had we been 6 hours later in all Probability we should have miscarried in our Design…. Providence seems to have smiled on us.” They took everything portable from the fort, including prisoners, and sailed back down the lake.⁵

Left behind by Arnold, Ethan Allen had followed in slower ships and missed the spoils, though he was attacked by British reinforcements. Arnold reached Ticonderoga triumphant, proclaiming, “we are Masters of the Lake.”⁶ When Allen returned from Saint-Jean, the two men continued to argue. Arnold complained of the intolerable situation: “When Mister Allen, finding he has a strong party, and being impatient of control, and taking umbrage at my forbidding the people to plunder, he assumed the entire command, and I was not consulted for 4 days, which time I spent in the Garrison. And as a private person often insulted by him and his officers, often threatened with my life, and twice shot at by his men.”⁷ Arnold’s ambitions had been satisfied by his success but were dampened by Allen’s constant undermining of his authority and his accomplishments. However, the people of New York were more generous. Six hundred families subscribed to an address of praise for Arnold, “deeply impressed with a sense of your merit,” after his part in the Ticonderoga raid and subsequent work in the region.⁸ A troop of a thousand men finally arrived to reinforce the fort and secure the southern end of Lake Champlain. Arnold returned to Albany to give a report, where he learned that on June 19 his beautiful young wife Margaret had died.⁹

Silas Deane traveled to Weathersfield to visit his own wife, Elizabeth, but he was also needed in Philadelphia, pulled in different directions by love and duty. On one journey home he was joined by Arnold’s childhood playmate, Philip Turner, now a talented surgeon who became the doctor for Connecticut’s troops in the Continental army.¹⁰ The previous summer in Philadelphia, Deane spoke of the “task before us, which is as arduous and of as great consequence as ever man undertook.”¹¹ The camaraderie in the summer of 1775 continued to feed Deane’s passionate patriotism, and even there at the heart of the Revolution, few matched him. He wrote back to Elizabeth in Weathersfield again, saying, “I have the fullest assurance that these colonies will rise triumphant, and shine to the latest posterity, though trying scenes are before us.”¹² In another letter he continued even more firmly, “My principles are … to sacrifice all lesser considerations to the service of the whole, and in this tempestuous season to throw cheerfully overboard private fortune, private emolument, even my life—if the ship, with the jewel Liberty, may be safe.”¹³ This was no reckless youth with nothing to lose, but a man of nearly forty, whose success and family were much to risk and whose formerly mild temperament had brought him political position and success.

Deane tried to remain practical despite this revolutionary fervor, serving on various committees throughout the summer and debating with Thomas Paine and Roger Sherman on the positive necessity of clothing the soldiers.¹⁴ When news arrived of Arnold and Allen’s success, and his own part in financing the operation, his nickname in Congress became “Ticonderoga.”¹⁵ Then on June 14 Deane and a veteran of the French and Indian War named George Washington spent two days drafting rules and regulations for the army. The tall Virginian was preparing to ride to Boston and take command of the various New England militias and promised to stop in Weathersfield. Deane wrote to Elizabeth, “General Washington will be with you soon…. I have been with him for a great part of the last forty-eight hours in Congress and Committee, and the more that I have become acquainted with the man, the more I esteem him.”¹⁶ A few weeks later Washington rode through Connecticut, proclaimed in New Haven by cannons, drummers, and a Yale fifer named Noah Webster. The general stopped for lunch at Deane’s house, meeting Governor Trumbull and Jeremiah Wadsworth. Elizabeth Deane set lunch and withdrew to sit with the house slaves, Hagar and Pompey, in the kitchen, while in the best room the three men talked of freedom.

Washington rode on to the siege of Boston, already over two months old. Within the week after the shots were fired at Lexington almost four thousand Connecticut men had marched to join the army assembling around Cambridge. Many of these men came back, since there was little food in April for the huge numbers rushing to defend their homeland.¹⁷ But throughout the summer, recruitment for the war effort continued, and it increased with the arrival of Washington to lead and cohere the various militias and companies.

One of those inspired to join that summer was Nathan Hale, who felt restless teaching in New London. Every day thirty-two boys sat on benches at long tables and scraped their slates, staring out the wavy glass windows of the Union School while he taught them Latin and grammar. On Saturdays he taught girls, a practice for which he had been vilified by some of the more conservative people in town. But the trustees of the school, including Nathaniel and Lucretia Shaw, seem to have had no problem with this quirk, inviting him to meals at their huge stone house by the harbor.¹⁸ After all, Hale was a respected teacher, “frank and independent in his bearing, social, animated, ardent, a lover of the society of ladies, and a favorite among them.”¹⁹

Hale had joined the New London militia the previous autumn, and by the summer of 1775 was promoted to first sergeant.²⁰ But the battle was not at New London, not yet, and even though his contract was nearly up anyway, he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. He wrote to his friend Benjamin Tallmadge about his conflicted feelings of responsibility, and Tallmadge wrote back, saying,

When I consider you as a Brother Pedagogue, engaged in a calling, useful, honorable, and doubtless to you very entertaining, it seems difficult to advise you ever to relinquish your business, and to leave so agreeable a circle of connections and friends…. On the other hand, when I consider our country, a land flowing as it were with milk and honey, holding open her arms, and demanding assistance from all who can assist her in her sore distress, methinks a Christian’s counsel must favor the latter.²¹

Tallmadge’s letter must have hit a nerve. On Friday, July 17, two weeks after Washington rode through Connecticut, Hale tendered his resignation, and as he left “gave [his students] earnest counsel, prayed with them, and shaking each by the hand, bade them individually farewell.”²² He joined the Seventh Connecticut Regiment as a lieutenant and recruited more soldiers from the area, such as Stephen Hempstead. A year younger than Hale, Hempstead lived in an old 1678 house a few blocks from the schoolhouse, at the bottom of a large hill. He idolized Hale and joined up as his sergeant.²³ Nathaniel Shaw gave his protégé Hale a gift of powder and shot before he left.²⁴

At the siege of Boston Hale livened up the dull camp life with sporting events and games, but always meticulous, he carefully wrote down instructions for himself in his diary: “It is the utmost importance that an officer should be anxious to know his duty, but greater that he should carefully perform what he does know.” He settled into a routine, drinking coffee in the morning and brandy at night, drilling his soldiers and preparing for the battles he knew would come.²⁵ Tallmadge visited the siege before returning to his job, where he weighed his options all summer and fall, aching to join up, but careful of his duties, unwilling to take his own advice.

Hale received many letters from friends he had made in New London; he had left behind many broken hearts. Gilbert Saltonstall wrote with tongue in cheek, “The young girls … have frequently desir’d their compliments to Master, but I’ve never thought of mentioning it ’till now—you must write something in your next by way of P.S. that I may show it them.”²⁶ But Hale had left the pleasures of youth behind and was now on his way to becoming a man. Promoted to captain, he dined with Gen. Israel Putnam at headquarters several times, initiated fully into the circle of Connecticut Revolutionaries.²⁷

Jonathan Trumbull, shown here with his wife, Faith, earned the respect of his contemporaries for his civil-work ethic and service in Connecticut government. Stuart, Life of Jonathan Trumbull.

The growing army needed to be supplied, and one hundred miles from Boston, safe in the New England interior, the hilltop town of Lebanon became one of the centers of the revolutionary effort. On the enormous, comet-shaped village green, livestock were gathered, soldiers billeted, and Governor Trumbull’s country store became the “war office,” where he would hold no less than nine hundred meetings of his Council of Safety during the course of the Revolution. Riders hurried to Lebanon from Boston and New York, and Trumbull remained one of the best informed figures in the war.²⁸ In fact, he may have been George Washington’s most frequent correspondent, and the “the mutual friendship and esteem” that grew between the two men helped both.²⁹ Though the religious Connecticutian was twenty years older than the Virginian, they spoke on equal terms, and legend has it that Washington called him “Brother Jonathan,” leading to the use of the term for the common Yankee soldiers during the war. Whether its origin is apocryphal or not, the term began to be used freely and proudly throughout the northern colonies.³⁰

Trumbull saw the Revolution as something of a religious quest. He was also a born egalitarian, with a simple approach to everyday life that stemmed from his puritanical background. At one point he was mocked by Loyalists on Long Island for the baffling habit of getting shaved at the local barber shop, where he “stands among the rest, and among them takes his turn in the chair,” rather than having a servant do this work.³¹ This dated criticism reveals how strange and new these democratic ideas were, and how the class-conscious British society was easy for someone like Trumbull to reject.

His sons all graduated from Harvard, and like their father became devout advocates for the Revolution. Born in 1740, Jonathan Jr. supervised the family’s Lebanon flour mill and East Haddam shipyard and now became the paymaster for the northern department of the army. The governor’s youngest son, John, only nineteen years old, became an aide to George Washington, and his eldest, Joseph, took the greatest responsibility of all. Joseph lived in Norwich at the outbreak of hostilities and began serving as commissary general of the Connecticut troops in April. He was recommended to Congress by Silas Deane and had done such a fine job so far that they appointed him commissary general for the entire Continental army on July 19.³²

The Commissary Department of the army immediately became the largest economic organization on the continent. Joseph siphoned grain from Virginia and salted pork and fish from Connecticut.³³ He sent and answered hundreds and hundreds of letters, requests, and orders.³⁴ His job was not an easy one and was praised by Washington, who said, “Few Armies, if any, have been better and more plentifully supplied than the Troops under Mr. Trumbull’s care.”³⁵ Having the governor of Connecticut as his father helped, and his mother, Faith, supported local charities, instituted clothing drives for the troops and kept up morale among the wives left at home.³⁶

Under Governor Trumbull’s zealous management, Connecticut became a model of a functional war state, with daily and weekly ration schedules for beef, pork, flour, molasses, milk, coffee, chocolate, rice, peas, beans, butter, corn meal, sugar, rum, beer, soap, candles, and tobacco. Clothing was supplied by establishing quotas in each town, and these efforts led to supplying not only the Connecticut troops but others throughout the colonies.³⁷ The state produced gunpowder at a far more rapid rate than any other, despite trouble importing saltpeter and sulfur. Muskets were put together by skilled craftsmen for five shillings a gun, enough so that almost all the Connecticut militia and troops in the Continental army were armed. The Salisbury foundry in the far northwest of the state produced cannon, grapeshot, and round shot for the fortifications around New York and along the Connecticut coast. Trumbull’s operation became by far the most productive per capita of any colony.³⁸ While in New York, Arnold told his aide Richard Varick to get supplies directly from Connecticut, because his home state was so reliable.³⁹

Governor Trumbull also supervised the daunting job of recruitment for the Continental army and local militia. Connecticut’s population was about two hundred thousand, and one-fifth saw military service during the war, almost all men of military age. However, just as in every other state, there were many desertions. Trumbull offered bounties, though they still struggled to keep the Continental army recruitment up to a respectable level. Rather than lacking interest in the cause of liberty, the soldiers were frustrated by intermittent pay, inadequate provisions, and other problems that plagued the army.⁴⁰ Hale reported a private deserting to the enemy as early as October 1775, but it was rare enough to mention.⁴¹ Two months later, though, when the Connecticut troops completed their initial enlistments, many chose to leave the siege of Boston and go home. Upon hearing about this disgraceful desertion of troops, Gideon Saltonstall wrote to Hale from New London, saying, “The behavior of our Connecticut Troops makes me Heartsick—that they who have stood foremost in the praises and good wishes of their Countrymen, as having distinguished themselves for their Zeal of Publick Spirit, should more shamefully desert the Cause, and at a critical Moment too, is really unaccountable—amazing.”⁴² Washington cursed the troops’ “dirty, mercenary spirit,” and despite the early valiance of Arnold, Putnam, and others, Connecticut briefly lost its reputation.⁴³ Indeed, when many of the militia returned home they found a hostile reception from their families and colleagues. Perhaps because of this pressure, many joined up again, and by the beginning of 1776 Connecticut’s regiments were almost at full strength.⁴⁴

Trumbull also commissioned two hundred privateers, which would capture more than five hundred enemy ships. But he had help with this job from an old friend’s son, Nathaniel Shaw Jr. He was the richest patriot in the best harbor in the state, which Silas Deane proposed to the Continental Congress as the future home of the American navy.⁴⁵ Shaw himself owned several unarmed ships and an astonishing ten armed vessels, including the General Putnam, a privateer with twenty guns that took fourteen prizes.⁴⁶ He and the other owners or captains were able to auction off the captured ships and inessential supplies, while all the necessary food, clothing, and arms were sent to the army.

But Shaw did much more than this, keeping up the now-dangerous Caribbean trade to gather more supplies. On July 12, 1775, he told his agent to sell goods in Philadelphia and then take the ship to Hispaniola to purchase gun powder, and if there was none, then to bring back coffee and brown sugar. He tells him to burn the letter “for Fear of Accidents.”⁴⁷ By January 1776 the prosperous businessman had felt the financial effects of war and moaned that “all our Trade is now at an end, & god knows whether we shall ever be in a Situation to Carry it on Again, no Business now but preparation for Warr, Ravaging Villages, Burning of Towns &c.”⁴⁸ But he persevered, commissioning another ship to collect gunpowder and by the following June sent a supply of the precious powder to Washington, along with cases of guns and flints and cutlasses.⁴⁹

Shaw was a businessman through and through and kept a clipped, professional attitude in his correspondence. His stark letters gave clear information, such as sending flour up the river to Norwich “as soon as the river opens,” delivering powder to Providence, or informing others that “a great number of French troops are daily arriving.”⁵⁰ But as the richer son of a rich man, Shaw had grown up with an opportunity for leisure that few in the eighteenth century had. He saved his emotions for hunting expeditions into the coves and bays of the Sound, searching for ducks and other waterfowl. Perhaps he considered these small holidays necessary for his effectiveness and came back to his huge stone house ready to make more money.

Trumbull’s friend John Ledyard had died, but his younger brothers, William and Ebenezer, continued the family business. Though much less prominent in the interconnected Connecticut community, they were a vital part of the New London and Groton war effort. William and his brother sent supplies to the army, probably at a great loss, complaining once that “we don’t mean to sell one article only to take some for the families. The remainder to lay by until we hear from the company…. We don’t believe anything about Boston prices.”⁵¹ They also worried about the inefficiencies of government and the meanness of the common people at the same time, saying, “I must fear we shall ruin ourselves while we are striving to support our Liberties against our mother country we shall lose it among ourselves.” Yet William and his brother kept faith, saying to Joseph Trumbull, “We hope and pray that union will increase throughout the Continent since on that our all depends.”⁵²

William Ledyard had married Anne Williams of Stonington, and together they lived happily on the large hill in Groton, giving birth to child after child. Ledyard was not as passionate as Silas Deane, as ambitious as Benedict Arnold, or as religiously devoted as Governor Trumbull. He had a classically moderate patriot attitude, desiring liberty from England but concerned about the cost and the consequences. He wrote to Joseph Trumbull that many of the “country people” were not Tories but felt as if “we have got between two fires.”⁵³ Nevertheless he wanted “to hear of the welfare of our friends and Country Men” and told their overworked friend, “you have our best wishes for your health and prosperity and we hope that a kind Providence will preserve you in all your undertaking.”⁵⁴

Meanwhile, Benedict Arnold returned to his house on Water Street in New Haven, where his three motherless children and sister, Hannah, met him. His business had already suffered as well, even though Hannah had tried to take over, with the occasional help from their friend Silas Deane.⁵⁵ She never lost sight of her brother’s welfare, sending him a horse on one occasion, “anxious” to have him know that she was looking out for him.⁵⁶ But Arnold was too passionate about the war to think of business anyway and could not sit idle for long.

There was not much opportunity to achieve distinction at the ongoing siege, but the American invasion of Canada offered a better chance. While the main invasion up Lake Champlain toward Montreal staggered under delays, Arnold proposed a new line of attack up the Kennebec River of Maine. He received approval on August 27, 1775, and put together an expeditionary force from the troops stationed around Boston, including his comrade from the foot guard Eleazar Oswald, who continued his friendship with the newly promoted Colonel Arnold. By September 13 Arnold had gathered his troops and George Washington himself had given him instructions, saying, “you are entrusted with the command of the most consequence to the interest and liberties of America.”⁵⁷

Arnold and his troops struggled through the backwoods of Maine, heading for the fortress of Quebec City. He and Eleazar Oswald learned to depend on each other during this brutal, epic march over stubborn portages. By the time they reached Canada, they had lost at least a third of their men, and the rest were starving and frostbitten. They were joined on December 2 by Gen. Richard Montgomery, who had just conquered Montreal. In Montgomery’s train were his young aide, Aaron Burr, and Capt. John Lamb of Stratford, another man who became great friends with Arnold. On the fifth, the combined force set up camp on the Plains of Abraham just west of the fortified city, above the icy Saint Lawrence River. The British troops stationed inside the citadel had much bigger cannon, and the Americans could not set up a proper battery to bombard the walls. So, on December 31, during a blinding snowstorm, they attacked.⁵⁸

While Montgomery’s troops scaled the bastion of Cape Diamond on the southwest corner of the city walls, Lamb bombarded the citadel with his mortars to give Arnold cover as he made a direct attack around the north side to the lower town. Cannonballs smashed through snow banks, and a musket ball smashed into Arnold’s leg, bouncing off the bone and splintering it. His men tried to carry him off, but he concentrated on commanding their safe retreat while blood flowed down his leg. Finally, weakened by blood loss, he allowed his men to drag him to the makeshift hospital.⁵⁹ Oswald and Lamb attempted to keep up the hopeless assault, but grapeshot hit Lamb in the face, ripping his cheek bone and knocking him unconscious and destroying the sight in his left eye.⁶⁰ Though the soldiers continued assaulting the defenses, they were left without support and could not hold their gains. Lamb and a small band were captured before they could retreat.

From his bed, Arnold waited to hear the fate of his men. Meanwhile, his old Freemason master and the man who held the keys of the powder house back in New Haven, David Wooster, was coming with a relief expedition. Arnold wrote him, “In the attack I was shot through the leg and was obliged to be carried to the Hospital, ware I soon heard the disagreeable news that the General [Montgomery] was defeated at Cape Diamond.”⁶¹ It was worse than that: Montgomery had been shot on the walls of the citadel, and his men had fled in panic.

As the siege of Quebec dragged on, Arnold slowly recovered from his leg wound. As at Ticonderoga, Arnold made enemies among the other officers, but this time he also made friends, like he did with the paroled Lamb during their mutual convalescence. In battle, soldiers had to be sure their comrades had their back, and men like Oswald and Lamb had his.⁶² One lonely midnight at the hospital Arnold penned a long letter to another friend, Silas Deane, saying, “I have often sat down to write you, and as often been prevented by matters of consequence crowding upon me, which I could not postpone.”⁶³ Deane had become closer to Arnold after Ticonderoga, writing that the brave Colonel “has deserved much and received little or less than nothing.”⁶⁴ And Arnold needed friends now, telling Deane that the fight for Canada looked more and more like a disaster. The American reinforcements under David Wooster did arrive, but they were not enough. When British reinforcements began arriving in May and June, Arnold and his comrades were pushed southwest back up the Saint Lawrence, and down into New York.

There was one piece of good news—Americans had finally dragged cannons from Ticonderoga across the snow-covered mountain paths to Boston, and the bombarded British had fled. But with reinforcements arriving on the continent, including tens of thousands of German mercenaries, unpleasant times seemed ahead for the Americans. If England was going to have this kind of help, the Americans needed help too. It was time to call on an old enemy, the French, who hated the British far more than the Americans did. The man they chose for the job was none other than Silas Deane, despite his previous lack of diplomatic experience. The thirty-eight-year-old man left for France in March 1776 and arrived with orders to get supplies, enlist men into service, and if possible involve France and other European nations in the war. He wrote a sorrowful farewell letter to his wife, saying, “It matters but little, my Dear, what part we act, or where, if we act it well.”⁶⁵

Once he settled into an apartment on the Rue de l’Universite in Paris, he met the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, and then Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the French polymath who wrote The Marriage of Figaro. Deane appealed to Beaumarchais, who got his hands on 3 million livre, including 1 million from Louis XVI’s personal coffers, to purchase one hundred cannons, countless guns, and twenty-five thousand uniforms. Eventually 6 million livre worth of supplies got around the British blockades in the early years of the war.⁶⁶

Deane also recruited young French aristocrats for the American army, more for their money than their military prowess. But one would defy those expectations: the nineteen-year-old Gilbert de Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. He had learned military science and riding at Versailles and stood at the door of Deane’s humble apartment on the Rue de l’Universite, asking to fight for human dignity.⁶⁷ Deane gave him the rank of major general to satisfy the young Frenchman’s family, and he sailed for America.⁶⁸ Meanwhile, Arthur Lee of Virginia and Benjamin Franklin arrived. Franklin was already famous in Europe due to his popular Autobiography, and he began working on the more serious problem of involving the French government in the war.

While Deane was in Philadelphia and France, his brother Barnabas kept his Connecticut business going, connecting with Nathaniel Shaw and Governor Trumbull under the auspices of the Secret Committee of the Continental Congress. Letters flew to and from Congress and Lebanon, Weathersfield and New London. Shaw collected cargos from the port and distributed goods to his friends, who sent them on.⁶⁹ Shaw wrote to the Huntingtons in Norwich: “Must inform you that I have been oblig’d to supply the Continental Troops Quartered in this Town, from Newport who have almost consumed the whole, and I must be oblig’d to call on you for sum more [flour] also for sum work.”⁷⁰ He had to balance the needs of the local people with the needs of Governor Trumbull and of George Washington’s army.

Washington himself arrived at Shaw’s granite mansion in New London on April 9, 1776, on his way from Boston to New York. He had been there twenty years earlier during the French and Indian War, while serving as a colonel in the British army.⁷¹ He remembered old Captain Shaw well and was happy to meet his son, bringing seventeen bottles of wine and eating a huge meal on creamware dishes at the mahogany dining table, along with Gen. Nathanael Greene and Cdre. Ezekial Hopkins. Washington and the three men planned the naval war before the exhausted commander in chief retired to old Temperance Shaw’s maroon and mustard bedroom.⁷²

Norwich lawyer Samuel Huntington, now in Congress, had finally sent official instructions for privateers, giving them permission to attack British ships.⁷³ Shaw had already been arranging these expeditions for a year, but it was nice to have official permission from the new government. His job was to get supplies and take enemy ships, and these two duties often coincided. Jonathan Mix, now recovered from broken ribs received on the march to Canada, joined one of these expeditions out of New London during the spring of that year, joining the fleet under Commodore Hopkins. They sailed to the Bahamas, landed at Nassau, stormed the fort, and took the governor of the islands prisoner. As new British ships arrived, the American navy took them one by one, building up a store of supplies. When the ships were full, they sailed back to New London, slipping past the British fleet at the end of the Sound and depositing a huge supply of cannons, arms, and ammunition, which, as Mix said, “proved to be of great and timely use to our country.”⁷⁴ Shaw used some of the captured cannons for defenses in Groton and New London, sent others to Newport, and shipped mortars and shells to Washington in New York.

Despite successes like this, Shaw settled in for a long war. He voted to restrict gunpowder use even for shooting game, to inoculate the populace for smallpox, and to provide for soldiers’ families. He also secured the town records in the western hills, a move that kept them safe from the burning four years later, and at a full town meeting approved the Articles of Confederation “as being the most effectual measures whereby the freedom of said states may be secured and their independency established on a solid and permanent basis.”⁷⁵ He often used his own money to supply the defense of the city and the troops and often went without payment from Congress.⁷⁶

William Ledyard became Shaw’s agent to Hartford that summer and discussed finances with Governor Trumbull, finally getting £300 recompense for his new boss.⁷⁷ He also was given command of the nascent Fort Griswold on Groton Heights for the first time.⁷⁸ Then, on July 10, 1776, Trumbull appointed Shaw agent of the colony for collecting naval supplies and taking care of sick sailors, another official sanction for a job he was already doing.⁷⁹ The Continental Congress followed, prompted by his friend Samuel Huntington, who recommended him, saying, “I had the pleasure of procuring you to be appointed Agent, being the most suitable person I could think of.”⁸⁰ Of course, this meant he was taking orders from both Lebanon and Philadelphia, like the micromanaging order from John Hancock to “deliver Mr. Barnabas Deane any Continental Stores in your possession which he may want for the up[keep] of the Frigate Trumbull now filling out in your state.”⁸¹

Shaw and Ledyard lived under constant threat of invasion from the superior British navy. A “ship-of-war” ran a captured prize ship onto the rocks by Fisher’s Island, but luckily “armed men from Stonington” and Capt. Elisha Hinman in the Cabot took the supplies ashore.⁸² Next, on July 25 three British men-of-war, the Rose, the Swan, and the Kingfisher, anchored outside the harbor to blockade the town. Shaw kept his good humor, sending George Washington a report a few days later and, along with it, an epicurean gift and joke: “as the Turtle was Intended for the Support of our Enemys, we thought best to Send him to head Quarters, to be Dealt with.”⁸³ Washington thanked Shaw for “an extreme fine turtle” and commiserated about a lost prize ship.⁸⁴ Then, on August 5 and 6 nine ships and several other vessels arrived but did not attack, being more interested in plundering Fisher’s Island, where they took over a thousand sheep, cattle, and other provisions. On this occasion they paid the Tory owner but stole from other islands like Gardiner’s and Plum without paying.⁸⁵

After this scare, Shaw wrote a more urgent letter to Trumbull the following day, begging for help: “This town has been drained of men already, so that there is scarcely a sufficiency of hands left to get in the harvest.”⁸⁶ Ledyard had already begun improving the land fortifications, saying, “no place lies more exposed than we do.” Ships had appeared in the Sound as early as 1775 and “appeared to be beating in but they came to Anchor off Fisher’s Island.” Ledyard “alarmed the country,” but so many people showed up to his signal that “we could not agree on a plan to oppose [the raiders] till Monday morning when they had got all the stock off.” Ledyard was one of the people who lost sheep in this raid.⁸⁷ Later that autumn a commission found “that there is in Groton, nearly opposite the old Fort at New London, a hill or an eminence…. It seems nature had prepared a place to plant cannon for the protection of that port or harbor.”⁸⁸ Now in 1776 the Groton citizens dug ditches and built fortifications around the harbor. At Waterman’s Point below Norwich, a small battery with four six-pound cannons was also erected to receive a potential invasion. But the process was slow. Acquiring the sledges, hammers, shovels, timber, and other supplies took ages, and every sight of sails would remind them that the work was incomplete. The lack of effective central government haunted small projects like this as much as it did George Washington’s much larger needs.⁸⁹

And Washington’s problems had become very serious indeed. His army had gathered in New York, waiting for an invasion they knew was coming. One of the soldiers gathering with Washington was Nathan Hale, who had reenlisted on New Year’s Day. His friend Benjamin Tallmadge had also decided to drop his job as high school superintendent and join the army. Perhaps one of Hale’s hilarious poems of rhyming couplets had done the trick and inspired his friend, who was quite a fan of versified letters.

Reviv’d a little by your letter,

With hopes of speeding better,

At length I venture forth once more,

But fearing soon to run ashore….

For this I leave my wonted course,

with you, and seek for aid from verse.⁹⁰

Maybe it was a less poetic kind of aid Tallmadge thought his friend was asking for, because on June 20 he rode up the dusty track to Hartford, where Governor Trumbull gave him a lieutenant’s commission.⁹¹

Only five days after Tallmadge joined up, British warships began appearing in New York Harbor. Throughout the hot, tense summer, more and more arrived, cutting off Long Island, spreading up the Hudson, just out of cannon range. Hale handed out new equipment to his men, preparing for an epic conflict.⁹² Then, sometime in August, he switched to a company of Rangers to patrol the shores of Manhattan and Westchester. In doing so, he missed the biggest battle on the continent since Europeans had arrived.

On August 22, twenty thousand British troops landed on Long Island and smashed into the American lines, pushing them back across Brooklyn. Those troops not captured or killed barely escaped, retreating back against the East River. Tallmadge had just arrived in Brooklyn and remembered the retreat: “It was one of the most anxious, busy nights that I ever recollect, and being the third in which hardly any of us had closed our eyes in sleep, we were all greatly fatigued.”⁹³ At last they reached Brooklyn Ferry and crept across the river to Manhattan. It was one of George Washington’s most skillful maneuvers, though there is little glory in retreat. Israel Putnam was astonished they had escaped from Long Island, saying the British commander “is either our friend or no general…. He suffered us to escape without any interruption.”⁹⁴ Meanwhile, David Bushnell of Westbrook sent his Turtle submarine into New York Harbor, attempting to attach mines to the hulls of British warships, but this technological ploy was unsuccessful.

Connecticut’s front with British-controlled New York and Long Island lasted from 1776 to 1783, leading to dozens of confrontations. Connecticut and Parts Adjacent, Geography and Maps Division, Library of Congress.

It was the beginning of a bad season. Throughout the autumn British troops whipped the Continental army off Manhattan and up through Westchester County. Stopped at the line of hills at the southwest corner of Connecticut, they pushed Washington and the main army across the Hudson River and into New Jersey. On December 7, 1776, another British force occupied Newport, Rhode Island, while a huge British fleet patrolled the Sound, effectively surrounding a panicked Connecticut on three sides.⁹⁵ Things must have seemed bleak indeed. But there was no turning back. These patriots had committed themselves now, through both declarations and blood, through fire and sacrifice. They were bound through comradeship and oaths, through the connections they had created before the war and through the ones they continued to make in the thick of the struggle. And each of them now faced an uncomfortable prospect: victory or death.