Renegade Revolutionary: The Life of General Charles Lee 9781479851218

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Renegade Revolutionary

Renegade Revolutionary The Life of

Gener al Charles Lee Phillip Papas

l N E W Y O RK UNI VE RSI TY PRESS New York and London

N E W Y O RK UNI VERSI TY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org

©

2014 by New York University All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Frontispiece: Bust of General Charles Lee, ca. 1780. Engraved by Robert Pollard for Murray’s History of the American War. From Donald H. Cresswell, The American Revolution in Drawings and Prints: A Checklist of 1765–1790 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975). Source: Library of Congress. For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8147-6765-8 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

For Sophia

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It is, then, necessary to study war before we engage in it. —Charles Lee

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Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Part I: The World of Charles Lee, 1731–1764 1. Colonel Lee’s Son . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2. Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the American Frontier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

3. An Ambitious Officer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Part II: The Last Asylum of Liberty, 1765–1775 4. Absolute Power Is a Serpent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 5. The Brutality of Love and War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

6. The Greatest Son of Liberty in America . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 7. The Dogs of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114 Part III: Unfortunate Son of Liberty, 1776–1778 8. The Key to the Continent: New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . .137

9. Angels of Indecision: Virginia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 10. Lee’s Southern Glory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166

11. Lee’s Northern Disillusionment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 12. The Idol of the Officers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .199

13. The King’s Famous Prisoner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 [ ix ]

Contents

Part IV: The End of a Soldier’s Life, 1778–1782 14. Monmouth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .235 15. Washington’s Scapegoat? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .256 16. The Bitter End . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .274

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403

[ x ]

Acknowledgments

Many people made this book possible. I would like to thank the staffs at the New York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and the Kenneth C. MacKay Library at Union County College for helping me find the sources I needed to tell Charles Lee’s story. This book has benefited from the scholarly insights of the many friends and colleagues who read different parts and generously made suggestions that improved my writing, strengthened the narrative, and helped contextualize Lee’s experiences. Thank you to Angelo T. Angelis, Laura M. Chmielewski, Kate Hallgren, Cindy Lobel, Julie Miller, Mark Sgambettera, and Iris Towers. I want to thank my mentor, Carol Berkin, for her continued support of my scholarly pursuits. She also read large sections of the book, offering constructive criticism that helped focus my arguments and improve the narrative. I also want to thank the staff at New York University Press for their work in bringing this book to publication. In particular, thanks to my former editor, Deborah Gershenowitz, for her support of this project from its inception and to my current editor, Clara Platter, and her assistant, Constance Grady, for helping guide it to completion. I wish to express my gratitude to Robert M. Calhoon and to the other reader for New York University Press who gave their time and energy to read the manuscript and whose advice widened its scope, improved its organization, and ensured its quality. I am indebted to the members of the Union County College Sabbatical Committee for supporting my request for a sabbatical leave for the 2010–2011 academic year, which helped me substantially to complete this book. I was also very fortunate to receive a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in 2008 from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which proved crucial for supporting my research at the New York Public Library and the New York Historical Society and in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. [ xi ]

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Arthur Rose of the English Department at Union County College for his enthusiastic interest in my work and for his close reading of several chapters of this book. His editorial comments and grammatical suggestions were invaluable. Thank you also to Loren Ventrice, the secretary for the Economics, Government, and History Department, who helped me with some of the images featured in this book, and to Patricia A. Castaldi, director of practical nursing and allied health at Union County College, who confirmed for me that Lee’s physical symptoms during the last years of his life were caused by tuberculosis. Thanks also to David Osborn, site director of Saint Paul’s Church National Historic Site in Mount Vernon, New York, and to Caroline Fuchs, formerly of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Eighteenth Century Reading Room and currently associate professor and outreach librarian at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, for providing me with several opportunities to present various aspects of Lee’s life to students, scholars, and the general public. Closer to home, I am grateful for my family. My partner Lori R. Weintrob read the book as a manuscript and offered thoughtful commentary, bringing an eye for social and cultural history to the project. Her recommendations helped shape some of the chapters and move the narrative along. As a historian, Lori understands the time and effort that it takes to bring a book or any scholarly project to completion. Her patience and encouragement were incredibly important to me. Thanks also to my parents Nicholas and Elisabeth, to my brother Peter, and to Lori’s daughter Joelle. And most of all, I am grateful for Sophia. She reminds me daily of the joys and wonders of life, the innocence and potential of youth, and the promise that the world has to offer. This book is for her, with all of my love.

[ xii ]

Introduction

In November 17 74, a pamphlet addressed to the people of America was published in Philadelphia and reprinted in other major cities in the colonies and in London. It forcefully articulated American rights and liberties and allayed the fears of many colonists of British military power. The pamphlet contended that the crisis that had unfolded between Britain and America since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 was not simply a dispute between a mother country and her colonies. Instead, it was part of the ongoing universal struggle for human freedom. To further their cause, Americans needed to stand together, prepared to declare and fight for their independence. The pamphlet’s author assured his readers that by emancipating themselves from Britain’s imperial shackles, Americans would inspire people who suffer under tyrannical governments to “demolish those badges of slavery” that stifle the natural human aspiration to be free. The author of this radical and strikingly optimistic pamphlet was not Thomas Paine—nor was it John Adams, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Franklin. It was Charles Lee, a former British army officer turned revolutionary, a man who became one of the earliest supporters of American independence and who served as George Washington’s secondin-command and military confidant during the early years of the Revolution. Lee fought on and off the battlefield for expanded democracy, freedom of conscience, individual liberties, human rights, and for the formal education of women. While many revolutionaries shared Lee’s commitment to independence, few shared his radical outlook. Fewer still shared his confidence that the American Revolution should be waged—and could be won—primarily by militia (or irregulars) rather than with a centralized regular army. To the eighteenth-century American gentry, who for decades had emulated an idealized and erroneous notion of English gentility, Lee was not a [ 1 ]

Introduction

true gentleman. For Americans, a true gentleman was a man of honor and integrity; he embraced rigid rules of etiquette and manners, demonstrated emotional self-restraint, exhibited a proper sense of decorum in public, and displayed elegance in speech and dress. Lee displayed none of these traits. He was careless in his dress and in his personal habits and hygiene. His manners were no better, although he could be charming, especially in the presence of females. More often, Lee was rude, profane, crude, irritable, egotistical, dogmatic, coarse, and abrupt. He was brutally honest and had a temper that flared at the slightest provocation and a biting and sarcastic wit that frequently left its intended target deeply wounded. After dining with Lee in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1775, the Congregational minister Jeremy Belknap, a graduate of Harvard, an early historian of New Hampshire, and a chaplain for American troops stationed outside Boston, found him “a perfect original, a good scholar and soldier, and an odd genius; full of fire and passion.” But Belknap could not ignore Lee’s outward appearance. He described him as a man with “little good manners; a great sloven, wretchedly profane, and a great admirer of dogs.”1 Mercy Otis Warren, author of one of the earliest histories of the American Revolution and the sister and wife of two of Massachusetts’s leading revolutionaries, described Lee as “plain in his person even to ugliness, and careless in his manners to a degree of rudeness. . . . His voice was rough, his garb ordinary, his deportment morose.”2 And a soldier who had served under Lee during the Revolution remembered that “the soldiers used to laugh about his great nose.”3 To his American contemporaries, Lee was an eccentric, and he looked the part.4 Contemporary descriptions and engravings depicted him as a cartoonish, almost grotesque figure with a lanky frame; lean face accentuated by a low-slung jaw and a long, sharp hooked nose; darting eyes; unusually small hands and feet; slovenly dress; and intelligent yet profane conversation. To complete the picture, one or more of his unruly canine companions was always at his side. Lee evidenced classic signs of what modern psychiatry would classify as manic-depressive disorder (or bipolar disorder). He experienced frequent swings in mood from extreme highs to emotional lows. Perhaps commenting on Lee’s mood shifts, Washington described him as “fickle.” Lee displayed periods of mania with high energy and exaggeratedly good moods. During his manic episodes, he recklessly took major risks when safer and surer alternatives existed or he went on spending sprees that often left him [ 2 ]

Major General Charles Lee. This engraving of Lee with his dog Spado is an example of the contemporary caricatures of Lee that existed. By Alexander Hay Ritchie, after a caricature by Barham Rushbrooke. Date unknown. Source: Library of Congress.

[ 3 ]

Introduction

in financial straits. Lee experienced phases of hypersexuality during which he obsessively talked of or thought about sex or engaged in numerous sexual encounters with different female partners. He drank to excess and was prone to fast, erratic talking, uncontrollable thoughts, jealousy, delusions of power, poor judgment, insomnia, and an inability to concentrate. Lee’s depressive episodes lasted for weeks, during which time he exhibited a lack of energy, mysterious physical ailments, restlessness, anxiety and sadness, insecurity, and feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, and helplessness. Lee’s mental health may have been the cause of his slovenly appearance and poor interpersonal skills. He was unable to maintain many close relationships, leading to a fundamental loneliness that sometimes overwhelmed him. Perhaps Lee’s profound love and respect for dogs, which was frequently noted by contemporaries, compensated for his inability to form lasting relationships with people.5 Contemporary impressions of Lee revealed a provincial misunderstanding, for he was the epitome of a middle-class English gentleman. Although his outward appearance and behavior did not meet any of the standards that an American would think genteel, in his background, upbringing, financial independence, and classical education, Lee was a gentleman. Lee was also perhaps the most cosmopolitan of the revolutionaries. No other American revolutionary, except maybe Benjamin Franklin, was as worldly as Lee. He seemed to move comfortably—almost effortlessly—between different social and political circles. He socialized with European monarchs, such as Frederick II of Prussia, Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski of Poland, and Joseph II of Austria; was accepted into the salons of Britain’s leading intellectuals; and hobnobbed with America’s republican revolutionaries. Yet scholars have treated Lee no better than his contemporaries. They have accepted the biased view that he was little more than an eccentric, egomaniacal professional soldier and have interpreted his strategic and philosophical disagreements with Washington as a plot against the commander-in-chief and a betrayal of the Revolution. In the process, they have ignored the complexity of Lee’s character and given little recognition to his intellect, his varied and extensive military expertise, the radicalism of his political and military ideals, and his modern sensibilities about religion and pet ownership. Historians have missed the opportunity to contrast Lee’s fire-breathing, inflexible, more traditional top-down leadership style (which contradicted his pronouncements concerning democracy) and his inability [ 4 ]

Introduction

to effectively negotiate between civilian and military interests to that of Washington’s more diplomatic, confident, and trustworthy managerial style of leadership. Washington’s reputation for integrity, his willingness to listen to the advice of others—whether from his senior military officers or civilian authorities—and his ability to accept responsibility for his decisions were hallmarks of his leadership and were admired by his contemporaries.6 Lee, who was appointed a major general in the Continental Army by Congress in June 1775 and who became Washington’s second-in-command fourteen months later, has been the focus of few studies. As a result, a full and fair evaluation of his life and his contributions to the American Revolution are largely absent from the historiography of the war.7 It is now time to reassess Lee’s life and ideas on their own merits and in the larger context of the Revolutionary era. “General Lee . . . is the first Officer in Military knowledge and experience we have in the whole Army,” confessed Washington to his brother John Augustine.8 In September 1776, Washington renamed Fort Constitution on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River Fort Lee in a symbolic gesture that acknowledged the military expertise that Lee brought to the revolutionary cause. Lee saw extensive action in America during the French and Indian War and later in Europe after the conflict expanded into the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). In America, he experienced firsthand the value of stealth, ambush, and psychological warfare as tactics against well-trained regulars. During the postwar years, Lee served as aide-de-camp to Poland’s King Stanislaus. In this capacity, Lee enjoyed the splendor of court life in Eastern Europe yet was simultaneously appalled by the absolute power the nobility held over the region’s peasants. Lee was commissioned a major general in the Polish army and eventually earned a post in the Russian military of Empress Catherine II during the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774). Lee also witnessed the brutality of civil war in Poland as bands of partisans conducted guerrilla operations that brought havoc and excessive violence on civilian populations and regular armies. It was during this time that Lee became a harsh critic of hereditary monarchy and joined many British radical Whigs in denouncing the rule of George III and his ministers. He warned that the policies pursued by the king and the ministry, especially those aimed at the American colonists, were tyrannical and would lead Britain to absolutism. Disillusioned by the political atmosphere in Britain, Lee relocated to America in 1773, arriving at a critical juncture in Anglo-American affairs. [ 5 ]

Introduction

Although Lee’s military service made him the most experienced officer in the Continental Army, his social and political views made him far more radical than most of his fellow revolutionaries in the military leadership. He had read more broadly and deeply in literature, history, politics, memoir, philosophy, and the art of war than most of his contemporaries. The selfassured John Adams, who rarely paid anyone an easy compliment, praised Lee’s attainments as “the soldier and the scholar” but thought him “a queer creature.” However, because of his respect for Lee, Adams told his wife Abigail: “You must . . . forgive a thousand whims.”9 Adams claimed that he “had read as much on the military Art and much more of the History of War than any American Officer” but Lee.10 Lee’s learning had prompted him to form strong commitments to democracy and republicanism, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, the education of women, natural rights, and the democratizing potential of a citizen army. More than any other officer in the Continental Army, Lee believed that military service should be an obligation of citizenship. He defined the “state” in terms of its citizens and contended that the army should be the representative and defender of the citizenry. Lee took his cues from several historical and philosophical sources: the idea of the public-spirited citizen-soldier existed in ancient Greece and Rome, where a citizen—that is, a person who owned inheritable land—could hold office and was responsible for contributing to national defense. The sixteenth-century Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli asserted that the cure for what ailed the corrupt republics of Italy was a return to the military organizations of the ancients. This meant the abolition of a professional soldiery and a return to citizen-soldier militias. Machiavelli viewed the militia as essential to the survival of a virtuous republic. Later political theorists echoed Machiavelli, but historian Saul Cornell writes that although there were always “considerable disagreements over how much virtue was necessary for the survival of a republic, at a very minimum there was a broad consensus that a republic had to possess enough virtue to ensure that its citizens would take up arms when necessary to meet internal and external threats.”11 In his Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), seventeenth-century Whig writer James Harrington connected military duty in defense of the state to citizenship, and eighteenth-century French Enlightenment thinkers Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau exclaimed the virtues of the citizen-soldier who sacrificed his personal interest for [ 6 ]

Introduction

the public good. Rousseau maintained that a state’s “true defenders are its members” and that “each citizen should be a soldier by duty, none by profession.” As scholar Everett C. Dolman notes, these and other theoretical arguments for the benefits of a citizen-soldier militia laid “the groundwork for democracy . . . through an understanding and manipulation of military organization.”12 Lee argued that the citizen-soldier was the military bedrock of democracy. He insisted that in a democracy citizens must actively share the burden of military responsibility equally; they must be willing to fight a war in which their private interests are sacrificed to the common good. National conscription was also an important element in Lee’s conception of war and the defense of democratic society. A similar notion that linked citizenship to military obligation and to sacrifice in defense of the nation was adopted by the French revolutionary Lazare Carnot, whose call to arms in defense of the French state, which was known as the levée en masse, swelled the ranks of the revolutionary armies during the early campaigns of the wars of the French Revolution in the 1790s.13 In America, some colonial militia laws involved selective drafts for service in particular military campaigns, but national conscription was not enacted until the Civil War. Lee’s military views distinguished him from many of his contemporaries. It was Charles Lee the professional soldier and not George Washington the former militia officer who held a high opinion of America’s militia as an institution and as an instrument of democracy. Indeed, Washington demonstrated contempt for the citizen-soldiers of the militia, bemoaning the short term nature of militia service, the militiamen’s indifference to military discipline, and their unreliability in battle. Historian Michael S. Neiberg notes that “American experiences after Bunker Hill proved this point” to Washington.14 The American victory at Bunker Hill in 1775 and the outpouring of patriotic rhetoric after the war had solidified the militia’s place in national folklore, but the debacle at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776 convinced Washington that the troops available to him could not repeat their successful performance at Bunker Hill. The British were no longer inclined toward reckless frontal assaults against entrenched defensive earthworks; instead, they preferred to turn the Continental flanks in a strategy of feint and maneuver. Washington and his protégés argued that the ability to counter the intricate complexities of this British strategy necessitated administrative efficiency, long-term enlistments, the training [ 7 ]

Introduction

of a professional soldiery, and the creation of a system of rigid discipline and deference to authority. From this perspective, the militia could not be relied upon as the main line of defense; instead, national security had to become the responsibility of a well-trained regular army. During the first two years of the American Revolution, Washington tried to fashion his troops into a regular army. He called on the Continental Congress to implement reforms that would transform the American militia into professional soldiers. His efforts faced political and ideological opposition, however, and the independent will of the American people. Lee demonstrated the utmost confidence in the abilities of the militia. He believed that the Americans’ natural independent spirit would preclude the creation of a professional regular army capable of confronting the British in a conventional war. Lee adhered to the notion that militias comprised of free citizens who were motivated by a desire to fight to preserve their liberty and defend their property and families rather than rewards (financial or honorific) made better soldiers than men who were held to long-term service, paid a wage, and trained to fight from a drill manual. He touted the martial virtues of America’s citizen-soldiers and was confident that their cultural acquaintance with firearms, their natural skills as marksmen, and their love of liberty would enable them to defeat Britain.15 Lee’s views were in keeping with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century radical Whig tradition, which condemned the dissolution of Britain’s militia system under the Stuart monarchy in favor of a professional army of long-term enlistments and conventional tactics. For Lee, then, the movement to create a professional army in America smacked dangerously of a European-style military establishment—one that was tied to absolute authority, monarchy, and European corruption and was at odds with the national character, liberties, and military traditions of the Americans. Lee warned that an army of professional soldiers who were paid by the state was invariably dangerous to liberty and civic virtue because it had the potential to become an instrument of tyranny should it come under the control of morally corrupt leaders concerned only with the protection of personal interests. He argued that the creation of a professional soldiery threatened the very essence of the American Revolution—that is, free citizens fighting for their natural rights and liberties and in defense of their families and their property. Professional armies were obedient to the interests of the state alone, not to the interests of the citizenry of a free [ 8 ]

Introduction

society. He feared that a professional regular army could be turned against the Revolution and used for the suppression of the same natural rights and liberties that the war aimed to protect. The plot by several Continental Army officers at Newburgh, New York, in 1783 to challenge the Congress of the Confederation and wrest power away from the civilian authorities because of the government’s alleged indifference to their financial problems proved that this was not the wild fantasy of an eccentric soldier. If he was out of step with Washington, Lee was not alone among the revolutionaries in his belief that professional standing armies posed a major threat to liberty. Samuel Adams insisted that “a standing Army . . . is always dangerous to the Liberties of the People.”16 The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which George Mason drafted in 1776, declared militias “the proper, natural and safe defense of a free state” and argued that “in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power,” while “Standing Armies . . . should be avoided as dangerous to liberty.”17 Among the litany of grievances in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, Mason’s protégé, condemned George III for keeping “among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures,” for rendering “the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power,” and for “quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops” among the citizens of America. Jefferson also denounced the king’s negotiations to import foreign mercenaries to be used for the American war. He implied that George III sought to use Britain’s professional army and foreign auxiliaries to crush the colonists’ assertions of their natural rights and liberties.18 These grievances justified the Americans’ decision to sever all allegiance to the British Crown and to establish “free and independent states.” To win the war and America’s independence, Lee urged the revolutionaries to adopt a petite guerre strategy that would avoid massing the Continental Army for conventional pitched battles against the British. Instead, he advocated forming the army along the lines of a national militia, dividing it into several small detachments that were trained in highly mobile light-infantry tactics, a practice that was consistent with the colonial military experience. The officers of these detachments could integrate their operations with the activities of roving bands of local partisans who were proficient guerrilla fighters. Lee believed that dividing the army into smaller units would improve its mobility and help logistically to supply the troops. Lee reasoned that smaller detachments could move quickly through [ 9 ]

Introduction

the countryside, subsist more easily off the land, and effectively harass the British until they were exhausted. He also suggested that the Americans move their main military operations to the rugged terrain west of the Susquehanna River, in central Pennsylvania. They would stretch out the enemy’s already thin supply lines, which relied heavily on the Royal Navy to transport provisions from Britain, creating a financial and logistical burden for officials in London. Furthermore, the smaller, more mobile American units could effectively carry out movements aimed at harassing the British flanks, cutting their outstretched lines of supply and communication, and ambushing isolated patrols and outposts. Local partisans could be used to administer and enforce test oaths, draw neutrals into the revolutionary cause, and intimidate and retaliate against Loyalists. Although Lee’s proposed strategy would expose large areas of the eastern seaboard to enemy occupation, he argued that forcing the British to hold these areas would limit their strategic options. He also maintained that taking military operations into the hinterland would force the British and their Hessian and Hanoverian allies to confront an unconventional enemy deep within unfamiliar territory. Geography would be the Americans’ ally; this was their home and they knew its contours. The extreme mobility of the American forces and their detailed knowledge of the terrain would make it possible for them to outmaneuver and to surprise the larger and better-equipped British Army. Lee was confident that this strategy would cause chaos and confusion in the ranks of the conventional forces of Britain and her German allies, causing them to abandon their preferred methodical, linear strategic movements in favor of improvised and reactive tactics that they were wholly unprepared to implement. He also felt it would negate any Loyalist support. Lee’s goal was to keep the enemy constantly off balance, to inflict as many casualties on their forces as possible, and to leave them demoralized. The defeat of the British army commanded by John Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1777 and the success of Generals Nathanael Greene and Daniel Morgan against the army of British general Charles Cornwallis in the crucial second southern campaign of 1780–1781, when the revolutionary cause seemed close to collapse, was the result of the application of a similar strategy. The defeat of the British military was not the only objective in Lee’s strategy, however. Lee’s scheme, which was reminiscent of Fabian strategy,19 sought to wear down the political will of the British people to continue [ 10 ]

Introduction

the war. In this way, Lee hoped that the loss of popular support in Britain for the conflict would force George III, his ministers, and Parliament to give up their attempt to subjugate the Americans. The realization of Lee’s proposed strategy—one that blurred the lines between soldier and civilian— meant fighting a wholly different war than that envisioned by Washington and other American officers who were continental in their thinking. For these officers, the key to winning American independence was national political unity and the key to national political unity was forging the Continental Army into a national army under a unified command structure that would be subordinate to the civil authority of the Continental Congress. Washington viewed the Continental Army as the key to the survival of the Revolution and did his best to keep it together. “Success for Washington was not in battlefield victory alone,” writes historian Caroline Cox, “but also in simply keeping the army together. No matter what disappointments the army faced in the field, as long as it continued to exist, the Revolution was alive.”20 Washington developed his own version of the Fabian strategy that concentrated the army just beyond the reach of the enemy and avoided large-scale battles in favor of smaller conventional operations against isolated British outposts and peripheral detachments before withdrawing his forces from the field. Washington carried out this strategy with perfection at Trenton and at Princeton in the winter of 1776–1777. The longer the Continental Army lived to fight another day, “the more secure Congress and the new nation became, the more other nations accepted the legitimacy of the new government, and the more disgruntled and war weary the British became,” writes Cox.21 In Washington’s strategy, the militia was used to screen the Continental Army and to undertake local defense, gather intelligence, and conduct operations that would limit British maneuvers, harass their flanks, and deny them resources. In this scheme, militias played a supporting role to the Continental Army; they did not become a substitute for it. Washington’s vision for the Continental Army required European-style organization and training, the opposite of Lee’s ideas. During the winter of 1777–1778, former Prussian military officer Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben joined Washington’s staff at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and was put to work training the Continental troops in the close-order drill system, in the discipline of the parade ground, and in the linear tactics that were familiar to eighteenth-century European armies. Furthermore, France’s [ 1 1 ]

Introduction

entry into the conflict in February 1778 all but guaranteed that the war would be fought according to what Lee called the “European Plan.” In his opponents’ view, Lee’s proposed strategy would undermine national unity since it had the potential to exacerbate the localism and provincialism that was a significant characteristic of American society in the colonial period; the fear was that this would cause the conflict to devolve into a war of reprisals and counter-reprisals. Historian John Shy writes that those Americans who opposed Lee’s strategy “felt a need to be seen as cultivated, honorable, respectable men, not savages leading savages in a howling wilderness.”22 They argued that a reliance on guerrilla tactics and terrorism carried out by organized militias or roving bands of local partisans or both would lead to the political fragmentation of the Revolution and to a full-scale civil war directed by local juntas. When one looks at the partisan violence that occurred in the areas around British-occupied New York City and in the southern backcountry during the American Revolution or the Jacobin Terror of the French Revolution or, on a larger scale, the recent situations in Iraq and in Afghanistan, where local sectarian militias and death squads have slowed or in some cases have undermined the political process, one can see the merit of this critique. Washington’s idea for the army ultimately proved correct, both politically and militarily. But his rejection of localism and his lackluster opinion of the American militia hampered the debate over local democracy and popular political participation in America. Washington’s rejection of Lee’s strategy and the rejection of many of his contemporaries do not justify its trivialization by historians as the irrelevant musings of an eccentric. Nor should Lee’s contributions to the American Revolution be dismissed. He was one of the leading voices for American liberty and an early advocate for independence, and he worked tirelessly to strengthen the Continental lines outside Boston and to put Newport, Rhode Island; New York City; and Charleston, South Carolina, into the best defensible position against a British attack. Lee reached his zenith as a revolutionary and as a hero of American liberty between June 1775 and September 1776. During that fifteen-month time span, he served as Congress’s main military troubleshooter, assigned to wherever the need for his military expertise seemed most critical. It would have served Lee’s reputation better had he been killed in battle early in the war. He would have been universally hailed by contemporaries and [ 12 ]

Introduction

remembered to this day as an ardent revolutionary and perhaps the nation’s first true soldier-scholar. But Lee’s proclivity for self-destructive behavior, which was demonstrated by the way he demeaned the decisions of his superior officers and civilian authorities throughout his military career, by his suspect actions while he was in British custody from December 1776 to April 1778, by the allegations of incompetence against him at the Battle of Monmouth in June of 1778, and by his subsequent court-martial and removal from the Continental service have left his historical reputation in tatters. This study draws a new portrait of Charles Lee, replacing a simple “oddity” with a complex, fascinating person who made important contributions to the Revolutionary era as a propagandist and as a soldier. Lee had confidence that a popular war of mass resistance that was fought using a strategy of petite guerre would effectively stymie the British war machine and neutralize local Loyalists. To a degree often not admitted and possibly not realized by Washington and his coterie of military officers, the Revolution proved Lee correct. The use of militia and roving bands of local partisans and unconventional hit-and-run attacks to defeat the British army at Saratoga in 1777 and in the South in 1780–1781 vindicated Lee’s strategy. The idea of a popular war of mass resistance that relied on guerrilla tactics was later echoed in struggles in France and Haiti during the eighteenth century; in Greece and Latin America during the nineteenth century; in the Philippines, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and Northern Ireland during the twentiethcentury; and in Syria and other conflicts around the globe in our time. Thus it could be claimed that Lee was a harbinger of certain aspects of modern revolutionary military strategy. The American nation was born in war. And, reflecting Lee’s arguments, this war shaped the kind of nation that emerged from it. Lee recognized that a strategic choice existed for the revolutionaries: they could try to preserve society by massing troops to fight conventional battles against the British at the risk of losing the war or they could risk that society by fighting a guerrilla-style insurgency that would prolong the war but give them their best chance to defeat the British and gain their independence. According to military historian Don Higginbotham, “a guerrilla war of independence had no appeal to the Americans.” They were too prosperous and still very close to their British heritage to consider Lee’s alternative. “It is impossible to imagine the Americans as terrorists in the modern sense,” [ 13 ]

Introduction

writes Higginbotham, “for terrorists hate their opponents and all they stand for. Terrorism spawns guerrilla warfare, which in turn produces more terrorism; terrorism rips apart the vitals of the community.” Many Americans did not hate the British nor did they want to risk tearing asunder their society and undermining their prosperity in an effort to fight a guerrilla war.23 Lee’s ideas were at the center of a debate among the American revolutionaries over the definition of a successful military strategy—one that would win America’s independence from Britain while remaining true to the democratic aims of the war and guaranteeing a stable postwar political situation. As they decided this issue, the revolutionaries confronted a real dilemma: create a national army of full-time professional soldiers and use the militia solely for local defense or avoid the creation of a national army and use the militia as the basis for several independent armies that would coordinate operations with local bands of partisans in a guerrillastyle insurgency. This was not simply a strategic concern; it also raised the question of where the military stood in the system of political power—that is, who should have a claim on the loyalty of the military: the states or the national government. This same issue would reemerge in political form over the next two centuries in America, most immediately in the debates over the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution.24 This, then, is the story of one of the most complex and controversial figures of the American Revolution and the debates and discussions regarding military strategy and democracy to which he contributed. At first glance Charles Lee was not impressive. He was tall, gangly, and awkward in appearance, dress, and manners and in no way fit the eighteenth-century American vision of an English gentleman. From such a portrait one can understand why contemporaries and historians have dismissed him. But a study of Lee’s life, his ideas, and his leadership style sheds new light on the way the Americans waged war against Britain during the Revolution and on the debate over the proper military organization in a democracy. By doing so, it addresses two critical questions: What kinds of institutions knit together a nation? and What is the price of creating those institutions?

[ 1 4 ]

1

Colonel Lee’s Son

On a cold, blustery December day in 1731, Colonel John Lee and his wife Isabella welcomed their last child into the world. The Lees must have viewed the birth of their son Charles with an equal measure of joy and trepidation, for death had visited their home all too frequently. Five of the six children who came before Charles had died; only this boy and his older sister Sidney would survive to adulthood.1 The two young Lees entered a world of status and privilege. Since the thirteenth century, Lees had been living in Cheshire, enjoying the comfortable life of gentry. Their distant relationship to the Lees who held the earldom of Litchfield added luster to their name. Isabella Bunbury Lee boasted an even more distinguished lineage. While the Lees were respected locally, the Bunburys had a national profile. Isabella’s father, Sir Henry, had served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Cheshire. Her older brother, Sir William, had attended Cambridge and Oxford, where he studied for the ministry. Isabella’s nephew, Sir Thomas Charles Bunbury, was an MP for Suffolk and the first husband of Lady Sarah Lennox, the great-granddaughter of King Charles II (r. 1660–1685), while her brother-in-law, General Robert Armiger, served as aide-de-camp to King George II (r. 1727–1760).2 Like many of his male relatives, Charles’s father, John, entered military service, beginning his career as a captain of dragoons (or cavalry). By 1742, he had risen to the rank of colonel of the 55th Regiment of Foot; sold his vast estate in Darnhall, Cheshire; and moved his family to the county seat of Chester, a provincial town of 8,000 residents on the River Dee sixteen miles south of Liverpool. Chester’s location on the main route into northern Wales and the western route to northern England and Scotland made the town a key transportation and commercial hub; vessels laden with goods from Ireland, northern Wales, and points beyond filled its wharves. [ 17 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

Although shipping was Chester’s major economic activity, local commerce was also brisk. The town’s markets regularly filled with local farmers bringing their wool and dairy products to be sold and purchasing manufactured goods with their profits. Prosperous merchants and gentry opened businesses in Chester’s popular market area, where unique rows of two-story timbered shops lined the cobblestone and dirt streets. Charles Lee’s earliest years were spent in this bustling commercial town instead of in the quieter setting of the countryside.3 Lee left no descriptions of his childhood and he wrote very little about his parents, especially his mother, whom he found to be very difficult. Charles’s relationship with his mother was filled with tension; it was so cold that many acquaintances wondered whether there was any love between them.4 Although Lee found his mother difficult, he was very much like her. From Isabella’s family he inherited his temperamental nature and chronic poor health. His temperament manifested itself in moodiness, a violent temper, periods of melancholia, excessive conversation and profanity, and a voracious appetite for food, drink, and sex, all of which are symptoms of what modern-day psychiatrists might diagnose as bipolar disorder, or manic depression. Charles frequently went for months in a state of lethargy with little or no appetite, and then his appetite, along with his strength and spirits, would return suddenly. Depression and other mental illnesses run in families. Lee’s manic episodes were similar to those experienced by Isabella and her brother Sir William. Charles often referenced the “rash humour which my mother gave me” and once confessed to Sidney, “After having entertain’d you on the distemper of my mind, let me say something of my bodily disposition. I think I gave you an Account some time ago of my complaints not totally unlike those of Uncle Bunbury [Sir William], a most canine, insatiable appetite attended with weakness and low spirits.”5 Such a family history suggests that Lee came by his manic depression through inheritance. His psychological condition was not of his own making, but in some ways it explains his intellectual voracity, his penchant for overindulgence, and his behavior, which many construed as eccentric. Poor physical health was another trait Lee inherited from his Bunbury lineage, especially rheumatism. Although Lee’s rheumatism can be traced to his genes, the chronic attacks of gout he suffered were brought on by years of stress, the excessive consumption of wine and liquor, and a diet that was rich in proteins and fatty foods. Gout affected Lee’s stomach, limbs, [ 1 8 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

and joints, causing him pain, weakness, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, and fainting spells. He often suffered for up to two weeks from an attack of rheumatism or gout or both. “A most dreadful visitation has fallen upon me, whether from exposing myself too much to cold or whether I had it in my blood I cannot say but I am actually incapacitated from moving my legs by the gout or rheumatism, or mixture of both,” Lee once complained.6 Lee was never afraid to experiment or to try the latest remedies in search of relief for his physical ailments.7 He visited experts and, like many members of eighteenth-century Europe’s elite who were hypochondriacs or who suffered from debilitating ailments, he took medicinal baths and placed his faith in spa cures. Lee drank mineral water as a tonic and bathed in warm springs as a restorative.8 Lee traveled throughout Britain and continental Europe seeking medical advice or simply seeking relaxation and the healing powers offered by spa resorts and baths. While Lee believed that bathing in warm springs helped cure illness, he also touted the therapeutic virtues of swimming as a source of preventative medicine. At a time when few Englishmen paid attention to physical exercise and athletics, Lee believed that swimming in salt water, or what he called “sea-bathing,” was beneficial to a person’s physical and mental health. In 1769, he informed Sidney that he planned to spend the winter in the Kingdom of Naples where he hoped that “bathing in the Sea in that warm climate will brace my body, which is really in a wretch’d state.”9 By 1771, Lee had traveled to Calabria on the southern tip of the Italian peninsula and to Sicily and Malta, partly out of curiosity about these Mediterranean locales and “partly to bath in the sea, as long as possible in the Winter, in order to recover the strength and spirits.”10 Lee was not alone in promoting the benefits of swimming. “Learn fairly to swim,” Benjamin Franklin advised a friend. “I wish all men were taught to do so in their youth; they would, on many occurrences, be the safer for having that skill, and on many more the happier, as freer from painful apprehensions of danger, to say nothing of the enjoyment in so delightful and wholesome an exercise.”11 Lee’s quest for a cure for his physical ailments revealed his openness to new ideas, but it also led him to travel. While his poor physical health was a detriment he had to contend with all of his life, it had a positive impact in that it allowed Lee to see many parts of the world. Traveling fed his intellectual curiosity and helped expand the cosmopolitanism instilled in him by his father. [ 19 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

Lee gained an intellectual curiosity from his father. Colonel Lee nurtured his son’s inquisitive spirit by encouraging him to read and to think critically. He also instilled in Lee an admiration for Whig politics and a respect for human liberty and natural rights. Lee wrote, “I was bred up from my infancy with the highest regard for the rights and liberties of Mankind, my Father possess’d ’em to the highest degree.”12 Colonel Lee was also the rare eighteenth-century father who nurtured his daughter’s intelligence. He encouraged Sidney to read at an early age. In an era when few women had a formal education, Sidney was well read in a variety of subjects, including history, philosophy, literature, and geography, and was an active member of Britain’s “bluestocking” intellectual circles.13 Four years older than Charles, Sidney had great influence over her younger brother. She was a mother figure to him, and he adored her accordingly. “You will perhaps find me not a less affectionate Brother,” Charles told her. “There can be no brother more Sincerely affectionate then myself.”14 Sidney, who was described as “a very agreeable Woman,” never married.15 Instead, she became her brother’s one constant confidante. The two siblings remained extremely close throughout their lives. They shared their dreams and hardships and relied on each other for advice and emotional support. While Colonel Lee encouraged Sidney’s informal learning, he made sure that Charles obtained a formal education. Colonel Lee knew that his son would potentially follow him into the military, but he wanted him to receive the education that was expected of a young man from his social class. To be the son of a gentleman was a distinct social advantage in eighteenth-century British society. Like most gentlemen, Lee received a classical education that prepared him for an advanced career. In addition to the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, and measuring, he studied rhetoric, geometry, logic, philosophy, history, geography, and dancing and became proficient in ancient Greek and Latin grammar, which were essential for reading classical literature. But Colonel Lee also wanted Charles to have more than a basic classical education; he wanted him to experience all the world had to offer culturally and linguistically. Many of Charles’s physical and emotional traits were shaped by his inheritance, but his education and his peers influenced his ideas. Lee’s formal education began with tutors. He later attended a grammar school near Chester and progressed to a private academy in Switzerland, where as a teen he demonstrated a love for history and literature and excelled [ 20 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

in languages, becoming versed in French and in ancient Greek and Latin. His gift for languages led him to become proficient in many of them over his lifetime. In addition to his native English, Lee acquired a fondness for and competency in several European languages: French, Italian, Spanish, and German. He also became versed in the Native American language of Iroquoian.16 Lee’s time at the Swiss academy set the foundation for a sound liberal arts education and nurtured his inquisitiveness and the love of learning his father instilled in him. In June 1746, Lee was enrolled in the King Edward VI Free Grammar School, which was located near Mildenhall, the home of his maternal uncle, the Rev. William Bunbury, in the town of Bury St. Edmunds in the county of Suffolk. The school was famous for preparing young men for studies at Cambridge. Its alumni included seventeenth-century dramatist and poet laureate Thomas Shadwell and the sons of the first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop.17 Among Lee’s schoolmates were several young men who would become lifelong friends, acquaintances, and ardent supporters, including William Butler, Charles Davers, and Thomas Charles Bunbury, his first cousin. These young men were members of Britain’s gentry and formed the major part of Lee’s network of social and political connections. Such networks were important for advancement in eighteenth-century British society.18 Lee and his schoolmates became fully absorbed in the style and wisdom of the ancients. “Let our masters teach nothing but the elements of grammar and instruction in Latin and Greek tongues,” read the Bury St. Edmunds curriculum. Students were taught to memorize and recite the classics, a skill required of candidates for college admission.19 The sons of Britain’s gentry were saturated with the virtues and ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. The texts by the great authors of antiquity inspired in Lee romantic notions of democracy, republicanism (or representative government), citizenship, morality, and classical ideals such as the Homeric arête—individual heroism, honor, courage, and excellence in a contest or battle—that remained with him his entire life. “It is natural to a young person whose chief companions are the Greek and Roman historians and Orators to be dazzled with the splendid picture,” he wrote, referring to the influence of the ancients on him and on other young men of the British gentry.20 Lee particularly admired the Greek historian Plutarch, whose best-known work, Parallel Lives, written in the first century AD, compared [ 21 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

the lives of forty-six famous ancient Greeks and Romans and provided a wealth of information about their civilizations. It was distinctly republican in spirit and emphasized the moral lessons that could be learned from history.21 “I have ever from the first time I read Plutarch been an Enthusiastick for liberty and . . . for liberty in a republican garb,” Lee declared.22 Lee could not have come of age at a better time. The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a new publishing economy and a print culture boom that was profitable for printers, publishers, and booksellers in Britain and in continental Europe. The number of books and other printed materials soared, and new elaborate networks for their marketing and distribution gave readers access to an extensive range of publications on a variety of subjects. The new media of written communication empowered many Europeans and disseminated ideas, opinions, theory, and practical knowledge to more people than ever before in history, influencing public discourse. Lee took advantage of this new publishing economy, spending large sums throughout his life filling his bookshelves. He always traveled with an extensive collection that included the classics, philosophy, law, the natural sciences, fiction, poetry, history, biographies, military strategy, and engineering. The new print culture expanded Charles’s intellectual horizons, helped foster his cosmopolitan sensibilities, kept him informed on the latest developments in the art of war, and swept him into the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, which emphasized secular, rationalist, liberal, and egalitarian ideals. From the Enlightenment sprang a modern secular worldview that promoted individual liberty, freedom of speech, religious toleration, commercialism and materialism, and representative government. This worldview had a transforming effect on societies in Europe and in the Americas and on individuals such as Charles Lee.23 Lee was immersed in the ideas of the Enlightenment, including deism. Although he was baptized by his parents and was raised an Anglican, he embraced the deist worldview.24 In this Lee was not alone. Deism appealed to many European intellectuals who believed that religious truths should be based on human reason rather than revelation. For deists, God (or the Supreme Being) took no interest in the moral choices of humans but existed only as the distant creator of the universe who revealed Himself every day in nature. Deists rejected the ideas of original sin and of a vengeful god who condemned the mass of humanity to eternal damnation, instead believing in the natural goodness of humans and hoping for a benevolent afterlife. [ 22 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

They also denied the divinity of Jesus, the Buddha, and Mohammad and argued that each was simply a reformer attempting to rescue his society’s corrupted religion. The intellectual trends concerning the role and meaning of religion had a profound influence on Lee and shaped his modern sensibilities on the subject. He never doubted the existence of God or of God’s creation of the world, and he did not doubt the existence of an afterlife. “Let it be sufficient,” Lee wrote in the third person, “that he acknowledges the existence, providence, and goodness of God Almighty; that he reverences Jesus Christ: but let the question never be asked, whether he considers Jesus Christ a divine person, commissioned by God for divine purposes, as the son of God, or as God himself.”25 Lee took serious issue with the conflicting notions of God and his Word that were propagated by the world’s major religions. He denounced “the tediousness and impertinence of the liturgies of the various sects, which so far from being the support are the ruin of all religion.” Dogma was “not only absurd,” Lee wrote, “but impious . . . [and] dishonourable to the Godhead or visible ruler and moderator of the infinity of worlds which surround us.”26 The maturing Lee socialized with intellectuals from an emerging eighteenth-century liberal avant-garde who had traveled extensively through continental Europe on the traditional “Grand Tour”27 and who exchanged ideas and experiences through correspondence or as members of social clubs, debating societies, secret associations, salons, and other communities dedicated to intellectual discourse. In Britain, young wealthy educated males with leisure time formed social clubs and secret societies such as the Club of Honest Whigs, the Spectator Club, the Order of the Knights of St. Francis (or the Monks of Medmenham), and Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club. These clubs offered members thoughtful conversation and debate on everything from art, music, literature, religion, politics, military strategy, education, science, and economics to sexual promiscuity, alcohol consumption, physical exercise, gambling, and hygiene. This freewheeling discourse supported the exchange of Enlightenment ideas and prompted a sense of community and camaraderie among Britain’s male intelligentsia.28 For Lee, membership and participation in these clubs fostered his love of free intellectual exchange. Lee was particularly attracted to the writings of the Geneva-born French Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom he described as his [ 23 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

“divine and incomparable master.”29 The seventeenth century witnessed the emergence of a new political tradition—a “natural rights” philosophy with its vocabulary of “natural rights,” “civil society,” “social contract,” and “state of nature.” By the mid-eighteenth century, “natural rights” philosophy had been embraced by mainstream Enlightenment thinkers who accepted the idea that consent was the sole legitimate basis for political authority. But only one of them, Rousseau, had actually developed a republican theory of government based on this idea. Rousseau’s theory was so democratic however, that it hindered its widespread acceptance. In Britain, the natural rights tradition was carried into the eighteenth century by the “commonwealth” or “Real Whig” ideology. By the beginning of the reign of George III in 1760, this ideology had already been well articulated by a group of writers and theorists who identified themselves as the “True” or “Real” Whigs. Their ideological heritage was drawn from several different sources dating to the Civil War, commonwealth, protectorate, and Glorious Revolution periods of British history (1642–1660, 1688–1690) and from the works of writers such as James Harrington, John Toland, Algernon Sidney, Joseph Addison, James Milton, Jonathan Swift, and John Locke. The Real Whigs believed that the Anglo-Saxon, or ancient, constitution of Britain before its destruction by the monarchical forces of William the Conqueror in 1066 had enshrined and expressed three important concepts for the foundation of legitimate government: natural rights, social contract, and virtue. It had also established an equilibrium of king, lords, and commons. Real Whigs also reached back to the politics of classical Greece and Rome for a model of republicanism in which civic virtue—the ability to place the good of society ahead of self-interest—was the key to constitutional stability and the preservation of liberty.30 The Real Whigs argued that throughout history, political leaders—monarchs and courtiers— have used every means at their disposal to extinguish the people’s liberties. They cited examples from history when political leaders driven by a lust for power used different means, especially standing armies populated by professional soldiers, to subvert free constitutions and individual freedom. The notion that a large professional standing army was the greatest threat to liberty was crucial to the Real Whig ideology.31 Lee admired the works of Real Whigs Paul de Rapin de Thoyras and Catharine Macaulay. In books by Rapin, Macaulay, and others, British history was presented as a power struggle between monarchical and popular [ 24 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

forces. Lee recalled that he had “read . . . with great attention” Rapin’s History of England (1723) and was impressed by Macaulay’s “zeal for true liberty, and the rights of her country and of mankind.”32 Ironically, despite Lee’s admiration for the works of these and other Real Whigs, he would make his career in Britain’s professional standing army. In April 1746, fourteen-year-old Charles Lee followed the paternal path into the British military. He was commissioned as an ensign in his father’s regiment, the 55th Regiment of Foot. The idea of a fourteen- year-old boy becoming an officer may seem remarkable to modern readers, but such a move was not extraordinary in Lee’s time. Young wealthy men with only a grammar school education were regularly commissioned and promoted in the British army. The officers’ ranks were often a family affair as young men of the gentry followed in the footsteps of a male relative, particularly their fathers, readily obtaining a commission before their formal education had ended. It was very likely that Colonel Lee had used his influence to secure the ensigncy for his son. In the regimental rolls, Lee was listed as engaged in recruiting while he completed his formal studies.33 In 1748, Lee ended his formal education and officially reported for active duty as an ensign in the 55th Regiment, which soon thereafter became the 44th Regiment of Foot. The 44th was known in the British army as a tough, hard-nosed, highly disciplined unit. It earned much praise for its valor on the battlefields of continental Europe during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and for its part in crushing the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 in Scotland, which was led by Charles Edward Stuart, or “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” the grandson of the deposed King James II. The young Lee did not see action with the regiment during these conflicts; instead he joined the 44th while the regiment was on peacetime garrison duty in Ireland. Lee’s formal education had ended and his active military career had begun, but he continued to pursue philosophical and practical knowledge whenever and wherever possible and often shared his enthusiasm for books with others in the regiment. As a result, Lee became known as the regimental savant. He had assembled an impressive library and was fond of quoting from contemporary literary works as well as those of classical antiquity. But in August of 1750, eighteen-year-old Charles lost his mentor and best friend when Colonel Lee died unexpectedly in his mid-fifties. Colonel Lee had taught Charles to engage in learned conversation, to value [ 25 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

knowledge, to respect the great scholars of the past, and to admire liberty. His father’s death left a void in Charles’s life that was never filled. The heartache and pain of losing his father did not prevent him from continuing his career in the army, however. Lee actively pursued a promotion even though opportunities for advancement in the British military during peacetime were few. In May 1751, 19-year-old Charles Lee secured his first promotion by purchasing a lieutenancy that had become vacant in the regiment.34 The British army that Lee joined was divided into two establishments: Britain and Ireland. It had been a standing force since the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II in 1660, when it replaced the British militia system.35 It was one of the smallest armies in Europe, but it was also one of the best trained, most successful, and fiercest military machines in the world. As historian Stephen Conway notes, between 1739 and 1763, the British military was engaged in almost continuous warfare. This experience, writes Linda Colley, made the army resilient and always prepared for a fight.36 By the time Lee had reported for active duty at the close of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, the British army had a wartime total of roughly 49,000 officers and troops, of which almost 39,000 were assigned to regiments distributed throughout Britain’s expanding empire, from Scotland and Ireland to the Atlantic coast of Canada, the Caribbean, India, and West Africa.37 Although young men from the British elite dominated the highest ranks of the officer corps, many officers were the sons of merchants and artisans. The expansion of the British army in the first half of the eighteenth century resulted in the need for more officers. This need could not be met by Britain’s upper classes, making it necessary to draw additional officers from a wider social base.38 All commissions from a colonelcy upward were appointed and were often based on seniority. Commissions to lower ranks were usually purchased. While most officers moved up in rank by purchase as vacancies occurred, some officers, like those in the Royal Artillery, were promoted because of their technical and engineering skills.39 An officer’s commission was viewed as the property of the person who held it, and thus the holder could lose it without compensation only if he were found guilty by a court-martial or died. Otherwise, he could resign and sell it at any time he officially withdrew from the service. The only other avenue for advancement was if a vacancy occurred during wartime because of death or the establishment of a new corps. [ 26 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

The competition for promotion in the British officer corps was intense, leading to pretentiousness and to jealous rivalries, biting criticisms, and behind-the-scenes maneuvering for influence and favor. Furthermore, in the commission purchase system, money and patronage were the keys to advancement. Young gentlemen such as Charles Lee were at a distinct advantage. He was the son of an officer and thereby had access to wealth and strong patronage networks within the officers’ fraternity. This system eventually came under much scrutiny for promoting incompetence and breeding institutionalized corruption, yet it ensured that British officers had a stake in maintaining the army as an institution and keeping it firmly under the control of society’s governing elite.40 As a cost-cutting measure, the British government always disestablished regiments in peacetime. If an officer’s regiment was disestablished, he continued to hold his commission even though he was effectively placed into semi-retirement and reduced to half-pay status. Half-pay officers were expected to remain “on call.” They had to be ready to return to active service during a crisis or war. In this way, Britain had developed a military system that supported a shadow officer corps and an army that could be mobilized at any time if necessary.41 Military academies did not exist; thus, British officers learned their profession in actual service or by studying military tactics on their own. The lack of any formal military education and the purchase of commissions produced an amateur quality in the officer corps, especially at its highest ranks. This amateurism went far to explain why so many junior officers were ready to criticize their superiors or were quickly offended at any rebuke from them. Quarrels were frequent and threats of resignation typical. The British army relied on volunteers who were paid a cash bounty to fill its ranks. The majority of the recruits were young, single, propertyless men who were victims of the periodic economic recessions that afflicted eighteenth-century Britain or had lost their jobs because of mechanization and other innovations in industrial and agricultural work. While some recruits were unskilled workers, a surprisingly large number were skilled or semi-skilled and worked at home or in small shops. Historian Sylvia Frey argues that “it seems reasonably certain that those crafts suffering the worst effects of economic change furnished the most soldiers for the army.” They accepted the opportunity for steady pay even if that pay was notoriously low and meant enlisting for life. The military offered them some [ 27 ]

Colonel Lee’s Son

security in the form of food, shelter, clothing, and income.42 For other recruits, military service promised adventure—something more exciting than working long hours in a textile mill or on a farm in the county where they were born, while others were given the choice between enlistment and prison or joined to avoid legal responsibilities to pregnant women.43 British recruiters such as Charles Lee were very much aware of the opportunities to recruit from poorer working class and agricultural communities in the British Isles, in Ireland, and in colonial America. Recruiters sold the benefits of joining the army: the adventure, the glorious tradition, the camaraderie, and the steady pay.44 Yet British regiments were rarely at full strength. The government occasionally implemented conscription (or impressment) or hired foreign, usually German, mercenaries.45 Recruits were subjected to a rigid training regimen and drills and to strict patterns of authority, order, discipline, and subordination. Any infraction of the rules or display of laziness by an individual soldier brought either corporal punishment or public humiliation. This harsh response led to disaffection and high levels of desertion.46 As an officer, Lee’s experiences in the military would have contrasted sharply with those of the ordinary British soldier. He would not have endured the same rigorous training or harsh discipline that enlisted men experienced. Instead, Lee would have seen other officers conduct drills and impose strict discipline on their men, and he would have done so as well in his capacity as an officer. While Lee’s actions to this end would have contradicted his humanist tendencies, corporal punishment and harsh penalties for infractions were an accepted part of British army life.47 Beginning in 1751, Lee endured the monotony of garrison duty in Ireland and of recruiting trips to England. This monotony changed in 1754 when Virginians commanded by a militia officer named George Washington exchanged volleys with French soldiers and their Native American allies near the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers deep in the wilderness of North America, starting a military contest that would test the competency of the British officer corps and the discipline of the army’s enlisted men. The conflict would be transformative for eighteenth-century Europe’s mighty empires, for Anglo-American relations, and for Charles Lee.

[ 28 ]

2

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the American Frontier

Tw ent y-t wo-y ear-old Lieut enant Char le s Lee was enjoying the waters at the English spa resort of Bath when he received news that the 44th and 48th Regiments of Foot had been called up for active service in America. “I fancy you have hear’d,” he wrote to Sidney, “that our Regiment is order’d to Virginia.” The immediacy of the deployment forced Lee to cancel a planned visit to see her. “I hope you won’t attribute it to any want of affection towards you, if I leave Europe without seeing you,” he lamented, “but I am afraid that the hurry and confusion of my affairs will deprive me of that pleasure.” Lee quickly wrote his will, leaving all or most of his property to Sidney, before he rejoined the 44th at a staging area in Cork, Ireland.1 The 44th and 48th regiments sailed from Cork in October 1754 and arrived in America in early March 1755. Colonel Sir Peter Halkett, who had succeeded Lee’s father as commander of the 44th, disembarked his men at Alexandria, Virginia. They were reinforced by provincial troops and marched to a staging area at Fort Cumberland, located on Wills Creek in western Maryland.2 Major General Edward Braddock commanded the British expeditionary force sent to America in late 1754.3 Braddock’s army was composed of the 44th and the 48th regiments; militia from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina; and a few Native American scouts. It consisted of between 2,000 and 3,000 troops as well as 500 packhorses, 200 wagons, several pieces of heavy artillery, and hundreds of civilian teamsters, sutlers, herdsmen, and female camp followers, including the wives of soldiers. Braddock planned to seize the French Fort Duquesne, at the confluence of the Ohio, Alleghany, and Monongahela Rivers (at present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Both France and Britain believed that domination of the American continent depended on securing control of this post and the [ 29 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

200,000 square miles of Ohio Country beyond it. Although small in comparison to other European military installations in America, Fort Duquesne was the largest French fort in the Ohio Country.4 The Native Americans who lived in the region, meanwhile, tried to protect their cultures and lands from the pressures exerted by the two European powers, who also courted them as military allies.5 On May 30, 1755, Braddock’s army began its trek into the Ohio Country, but its progress through the rugged, thickly forested area and across the Alleghenies was painfully slow.6 By July 9, the main column had successfully forded the Monongahela River at two locations about eight miles southeast of Fort Duquesne.7 The army’s advance guard, which was commanded by 35-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage of the 44th, was comprised of about 300 regulars and officers from that regiment, including Lieutenant Charles Lee, as well as militia from Virginia and Maryland. These troops fell into a firefight against a force of almost 900 French regulars, Canadian militia, and Native American warriors sent from Fort Duquesne. The two forces were an unequal match, but Gage blundered when he failed to occupy a grassy hill to his right. The French-allied Indians quickly flanked the British main column. Some of them seized the hill Gage had failed to occupy, while the others dispersed into the thickly wooded forests that bounded the road. The Indians on the knoll fired incessantly at the British troops, who panicked and broke ranks, prompting Gage to call for a retreat. Braddock worsened the situation when he ordered the remainder of the main column to advance up the narrow road. The result was chaos as Gage’s panicked retreating forces collided with Braddock’s advancing troops. Thick white smoke from discharged muskets blanketed the area. Unsure of the enemy’s position, British troops fired wildly, killing some of their own men. The Indians continued to pour devastating fire into the confused British lines. Their shrill war cry frayed the nerves of the traumatized British regulars, who “were so disconcerted and confused, as soon to fall into irretrievable disorder,” remembered George Washington, who served as one of Braddock’s aides-de-camp.8 In contrast to the panic of the British, many of the Virginia troops, who had rushed into the woods to engage the Indians, stood their ground and attempted a counterattack. But they were caught between the enemy and the confused British regulars and were decimated. Washington later commented that his fellow Virginians had “behav’d like Men, and died [ 30 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

like Soldiers” that day.9 Braddock and his officers, including Lee, bravely attempted to regroup their men and direct their line of fire. Many of them were fatally wounded, however, including Braddock and Halkett, the commander of the 44th.10 After the three-hour firefight, the decimated British forces retreated. Colonel Thomas Dunbar, who commanded the 48th regiment, took charge of the retreat. In an effort to speed the army’s escape, he abandoned supply wagons, cattle, horses, artillery, ammunition, and members of the expedition who were too seriously wounded to walk.11 For several days, the French and their Native American allies collected the spoils of war. Many of the wounded British were tortured, massacred, and scalped. The grim possibility of having the top of one’s scalp flayed was understandably terrifying to British soldiers, whose training had not prepared them for such a fate. “There is one horrid circumstance attending this service which is, that if you, happen to be left disabled in the Field, the highest blessing that you can wish for is, that some friends will immediately Knock you on the head, for it is great odds that you suffer some terrible lingering death from these savages; such I’m afraid was the fate of our poor wounded friends at the Monongahela,” Lee informed Sidney.12 The disaster along the Monongahela was Lee’s first battle, and it disturbed him. The scenes of panic and death and the screams of the wounded haunted Lee for the remainder of his life. Although it pained Lee to hear the cries of anguish from the wounded British as they were scalped, he accepted it as part of the “Indian way of war,” a form of warfare that was unconventional in the European sense but had its own rules and methods. The fact that French soldiers were complicit in this practice troubled him. Eighteenth-century Western European armies followed certain rules of engagement to protect noncombatants. The failure to observe these rules alarmed many contemporaries, including Lee, who declared that “the Indians may indeed be excus’d more than the French, for they are bred up in these bloody notions. Such is the nature of their wars one with the other, but the latter, what treatment can be equal to their monstrous cruelties; for it is certain that these patterns of generosity and humanity (as They are pleas’d to style themselves) commit more murders and butcheries upon men, women and children with their own hands than do their savage Allies.”13 Lee learned a hard lesson in North American warfare along the Monongahela, and that lesson informed his military thinking for many years. [ 31 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

Braddock became the scapegoat for the British defeat, but Lee did not blame him for the disaster. British commanders were familiar with tactics and methods intended for European battlefields, but they failed to understand or recognize that European linear tactics and rules of engagement could not be applied fully in America and meant little to Native American warriors, who followed a code of warfare that emphasized “the imperatives of military necessity.”14 The Native Americans were proficient at petite guerre. They were lightly armed, highly mobile guerrilla fighters who endured long periods of fatigue, attacked swiftly and with stealth, and could campaign for extended periods over several miles. Native American warriors routinely used the ambush and effectively used psychological warfare tactics that included targeting noncombatants, torturing prisoners, and destroying villages and provisions.15 They were skilled at firing at their enemy from behind natural cover and ensnaring them in cross fire. Historian Armstrong Starkey writes that many Native American tactics “closely paralleled the male Indian’s life as a hunter.”16 Lee, who was among the most alert students of this military experience, believed that “nothing contributes more to form the military science then the exercise of hunting: for, besides giving us thorough knowledge of the country, and of the different situations, which are infinite, and near the same, it teaches us a thousand stratagems and other things relative to war.” Lee argued that the skills acquired from the hunt are extremely important “because it ensures us to bear the fatigues of war.”17 In response to the Native American style of warfare, the Anglo-American colonists organized militias in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, reviving a military system that at the time was being supplanted in Britain by a professional standing army. Militias were regulated by the individual colonial assemblies through militia laws that outlined the command structure, indicated the appointment or election of officers, required individuals to bear arms and to comply with mandatory musters and drills, and defined the terms of universal or near-universal military obligation for individuals.18 Although the popular image of the militia as a democratic army, which was created after the American Revolution, contained some truth, even in colonies where militia officers were elected by their men, such as Massachusetts, social prestige and deference were important. Militia officers in colonies where they were elected were usually from the same socioeconomic group as officers from colonies where they were appointed. [ 32 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

The main military function of the militia was to protect their respective communities from external threats such as Indian raids and attacks by rival European powers or from internal disorder such as slave insurrections and civil unrest. The tactics that colonial militias used were modified versions of the traditional European linear style of warfare combined with practices popular among the Native Americans.19 Lee recognized that two different methods of waging war existed in the colonies—the European method and the North American method.20 The latter, which both Native Americans and colonists used, targeted all enemies regardless of age or gender and depended heavily on using the terrain and the strategy of surprise to maximize casualty ratios. The professionally trained European soldiers were not ready to confront this method and had difficulty making the adjustment to warfare in North America. Subsequently, Lee and other British officers, notably George Augustus, Lord Howe, General James Wolfe, and Thomas Gage, the new commander of the 44th Regiment, recognized the need to adjust the military’s tactics to the reality of warfare in America. They supported methods of surprise and cover and called for more use of the colonial militia and of Native Americans as scouts and skirmishers. Their calls for reform eventually encouraged the formation of light infantry and specialized “ranger” units that were adept at the rudiments of American irregular warfare: intelligence gathering, security, mobility, stealth, and ambush.21 Braddock’s defeat threw the entire frontier from Pennsylvania to Virginia into violent chaos as Anglo-American communities were attacked by the French and their Indian allies. This led to brutal reprisals against isolated French outposts and Native American villages.22 In his study of Euro-Indian relations in the Pennsylvania backcountry, historian James H. Merrell remarks that “the bloodshed and anguish forever changed the face of the frontier.”23 Lee and the other survivors of Braddock’s disastrous Monongahela expedition were in Philadelphia, however, far from the violence that was devastating the backcountry.24 Although Philadelphia was physically small, covering an area of less than one square mile, it was eighteenth-century British North America’s largest urban center. Its population had doubled from 9,000 in 1740 to approximately 18,000 by the 1760s. Philadelphia was also one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the Americas. Irish, Scots-Irish, German, Dutch, Swedish, French Huguenot, and Sephardic Jewish migrants came to Pennsylvania [ 33 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

Print of General Thomas Gage, ca. 1899. Engraved by William Sartain. Gage succeeded Sir Peter Halkett as commander of the 44th Regiment of Foot after the Battle of the Monongahela in July 1755. He later recruited and commanded the 80th Light Infantry Regiment and served as commander of British forces in North America. Charles Lee had great respect for Gage as a person and as a soldier. Source: Library of Congress.

through its port, and most of them remained in the city. Philadelphia was also teeming with young men and women from the surrounding countryside who were in search of work. By the 1750s, white indentured servants and enslaved Africans and African Americans were vital to the city’s economy, working in households, artisan shops, and taverns and in the maritime trades.25 Each of the ethnicities that comprised Philadelphia’s heterogeneous population created a distinct subculture. As Lee walked the city’s busy streets, he would have passed schools and churches where only German was spoken or encountered groups of free and enslaved Africans celebrating important holidays with traditional dances, rhythmic clapping, and songs in their native African dialects. Philadelphia’s ethnic pluralism was reflected in its variety of religions and degrees of religious belief. It contained several Quaker meetinghouses as well as places of worship for Anglicans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Anabaptists, Calvinists, Lutherans, Moravians, and Jews and was home to several persons who identified as deists and atheists. As the Philadelphia port flourished, the city’s overall wealth increased, especially that of its Quaker and Anglican elite. Its prosperous commercial interests were complemented by a thriving cultural arts [ 34 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

community and many sophisticated educational, philanthropic, and scientific institutions.26 Philadelphia added a sweet note to Lee’s colonial lesson in the field. He found the city “charming” and its residents “very sociable people.” The city made an indelible impression on him because of its vibrancy, its sophisticated entertainment, its ethnic and linguistic diversity, its mixture of rich and poor, the vitality of its wharves and taverns, and the polite revelry of its coffeehouses. But it was the city’s permissive sexual atmosphere and its women that impressed Lee most. “The women . . . are extreamly pretty and most passionately fond of red coats, which is for us . . . most fortunate,” he confessed to Sidney.27 The freedom and anonymity associated with urban life combined with the culture of pleasure (or libertinism) that was developing throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to facilitate a climate of sexual indulgence, casual encounters, and adulterous affairs in British North America’s leading city.28 Prostitution was not uncommon in the seaport and, although they were confined mainly to Philadelphia’s waterfront districts, brothels existed throughout the city and were patronized by men from every social class.29 The sex trade was especially profitable in the taverns and brothels that catered to the British troops and their officers.30 Lee was more than likely among those who participated in this sexual opportunity. Philadelphia’s remarkably loose sexual climate unfortunately came with a financial and medical cost to society: venereal disease was widespread and bastardry became increasingly common, with some of these children fathered by the British soldiers who were quartered in the city.31 Yet Lee and many of his comrades happily continued to take advantage of the sexually charged atmosphere in Philadelphia and its “extreamly pretty” women until the fall of 1755, when they were deployed to the frontier town of Albany, situated at the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers in New York’s Mohawk River Valley. There could not have been a sharper contrast between locales. By the 1750s, Albany was at “the crossroads of empire” between North America’s British, French, and Native American inhabitants. Those who traveled south along the Hudson River, which in the eighteenth century was known as the North River, ended up in New York City; those who moved west entered the lands of the Iroquois League (comprised of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras); and those who journeyed [ 35 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

north along the Lake Champlain corridor could cross the St. Lawrence River into the French settlements of Montreal and Quebec. Albany was home to several long-established Dutch families who had prospered from the fur trade. At the town’s riverfront, vessels unloaded products from across the Atlantic world and carried furs, grains, and livestock to markets in New York or directly overseas.32 Perhaps Albany’s commercial aspects reminded Lee of his hometown of Chester. In July 1754, Albany hosted delegates from seven of the thirteen American colonies in an effort to negotiate a renewal of Britain’s alliance with the Iroquois League and to discuss ways to coordinate colonial efforts to defend the frontier against the French and their Indian allies. Unfortunately, the Albany Congress failed. Individual colonial assemblies were not willing to give up sovereignty, and they rejected the efforts of Pennsylvania delegate Benjamin Franklin to bring the colonies together under a representative government and to establish a common army for their defense. The failure of the Albany Congress to foster intercolonial cooperation made it clear to British officials that the colonists could not effectively defend themselves, and this perception led to the deployment of Braddock’s illfated expedition.33 The 44th regiment made its winter quarters for 1755–1756 at Albany. Despite the New York Assembly’s appropriation of £1,100 for barracks, nothing had been constructed by the time the troops arrived, and the men were quartered in private houses and public buildings.34 Lee’s personality and his inquisitive nature did not adapt well to sitting idly for months in a small frontier town, especially after having experienced the cosmopolitanism and urban vibrancy of Philadelphia. Yet Lee made the most of his situation. He often volunteered to lead patrols into the countryside and was awed by the region’s natural beauty. “The place itself is very pleasant,” Lee informed Sidney. “Indeed there is a magnificence and greatness through the immense extent (which we have seen of this Continent) not equal’d in any part of Europe; our Rivers and Lakes (even the greatest) are to these little rivulets and brooks; indeed Nature in every Article seems to be in great here what on your side the Waters, she is in small.”35 Lee’s observations convinced him of America’s potential for greatness long before the American Revolution. During Lee’s stay in Albany, he purchased a captaincy in the 44th for £900.36 He also met and befriended Britain’s superintendent of Indian affairs [ 36 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

for the northern colonies, Sir William Johnson. The 40-year-old Johnson was a native of County Meath in eastern Ireland and was known to dress in Native American fashion and to wear war paint. By 1741, he had amassed a fortune from the fur trade and from various real estate transactions and had built a large mansion in the Mohawk River Valley called Mount Johnson. He also cultivated a long association with the Iroquois League, especially the Mohawks. Although Johnson had married his German servant, he also had sexual relationships with many Iroquois women, who bore him several children. Euro-Indian sexual relations were not uncommon along the frontier; they were an important aspect of life on the outer edge of colonial settlement. Johnson acknowledged the children he had with his Iroquois concubines and left them each a considerable inheritance.37 Like Johnson, Lee immersed himself in Native American culture and eventually learned to speak Iroquoian fluently. He read prominent New York politician Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America (1727) and often visited the multicultural world of Mount Johnson, where he interacted with Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans and where a variety of languages and dialects were spoken and understood by many. Lee also briefly lived among the Mohawk. “As for accounts of the Indians I would refer you to Goldens [Colden’s] history of the Five Nations, which I advise you to purchase and read, for you will find it prodigiously entertaining, and literally true by what little I can judge from my own experience,” he wrote to Sidney.38 Lee knew that the British public learned about Native Americans from newspapers, magazines, or books that portrayed them as barbaric and depraved, and he tried to dispel the British media’s portrayal of them.39 “I can assure you that they are a much better sort of people than commonly represented,” he declared to Sidney.40 Lee’s descriptions of Native Americans fit the Enlightenment ideal of the noble savage, which had emerged from a reaction against the perceived artificial and corrupting influences (both moral and emotional) that abounded in modern European society. French travel writer Louis Armand de Lom d’ Arce, baron de Lahontan, was the originator of the idea of primitive or savage man as the possessor of natural virtues, individuals who were not yet corrupted by civilization. But it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who popularized the concept, and Lee admired Rousseau’s writings above all others.41 Lee described the Native Americans as “hospitable, friendly, and [ 37 ]

Sir William Johnson, from a plate in Francis Whiting Halsey, The Old New York Frontier (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901). Charles Lee admired the British superintendent for Indian affairs in the Northern Department and wanted to emulate his life on the New York frontier. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

[ 38 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

civil to an immense degree.” He was impressed by their “good breeding” and their “constant desire to do ev’rything that will please you” and by their “strict carefulness to not say or do anything that may offend you.” Lee noted that they were tall and slender, wore colorful dress, and that their skin, which was “deep olive” in complexion and “most inexpressibly soft and silky,” was covered by red, blue, black, and yellow body paint. Their eyes and teeth were “very fine” and their gait graceful. “I assure you that if you were to see the young Warriors dress’d out and arm’d you would never allow that there was such a thing as gentillity amongst our finest gentlemen at St. James’s!” Charles wrote to Sidney.42 Wartime service on the open and fluid American frontier allowed British regulars unfamiliar with frontier life the chance to satisfy their curiosity and confront their preconceived notions about the Native Americans. It also offered them a new and more exotic sense of sexual freedom than the brothels and bawdy houses of London or colonial cities such as Philadelphia. Far removed from their families, British soldiers found themselves among a people who had a very sophisticated attitude toward sex. Although Native American wives were expected to be faithful, sexual experimentation with multiple partners was not taboo for women before marriage. Moreover, sex was regarded as normative in the ritual exchange of commerce and diplomacy.43 Tribal elites frequently offered young single women as temporary companions to civilian visitors of political importance or to the officers of military garrisons as a way to procure necessary material goods or diplomatic and military advantages for their tribes. Lee was not averse to these courtesies. Like Sir William Johnson and many other British officers and traders on the American frontier, he promptly took up with an Indian woman who was the daughter of the prominent Seneca chief White Thunder of the Bear Clan. This woman bore him fraternal twins. He was accepted into the clan and given the name Ounewateriku, or “Boiling Water,” which perhaps was a comment on his volatile and moody personality. In matrilineal Seneca society, women had a great deal of influence in social, economic, and political matters. Elder clan mothers selected the men who represented the tribe on the 50-member Central Council of the Iroquois League, which deliberated on issues of peace and societal welfare. Lee’s union with White Thunder’s daughter introduced him to a set of kinship relations that thrust him into a position of political prominence in Seneca society. As a member of the Bear [ 39 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

Clan, he was “entitled to a Seat and the privilege of Smoking a pipe in their Councils.”44 Lee admitted that “I do not flatter myself that I am so much indebted to my own merit for these dignities as to my alliance with one of the most illustrious families of the Six Nations.”45 Unlike Johnson, however, who acknowledged his Indian children and provided for them, Lee abandoned his twins and his Indian wife, never to see them again. The sexual permissiveness of Native American culture led many British men to interpret their unions with Native American women as transient affairs.46 Perhaps Lee interpreted his relationship to White Thunder’s daughter as a temporary marriage, convincing himself that there was nothing immoral about abandoning her and ultimately his children when the time came for him to return to the 44th.47 Albany was at the eastern terminus of a military supply line that stretched for more than 200 miles to the British garrison at Oswego, near the mouth of the Oswego River. On August 14, 1756, a French and Indian force captured the garrison, weakening the British presence around the Great Lakes and placing the French in control of the region’s lucrative fur trade. Although the 44th was sent to reinforce Oswego, it arrived too late to save the doomed garrison. The regiment eventually returned to Albany, where it remained until the spring of 1757, when it was part of the expedition against the French citadel of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Louisbourg was the gateway to New France and was crucial to French military plans in North America. The citadel gave the French a major presence in the Canadian maritime region, provided security for their fisheries off Cape Breton Island and for their settlements in the St. Lawrence River Valley, especially Montreal and Quebec. It also served as an important commercial center between French Canada and the West Indies. The British commander-in-chief in North America, John Campbell, Lord Loudoun, who had succeeded the deceased Braddock, favored a direct strike against Quebec as the showcase for the military campaign of 1757. But Britain’s chief minister William Pitt believed that Louisbourg should be the primary target. In April 1757, Loudoun followed Pitt’s instructions and ordered the British regulars stationed around Albany, including Lee’s 44th, to proceed to a staging area in New York City, leaving many of the British settlements in northern New York defenseless against enemy depredations. On June 30, Loudoun’s 6,000-man army arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The expedition was joined on July 9 by a British naval squadron [ 40 ]

Early Encounters and Life Lessons on the Frontier

commanded by Admiral Francis Holburne. Shortly before Holburne’s arrival, however, three French squadrons had sailed safely into a fog-draped Louisbourg harbor. The British commanders were unsure of the strength of the enemy because the thick fog hampered reconnaissance. By early August, the British received discouraging reports of French naval superiority, which convinced Loudoun to abort the attack and retreat to New York City.48 The British troops were disappointed with his decision. They criticized Loudoun’s handling of the expedition and his insistence on having them engage in mock battles and sieges and in the planting of vegetable gardens as they waited. Lee was frustrated and infuriated with Loudoun, sarcastically referring to the Louisbourg campaign as “the Cabbage Planting Expedition.”49 But he was reasonable enough to recognize that Loudoun could not be condemned entirely for the failure to assault the fortress. “As to our not attacking Cape Breton, I don’t see how either the Admiral [Holburne] or the General [Loudoun] can be blam’d; the French were certainly too strong for us, according to all intelligence,” he conceded. Adding to British discontent was news that the enemy had captured and destroyed Fort William Henry, which guarded a key route to Albany along the southern end of Lake George. The French massacred its garrison.50 The year 1757 came to a rapid end. The British war effort seemed on the brink of failure as the advance into Canada was checked and British troops were driven from Oswego and the Great Lakes region. The British presence around Lake George was also weakened. The French, on the other hand, strengthened their perimeter defenses from Fort Duquesne in the Ohio Country to Fort Saint Frédéric on Lake Champlain. Yet British chief minister William Pitt remained optimistic. He formulated plans for three major operations in 1758 that, if successful, would determine the fate of New France: Louisbourg, Ticonderoga, and Duquesne. Lee and the 44th would see action at Ticonderoga and learn another hard lesson in North American warfare.

[ 4 1 ]

3

An Ambitious Officer

“ We expect very soon to attack Tikenderoga,” Lee told Sidney, “so that in a very little time you must expect to hear of our either striking or receiving a great blow.”1 In June 1758, 26-year-old Captain Charles Lee and the 44th Regiment were at a staging area on the southern end of New York’s Lake George, near the remnants of Fort William Henry. The 44th was attached to the largest army assembled in America: 16,000 regulars and provincials were commanded by Major General James Abercromby, who had replaced John Campbell, Lord Loudoun, as commander of British forces in North America in December 1757. The British planned to attack the French Fort Carillon (Fort Ticonderoga), which was located at the forwardmost position on the important Richelieu River and protected the northern end of Lake George and the southern end of Lake Champlain. By capturing Carillon, the British would be in a position to conquer New France. “On the 5th of July,” Lee reported, Abercromby’s army “embark’d on Lake George, early the next morning we made the North end of the Lake.”2 The British landed roughly four miles from Fort Carillon. Abercromby appointed George Augustus, Lord Howe, to command the advance corps, which included the newly established 80th Light Infantry, recruited and led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage. Howe conceived of a battle plan to secure the western side of the Rivière de la Chûte (now Ticonderoga Creek), which connected Lake George to Lake Champlain, potentially placing Carillon in an untenable position. The 80th Light Infantry led the advance corps toward the Rivière de la Chute. Howe sent ranger units under the command of Major Robert Rogers to secure Bernetz Brook (now Trout Brook).3 The British were confident that they would succeed. But all did not proceed as envisioned. [ 42 ]

An Ambitious Officer

Lee recorded the confusion that followed. Howe ordered two Connecticut regiments to join Rogers’s rangers at an abandoned French encampment near two sawmills. What happened next was one of the most confused firefights of the war. Lee reported that the British “were attack’d by a body of 6 or 700 French Scouts.”4 His estimate exaggerated the confrontation with a 350-man French scouting party. Howe rushed to the scene of the action but was killed instantly by a musket ball.5 The British decimated the enemy, but the skirmish delayed their advance.6 As night descended on the region, the darkened wilderness and the chilling war cry of the French-allied Indians unnerved the British troops, especially those such as Lee who had survived the Monongahela expedition.7 The shattered British nerves led to a few incidents of what modern soldiers call friendly fire.8 The British suffered 100 casualties, but none was more important to their war effort than the death of Howe, one of the military’s brightest tacticians and one of the few officers who had urged that the British army adapt its tactics to wilderness warfare. “On our side very few men were lost, amongst these few, was the most estimable Lord Howe, whose only fault was that of not knowing his own value,” Lee declared.9 By the evening of July 6, most of the British troops had straggled back to their original landing point. The next morning, Abercromby appointed Lieutenant Colonel John Bradstreet to command the advance corps.10 Bradstreet was a popular choice among the troops, who were confident that “the whole affair [would be] decided in our favor.”11 Bradstreet secured the abandoned French post near the two sawmills, repaired a damaged bridge across the Rivière de la Chûte, and moved his men to within two miles of Carillon.12 Lee exclaimed: “What a glorious Situation was this! Everything had so charming an aspect, that without being much elated I shou’d have look’d upon any man as a desponding dastard who could entertain a doubt of our success.”13 However, Abercromby ordered Bradstreet to hold his position.14 As Bradstreet’s troops remained idle, Carillon’s commander, General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Grozon, prepared his defenses. With only 3,500 men to defend the fort and less than a week’s supply of food, the French situation was desperate. Historian Fred Anderson writes, “Abercromby’s delay gave Montcalm the gift of time, and he employed it well to prepare for the assault he knew could overwhelm Carillon’s defenses.”15 Montcalm’s troops erected abatis (or earthworks) as a defensive barrier; they [ 43 ]

An Ambitious Officer

dug entrenchments and carefully positioned log breastworks with swivelmounted small-bore cannon above them. In front of the entrenchments, down a steep slope, were chevaux de frise, a tangle of felled trees with sharpened branches designed to impede a frontal assault.16 Abercromby had no choice; he would have to attack these fortifications. Or would he? About a mile to the southwest of Carillon was Rattlesnake Hill (now Mount Defiance), which rose 700 feet above Lake Champlain. Montcalm did not have the men or the equipment to secure this high ground, leaving it undefended. Abercromby’s army included several pieces of heavy artillery that would have forced Montcalm to abandon Carillon if they had been positioned on Rattlesnake Hill.17 Yet Abercromby ignored the strategic possibilities that Rattlesnake Hill offered, taking the advice of Lieutenant Matthew Clerk, an inexperienced engineer with the 27th Regiment of Foot. Clerk reported that the French fortifications could be easily breached by a frontal assault. Montcalm had skillfully camouflaged the entrenchments with fir trees and shrubs, giving the impression that they were unfinished.18 In a moment of irresponsibility, or what Lee called “Idiotism,” Abercromby failed to personally review the French entrenchments, and he did not seek the opinion of more experienced engineers.19 He planned to charge ahead without bringing his heavy artillery to the front, leaving his infantry vulnerable.20 “There was one hill [Rattlesnake Hill] in particular which seem’d to offer itself as an ally to us, it immediately commanded the lines from hence two small pieces of cannon well planted must have drove the French in a very short time from their breast work, this never was thought of, which one wou’d imagine must have occur’d to any blockhead,” Lee complained.21 Abercromby arrayed his forces for a frontal assault against Carillon. The lead column was commanded by Gage, who had succeeded Howe as the expedition’s second-in-command. Lee respected Gage as a tactician and as a friend and colleague. “I have had a real affection for very few men. . . . You, Sir, amongst these few, have ever held one of the foremost places,” Lee once wrote to him.22 Gage ordered his rangers to take sniper shots at any French defender who poked his head from the fortifications, demonstrating that he had learned something about North American warfare.23 But Abercromby had decided to use conventional tactics. Lee recalled the scene: “The Regulars . . . march[ed] thro’ the intervals of the Provincials & with Bayonets [ 4 4 ]

An Ambitious Officer

fix’d against the Enemy’s lines. . . . The attack was accordingly made, with most perfect regularity coolness & resolution.”24 The British marched up the heights of Ticonderoga. Officers, including Lee, shouted orders and encouragement to their men. “The unevenness and ruggedness of the ground which was almost made impassable by great fallen trees, & the height of the breastworks which was at least eight feet, render’d it an absolute impossibility,” Lee remembered.25 “The fire was prodigiously hot, the slaughter . . . very great.” As Lee moved with the mass of regulars, a musket ball pierced his body, shattering two ribs. Lee “lay senseless for some time” on the field until he was carried to a makeshift military hospital on the estate of Philip Schuyler near Albany.26 Abercromby directed the battle from a rocky outcrop near his headquarters at the two sawmills. After he saw his men take vicious fire from Carillon’s defenders, amassing 2,000 casualties, he called for a general retreat. His exhausted troops were hurried onto transports that carried them back to the burned-out shell of Fort William Henry. The largest British army ever assembled in America had fled from an enemy that was not a quarter of its size and had not attempted to pursue it.27 The “hurry, precipitation and confusion” gave the British withdrawal “entirely the air of a flight,” Lee remarked.28 The defeat and humiliation that came with the British retreat from Ticonderoga brought Abercromby under intense scrutiny.29 Lee, who would later face the same scrutiny for directing a general retreat that seemed to spiral into confusion at Monmouth in 1778, was one of his harshest critics. He sent a scathing account of the battle and its aftermath to his sister Sidney, referring to Abercromby as “our Booby in Chief.” The British defeat “must undoubtedly appear most astonishingly absurd to people who were at a distance, but they are still more glaringly so to us who were upon the spot,” Lee wrote, describing Abercromby as a “damn’d beastly poltroon” and “a stupid blunderer.” His “behavior cou’d only be call’d stupid, ridiculous & absured,” and his retreat was “dishonorable and infamous, & had some strong symptoms of cowardice.”30 Lee fumed: “Fortune . . . had cram’d victory into his mouth, but he contrived to spit it out.”31 Lee instructed Sidney to forward his critique of Abercromby to their uncle, Lieutenant General Robert Armiger, one of King George II’s aides-de-camp.32 Other officers also wrote letters to influential family and friends describing the military situation in America. These letters had the desired effect. In September [ 45 ]

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1758, Abercromby was replaced as the commander of British forces in North America by Major General Jeffrey Amherst.33 After Lee had recovered from his wound, he rejoined the 44th at its winter quarters on Long Island, New York, where he was quickly embroiled in a controversy that almost proved fatal. While Lee was recuperating, one of the surgeons for the 44th had “compos’d a stupid libel” against him, which had been read publicly in the presence of Amherst. The content of this libel has unfortunately been lost. Lee challenged the surgeon to a fistfight and gave him a thrashing. Eager to retaliate, the surgeon borrowed two pistols from Major John Beckwith of the 44th, who was probably a willing accomplice, for Lee had quarreled with him on many occasions over his treatment of the men in the regiment. (Lee referred to Beckwith as a “petty Caligula” whose troops suffered miserably under his “detestable tyranny.”) As Lee and another officer, Captain William Dunbar, rode along a road near their camp, the surgeon confronted them. He fired a shot at Lee, the ball glancing off his ribs. “My horse fortunately at that instant, started to the right,” Lee recounted, “which sav’d me; but the shock was very violent, and the contusion very great, exactly under my heart.” The surgeon attempted to take another shot, but Dunbar struck the pistol out of his hand.34 Lee brought the incident to the attention of Amherst, who allowed the surgeon to resign his commission after “a publick acknowledgment of his crime.” Lee could not contain his outrage, for the surgeon was clearly guilty of intent to murder. In addition to his tendency to act impulsively, Lee often demonstrated a remarkable lack of political acumen. He had hoped for a court-martial that would reveal that his assailant had obtained the pistols used in the attack from Beckwith. Lee should have ended the affair here; instead, he publicly criticized Amherst’s decision. The whole affair left Lee bitter and disillusioned with Amherst, with the 44th, and even temporarily with the British war effort. Subsequent events, however, revived Lee’s enthusiasm. By the early fall of 1758, the British had captured Louisbourg as well as Fort Frontenac (Crown Point), at the northern end of Lake Ontario. Louisbourg was the key to the St. Lawrence River valley, but the capture of Frontenac disrupted Franco-Indian trade relations in Canada and in the Ohio Country and cut off communications with and supplies to Fort Duquesne.35 Lee lamented that had Abercromby “acted with the spirit and prudence of an old Woman” against the French at Ticonderoga, “their whole Country must inevitably [ 46 ]

Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Knight of the Most Honorable Order of Bath British General, by James Watson, copy after Joshua Reynolds, 1766. The dour, methodical Major General Jeffrey Amherst orchestrated the successful military campaigns that eventually led to British control of New France. Source: Library of Congress.

[ 47 ]

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have this year been reduc’d.”36 In late November, Lee heard of the capture of Fort Duquesne and triumphantly declared that “nothing can possibly be more important to our nation than this place.”37 The British now controlled the gateway to the Ohio Country as the French saw their defensive strategy collapse. The defeat of the French at Louisbourg, Frontenac, and especially Duquesne forced many Native American tribes to offer military support to the British.38 The new Anglo-Indian relationships changed the commercial patterns and the balance of power in the Ohio Country and the Great Lakes region. But there was still one French stronghold in the area: Fort Niagara, situated at the mouth of the Niagara River. This garrison was the focal point for French commerce around Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. British plans to take Fort Niagara included the Seneca, who had been active trade partners with the French. In April 1759, Johnson presented a war belt to Iroquois League representatives, offering them many gifts in exchange for their military support. The representatives of the Seneca accepted the offer and urged the British to attack Niagara. The motives of the Seneca were obvious; the French could no longer supply them with trade goods. The chiefs of the other Iroquois nations saw an opportunity to reestablish the league’s influence over the tribes in the Ohio Country, especially the Delaware and the Shawnee, who had allied with the French.39 Sir William Johnson assured Amherst, who, like many British officers, distrusted the Native Americans, that the Six Nations would support an attack against Niagara. Johnson’s close relationship with the Iroquois convinced Amherst to assign him to the expedition. Lee, having recovered from his wounded body and his wounded pride, rejoined the 44th Regiment at a staging area at Schenectady, New York.40 In late May, a 5,000-man British army commanded by Colonel John Prideaux began the expedition against Fort Niagara. The army arrived at the remnants of Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario, where it was greeted by 1,000 warriors from the Six Nations.41 Prideaux ordered a detachment of provincials to rebuild Fort Oswego and led the remainder of his army, which now included the 1,000 Iroquois warriors, westward on Lake Ontario. On July 6, they landed about four miles east of Fort Niagara, whose commander, Captain Pierre Pouchot, had made significant improvements to its defenses.42 Prideaux demanded the fort’s surrender but was politely and firmly rejected by Pouchot, who hoped that his defensive improvements could delay the British in time for [ 48 ]

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reinforcements to arrive.43 On July 20, Prideaux ordered the bombardment of Niagara but was accidently decapitated by a mortar round. His death left the inexperienced Johnson in command of the siege. Lee described Johnson as “a very good and valuable man, but utterly a stranger to military affairs.”44 On July 23, a party of 1,600 French reinforcements appeared near the falls south of the fort. Among them were many Native American warriors. The British position suddenly seemed vulnerable. But Johnson worked diligently to prepare an effective defense. He directed light infantry and regulars to guard the main road to the fort and ordered abatis and breastworks to be constructed about a mile and a half from Niagara in an area known as La Belle Famille. Johnson also sent a delegation of Iroquois to convince the French-allied Indian warriors to abstain from participating in any military operations. These Iroquois diplomats successfully dissuaded the warriors from participating in the assault at La Belle Famille.45 Lee and the 44th Regiment were deployed along the main road to La Belle Famille when the French attempted “to force a passage into the Fort.” As the French approached the British lines, “our men . . . immediately rush’d in with their Bayonets, the victory was quick & decisive in our favour,” Lee recalled.46 In the chaos of combat, “two musket balls at the same instant” grazed Lee’s hair, but he escaped without injury.47 Lee reported that the British lost “190 kill’d & wounded,” while French casualties numbered more than 400.48 The British victory at La Belle Famille sealed Niagara’s fate; Pouchot capitulated on July 25.49 The capture of Fort Niagara was a “happy event,” a euphoric Lee wrote. Professionally, he had learned two critical lessons: the importance of properly executing a wellinformed, if unconventional, battle plan, and the key role diplomacy played in the midst of war, as Johnson had won a significant part of the battle before his men had fired a single shot.50 Lee’s experience at Niagara, which helped develop his strategic sense, also cultivated his appreciation of America’s commercial and geopolitical potential. “This place [Niagara] is quite a paradise,” he reported, “situated on the West end of Lake Ontario, and wash’d by Niagara River 18 miles from the great falls, the most stupendous Cataract of the World.”51 The region was “most magnificent . . . fill’d with Deer, Bears, Turkeys, Raccoons, in short all sort of game,” while Lake Ontario “affords Salmon & other excellent fish.”52 Lee described Fort Niagara as the “absolute Empress of the Inland parts of North America, commanding the two great Lakes, [ 49 ]

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Erie, Ontario; the River Ohio, [and] all the upper nations of Indians.” He astutely understood the negative impact that Niagara’s loss would have on French communications and on Franco-Indian relations.53 The capture of Niagara, Lee wrote “cuts off all communication between Canada and all other Settlements in America belonging to the French; it entirely commands the numerous back nations of Indians, and consequently engrosses the whole fur trade to us, a more solid and real advantage to the Publick than the whole Commerce with the E. Indies.”54 The British victory at Niagara thwarted “their . . . long projected scheme of forming a chain around our Colonies, so as in time to have justled us into the sea.”55 In September, Prideaux’s successor, Thomas Gage, now a brigadier general, ordered Lee to lead an expedition to Fort Pitt, where he was to arrange for reinforcements to be sent to Niagara. Gage, who had been one of Lee’s advocates when he commanded the 44th, also directed him to gather information about “the remains of the French Army.” This was an important mission that Gage believed Lee could effectively undertake.56 Lee’s expedition “arrived safe . . . tho’ naked & almost starv’d” at Fort Pitt, where he delivered Gage’s request for reinforcements to the garrison’s commander, Colonel Hugh Mercer.57 Lee then traveled to Crown Point on the southern end of Lake Champlain, where he informed Amherst of his expedition. Amherst directed him to rejoin the 44th Regiment immediately, but Lee refused, reporting instead to Gage at Albany. Here Lee again failed to comprehend the implications of his actions. Although he was not publicly reprimanded for disobeying Amherst’s order, Lee was sent in the spring of 1760 to Philadelphia on a recruiting mission. Given the difficulties and frustrations military recruiters faced on a daily basis, this assignment could be construed as a reprimand. In Philadelphia, Lee was beginning to feel the emotional stress of war and the long separation from his sister and his friends when a packet arrived for him containing letters from home. The letters “have made me extremely happy” he wrote to Sidney, “not only in giving me fresh proofs of your affectionate punctuality, but in convincing me that I am not yet worn out from the memory of several persons whose friendship and good opinion I esteem an honour and felicity.” Lee was relieved that his friends and family had not forgotten him, and he asked Sidney to give them “my warmest thanks . . . for their kind sentiments towards one who in this long banishment looks upon nothing more dreadful but the being absented from [ 50 ]

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Robert Morris, 1782, by Charles Willson Peale. Morris was among the wealthiest men in America and eventually became Charles Lee’s main financial advisor and one of his supporters in the Continental Congress. Source: Library of Congress.

them.”58 Lee also found emotional release by frequenting many of Philadelphia’s coffeehouses, theatres, taverns, and brothels. He also attended lavish dinner parties, receptions, and other entertainments hosted by the local merchant elite, which gave him the opportunity to mingle with the city’s most prominent residents. It is likely that Lee met Robert Morris and David Franks at one of these social events. Morris had a brusque manner that did not endear him to many persons. Few had ever grown close to him and even fewer had [ 5 1 ]

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anything nice to say about him. Perhaps because of their similar personalities, Lee proved an exception. The two men forged a close friendship, and Morris became Lee’s chief financial advisor and one of his strongest advocates during the American Revolution. David Franks was a successful merchant and a leader in Philadelphia’s Jewish community. His daughter Rebecca became one of the city’s leading socialites. Unlike Morris, who became the “financier of the American Revolution,” Franks would be exiled from the United States in 1783 for his Loyalist sympathies.59 Lee’s acquaintance with Morris and Franks immediately proved beneficial. Lee had barely settled into his new assignment when he was arrested in April 1760 for assaulting a constable. Lee had recruited an apprentice and under British law, the recruit’s master had two options: either retrieve the servant and return his enlistment money or receive financial compensation to cover the recruit’s remaining years of service. The young man’s master chose to release him from his apprenticeship and be compensated for the remaining years of service. Lee agreed to meet with the apprentice and his master at a local tavern to determine proper compensation. During the meeting, a constable appeared and arrested the apprentice, offering no legitimate explanation for this action. As the constable led the young man out of the tavern, Lee tried to block their exit. When the constable shoved him out of the way, the volatile Lee lost his temper, striking the officer in the face. Lee was arrested and charged with impeding an arrest and assaulting an officer of the law.60 As any gentleman knew, it was not Lee’s impeding of an arrest or his striking an officer of the law that was his gravest mistake. His true error was his failure to exercise gentlemanly restraint in response to an assault by a social inferior. The eighteenth-century code of sensibility provided a tradition-bound standard of conduct that all gentlemen were expected to follow. Violence was considered proper only in response to an insult from a social equal.61 Lee’s action landed him in legal straits. On April 28, he agreed to a plea bargain in which he promised to stay out of trouble for one year. As a guarantee for his good behavior, Lee put up £500, which he borrowed from Morris and Franks. Lee had asked Amherst to intervene on his behalf with the governor of Pennsylvania, but his request was denied, a strong sign that he was not a favorite of the British commander.62 By late spring 1760, Gage had ordered Lee to rejoin the 44th Regiment near Niagara. Although Lee was unhappy about having to serve in the 44th [ 52 ]

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under regimental officers such as Beckwith, the very real possibility that he would be returning to the battlefield raised his spirits. The 44th was part of an expedition to capture Montreal, the last major military garrison in New France. It would be a daunting task, however. The town was surrounded by a series of rivers and was protected by a stone wall and thirty small redoubts.63 In early August, the 44th was assigned to an 11,000-man army commanded by Amherst for the assault against Montreal. They departed from a staging area at Oswego and were transported across Lake Ontario and down the St. Lawrence River, where they confronted the French Fort Lévis (in present-day Ogdensburg, New York). The fort could have been easily bypassed without much trouble, but Amherst decided to capture it. On August 23, British artillery fired on the garrison, which capitulated two days later. This nonessential action delayed the British advance until September 6, when they landed a few miles from Montreal. Amherst ordered a siege of the town and its outlying redoubts. On September 8, Montreal’s defenders surrendered, giving the British firm control of New France. By late 1760, while the British were focusing their attention on the Caribbean possessions of France and her ally Spain, Lee focused his attention on going home. “We wish you to come again amongst your friends,” wrote his uncle, Sir William Bunbury, “and surely some change might be procured as well as [an] advance on this side of the water, if you desired it.”64 Sir William informed Lee that the commander of all British forces, 80-year-old Field Marshal John Ligonier, Lord Ligonier, was in poor health and that a family acquaintance, General John Manners, the Marquis of Granby, was in line to replace him.65 Lee’s longtime friend Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, a well-respected military officer, also believed that his service in America put him in a good position for a promotion.66 As a veteran officer, Lee knew that the end of the war in America would mean diminished prospects for rapid promotion on the battlefield. He decided to return to Britain to promote his military service and to personally defend his reputation, which had suffered because of his repeated criticisms of his commanding officers.67 Lee obtained a leave of absence from the 44th and left America in October 1760. The continent and its people had made a lasting impression on him. As a soldier, Lee had absorbed from his experience the kinds of tactics and methods that would be effective in a future war in America. He also realized, more than most British officers and policymakers, the importance of using the terrain for military success. [ 53 ]

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Lee’s confidence that his tactical abilities were superior to those of his commanding officers was perhaps justified, but his quickness to criticize and his lack of restraint remained a detriment. Lee arrived in London in late December to learn that George III had succeeded his grandfather to the British throne, beginning a reign that would last until his death in 1820. He also plunged into one of the major political debates of the day, the Canada-Guadeloupe controversy.68 At the center of this debate was the issue of whether Canada and the Ohio Country or the West Indian sugar island of Guadeloupe should be returned to France in peace negotiations. One of the most sophisticated arguments in this debate was made by Benjamin Franklin in his pamphlet The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to her Colonies and the Acquisition of Canada and Guadeloupe (also known as the Canada Pamphlet). Franklin,

His Most Sacred Majesty George III, King of Great Britain, etc., 1762, by Thomas Frye, engraved by William Pether. In 1760, 22-year-old George III succeeded his grandfather as king of England, Ireland, and America. Source: Library of Congress. [ 54 ]

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Benjamin Franklin’s 1760 pamphlet The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to her Colonies and the Acquisition of Canada and Guadalupe inspired Charles Lee to become involved in the Canada-Guadalupe debate when he returned to Britain later that year. In 1774, Lee was outraged at the way British solicitor general Alexander Wedderburn had treated Franklin in front of the Privy Council. This incident intensified Lee’s support for the Americans. Source: Library of Congress.

who had arrived in Britain in 1757 as a colonial agent for Pennsylvania, cogently argued that Britain should retain Canada and the Ohio Country because the removal of the French from America would hasten the spread of the Anglo-American colonists across the continent and provide a vast market for British manufactured goods.69 Franklin’s pamphlet inspired Lee to write The Importance of Canada Considered in Two Letters to a Noble Lord. Lee agreed that Britain should retain Canada and the Ohio Country, especially the Niagara region, which he argued was the key to the continent’s fur trade. “Whosoever possesses the [ 55 ]

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dominion of lake Ontario and the pass at Niagara, must engross the whole fur trade,” he wrote. Lee also maintained that the French still had influence over some of the Indian tribes around the Great Lakes and in the Ohio Country, particularly the Delaware and the Shawnee, and could use them as proxies to continue the war. He urged the British government to consider a policy of conciliation toward these tribes or be prepared for a potential major Indian uprising.70 Lee’s pamphlet was overlooked in the debate, but his warning about a future Indian rebellion was prophetic. As French officials and fur traders withdrew from the Ohio Country and the Great Lakes, the British arrived, and life for the Indians changed dramatically. The French had dealt with the tribes as their partners, but the British came with grand plans for imperial domination. The Indians had hoped that the British would simply replace the French, continuing the customary practice of “gift giving” in the form of clothing, food, weapons, or ammunition in exchange for military cooperation. But British officials who were intent on fiscal retrenchment ended this practice, effectively forcing tribes to acquire goods from British markets. They believed that this new strategy would keep the Indians in a subordinate position and decrease the threat of an armed uprising.71 Amherst, who was responsible for implementing the government’s policy, was confident that British military superiority made conciliatory measures unnecessary. The new British policy changed the nature of Anglo-Indian relations in the Ohio Country and around the Great Lakes. Disgraced and concerned about their survival, many tribes coalesced around the leadership of the Ottawa chief Pontiac, who in the spring of 1763 led a rebellion against British authority—just as Lee had predicted.72 It was one thing to debate the relative merits of Canada or Guadeloupe as a prize of war, but it was reckless of Lee—and counterproductive to his quest for a promotion—to question Amherst. Yet Lee became the leader of a group of officers who frequently critiqued his leadership in America.73 Lee asserted that Amherst’s implementation of the new British policy hindered future economic development of the Ohio Country and the Great Lakes area and that it cost the British more financially to crush Indian uprisings like Pontiac’s Rebellion than to conciliate the tribes. Lee’s illadvised critique brought him into conflict with Lord Ligonier, who had recovered from his illness and was committed to protecting Amherst, his protégé.74 Lee’s friends in government, who included the Earl of Pembroke [ 56 ]

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and Sackville Tufton (Lord Thanet), had tried to intervene with key officials on his behalf. But Lee, growing impatient and frustrated, decided to personally take his case for a promotion to George III. He petitioned the king for an audience but received no immediate response.75 As Lee waited for a response from George III, he became acquainted with the poet John Hall-Stevenson, the author of several works of licentious verse such as Fables for Grown Gentlemen and Crazy Tales. Hall-Stevenson led the “Demoniacs,” hard-drinking, politically radical libertines who met at his residence, Skelton Castle, in Yorkshire. Lee attended several of these gatherings, where he met prominent figures in the arts, politics, science, and literature, among them Laurence Sterne, the author of one of the eighteenth century’s most popular and controversial novels, Tristram Shandy. The Demoniacs expanded Lee’s circle of friends and provided him with companionship of a more intellectual and skeptical nature than he had found in the military. Lee also publicly expressed his political views, firmly standing with the Radical or True Whigs. This did not help him in his quest for a promotion. The Radical Whigs were outspoken critics of the ministry and of royal influence and voiced concerns that the British constitution was in danger from government corruption. They believed that the development of the cabinet system after the Glorious Revolution (1688–1690) and the Hanoverian succession (1714) had threatened the traditional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of the British government. They frequently warned of the potential dangers a professional standing army posed to individual rights and liberties. The Earl of Shelburne cautioned Lee that his support of Whig politics, particularly the Radical Whigs, could seriously hurt his chances for a promotion and advised him to keep his political opinions private. But Lee ignored Shelburne, citing Whig military and naval officers such as Thomas Gage, John Burgoyne, Charles Cornwallis, brothers Richard and William Howe, and the late James Wolfe and George Augustus, Lord Howe. These men, however, were supporters of the mainstream Whig position. Lee naïvely believed that his military service in America would be enough to gain him a preferment from George III, regardless of politics.76 In July 1761, his optimism did not seem so misplaced. Lord Thanet argued Lee’s case to George III, who promised to promote him to the first vacant position. “Is not this friendship?” a grateful Lee wrote to Sidney about Thanet. “By my soul I think so; [ 57 ]

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and in the reflection of the Friendship of such men consists the greatest happiness of my life.”77 Lee did receive a promotion one month later, but it was not the preferment he had sought. Lee was elevated to the rank of major on a temporary (or brevet) basis and was assigned to the 103rd Regiment of Foot, which was among five regiments raised for service on the Iberian peninsula against Spain.78 In May 1762, Spain demanded that Portugal, which was Britain’s most important trade partner in continental Europe, close its ports to British commerce. When the Portuguese refused to acquiesce to this demand, Spain invaded its Iberian neighbor.79 Britain responded by sending the new regiments, including the 103rd, to Portugal under the command of Lord Loudoun. They arrived in Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, in June.80 While Loudoun led the expedition, overall command of all joint British and Portuguese military operations fell to a London-born German count, Wilhelm of Schaumburg-Lippe, who was the grandson of King George I. Schaumburg-Lippe had served as an artillery commander in the army of Prince Frederick of the German principality of Brunswick, a British ally.81 Lee was excited at the prospect of serving under the highly regarded Schaumburg-Lippe and hoped to be asked to join his staff, believing such an appointment would improve his chances of obtaining a permanent promotion in the British military. Lee met with Schaumburg-Lippe but unfortunately was not offered a position on his staff. Perhaps Lee’s reputation for being difficult and his habit of petty criticism had preceded him to Portugal. Lee felt like “an excommunicated miscreant.”82 His only source of consolation was that he would soon return to the battlefield, where he could display the valor that he believed would gain him a permanent promotion. In late July, the Spanish, reinforced by 10,000 French troops, invaded Portugal. Schaumburg-Lippe ordered an Anglo-Portuguese expedition commanded by John Burgoyne, who held the rank of brevet brigadier general, to undertake a delaying action near the border town of Valencia de Alcántara. The 103rd regiment was attached to this expedition. Burgoyne’s forces successfully captured Valencia de Alcántara without much resistance.83 In October, Burgoyne ordered a raid on the Spanish army’s main supply depot and communications center, Vila Velha. He chose Lee to command this crucial mission, demonstrating great confidence in his tactical abilities.84 On October 5, Lee led 300 troops, fifty of whom were with the 16th Light Dragoons, an elite cavalry unit, against Vila Velha. [ 58 ]

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He effectively applied tactics that he had learned in America, particularly stealth and ambush, catching the enemy completely by surprise. Lee’s troops destroyed a large stockpile of arms and ammunition; carried off livestock, pack animals, and several prisoners; and disrupted the enemy’s line of communication. Lee’s victory at Vila Velha was decisive. By mid-November, the Spanish offensive had been stymied. After six months of combat, the British had won the Portuguese campaign.85 But while Lee had led the successful assault on Vila Velha, Burgoyne received much of the credit. Lee did receive some public recognition from Schaumburg-Lippe, who secured a colonelcy for him in the Portuguese army. He also recommended Lee for a regular British promotion. Lee was delighted and prodded his friends in the British government to support Schaumburg-Lippe’s recommendation.86 Lee returned to Britain in December confident about his prospects for a permanent promotion. The war against France and Spain came to an end in February 1763 and with it came more disappointment for Lee. The British army reverted to peacetime strength, and in November he was retired on half-pay status in the rank of major. Lee was stunned and bitter; he felt that this enforced retirement devalued his recent accomplishments in Portugal. It was also a significant loss of income, making it more difficult for him to maintain his libertine lifestyle. Lee did not know it at the time, but he would never again serve actively in the British military.87 To lift his spirits, Lee traveled with Hall-Stevenson to the spa resort of Harrogate, where they lodged at the upscale Dragon Inn.88 “About the fourth evening I had a little relief by the arrival of two gentlemen,” remembered Rev. Alexander Carlyle, minister of the Presbyterian congregation in Inveresk, Scotland. “They were Hall, Esq., the author of Crazy Tales; and the famous Colonel Lee, commonly called Savage Lee.”89 Perhaps Lee had earned the nickname Savage Lee because of his fondness for and extensive knowledge of Native American cultures or perhaps it was a commentary on his violent temper, which was frequently on display at Harrogate. The cantankerous Lee argued with several guests of the Dragon Inn, particularly a young officer upon whom he took out his frustration with the British military and government.90 Lee returned to London in the fall of 1764 and found his personal finances in disarray. He admired the landscape of northern New York and applied for a land grant around Niagara, believing this would help [ 59 ]

General John Burgoyne, ca. 1766, by Joshua Reynolds, oil on canvas. Burgoyne was Charles Lee’s commanding officer in Portugal and showed great confidence in his military abilities. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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his financial situation. Lee also wanted to emulate the lifestyle of his old acquaintance Sir William Johnson.91 The competition for land grants in New York was fierce, however, and grants often went to persons and investment groups who had more substantial connections to George III, the ministry, and Parliament than Lee.92 His failure to obtain a land grant in New York heightened Lee’s bitterness toward the British government. “I see no chance of being provided for at home; my income is miserably scanty,” he lamented. As his prospects for professional advancement and financial security dimmed in Britain, Lee no longer had the resources to live like an English gentleman. “My inclinations [are] greater than those who are ignorant of my circumstances suppose. It is wretchedness itself not to be able to herd with the class of men we have been accustomed to from our infancy.”93 Thus with no suitable means of income at home, Lee searched for employment abroad, finding it far outside the British Empire, in Poland.

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4

Absolute Power Is a Serpent

Thirt y-t wo - y e ar - ol d C h ar l e s L ee h ur r iedly m ade plans in early December 1764 for his trip to Poland, where he hoped to find military employment and repair his damaged reputation.1 Lee’s quest for employment in the Polish military was not an anomaly for an eighteenth-century British officer. During peacetime, when opportunities for promotion were scarce, many British officers obtained military commissions abroad. Heads of state who sought to develop their militaries often gave commissions to experienced officers from other nations, usually at a higher rank than they had held in their respective militaries. Historian Janice E. Thomson writes that “the practices of hiring foreigners and allowing individuals to join other states’ armed forces were common in the period 1600 to 1800. The market for military manpower was as international as it could ever be.”2 Eighteenth-century sovereigns did not view nationality or country of origin as an obstacle to military obligations. Instead, the capabilities and expertise of officers, the desperation of soldiers, and the economic interests of the state and the individual determined who served and where. Lee obtained several recommendations from prominent British citizens and secured passage on a packet ship bound for the Netherlands. Lee left Britain politically jaded but committed to the idea of a true but limited monarchy; he would return as a democratic revolutionary. In the Netherlands, Lee was greeted by the longtime British ambassador to The Hague, Sir Joseph Yorke, who introduced him to several British and Dutch dignitaries. The influential Sir Joseph wrote Lee a letter of introduction to the British representative at Warsaw, Sir Thomas Wroughton.3 From the Netherlands, Lee traveled to Brunswick, a principality in what is now Germany, where he presented a letter of recommendation from Count Schaumburg-Lippe to the “Hereditary Prince,” Charles William [ 65 ]

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Ferdinand, the nephew of King Frederick II of Prussia and the brotherin-law of George III. “My reception at Brunswick, was if possible better than I cou’d have expect’d even from Count La Lippes recommendation,” he wrote to Sidney. “The Hereditary Prince did not treat me like a stranger well recommended but like an old deserving Client and Friend.”4 During Lee’s brief stay in Brunswick, he was struck by the charm, wit, and intelligence of Charles William Ferdinand’s wife, Lady Augusta. The two developed a close friendship despite Lee’s disillusionment with Lady Augusta’s brother, George III. They were often seen discussing politics, literature, art, and the latest gossip. “I ought to tell you that I adore the Lady Augusta,” he confessed to Sidney. “In two days we were so good friends that I talked politicks as freely to her as I shou’d to you.”5 After a few days in Brunswick, Lee traveled to Berlin, the capital of Prussia, where he gained an audience with Frederick II. Lee was received warmly by the Prussian king. He told his sister that “strangers of the highest rank do not meet with [such warmth] at that Court.”6 The two men had much in common: they each spoke several languages; they each had a love of and appreciation for classical literature and Enlightenment thought, especially the ideas of the French philosophes; and they each had a sense of military honor reminiscent of the Homeric aréte. Frederick had several conversations with Lee covering numerous topics, mostly related to America.7 Lee found the Prussian king “a very different man from what I expect’d, both in Person & address.” Frederick’s speech was “unceremonious and familiar; his words are the commonest and not the least recherchés; as I was taught to expect.”8 Lee was introduced to Frederick’s nephew, Prince Frederick William, the heir to the Prussian throne. The prince made an immediate impression on him. “The Hereditary Prince of Prussia,” Lee wrote to Sidney, “is really an uncommon fine figure, and unaffectedly civil in his behaviour.”9 Lee’s positive meetings with Frederick II and Frederick William gave him a boost in confidence. He arrived in Warsaw in March 1765 determined to obtain an important position in the military from King Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski of Poland. The Poland in which Lee sought his redemption was one of the largest territorial states in Europe and one of the most ethnically diverse. Poles made up about half of the population, roughly one-third were Byelorussians and Ukrainians, and the rest were Armenians, Jews, Lithuanians, and Germans. Poland’s ethnic diversity was mirrored by its religious pluralism: [ 66 ]

Portrait of Stanislaw Augustus Poniatowski, 1793, by Marcello Bacciarelli, oil on canvas. Charles Lee found an intellectual kindred spirit in the enlightened monarch Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski of Poland. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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the nation’s citizens included Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Lutheran Protestants, and Jews. However, Polish Catholics dominated the political and social structure, and there was considerable discrimination against those of the other faiths.10 Polish society was based on the dominance of the nobility and the servitude of the peasants who comprised more than 70 percent of the population. Poland’s peasants lived in abject poverty; their lives were regulated by laws and customs that placed them into a condition of serfdom.11 The Polish nobility (or the szlachta) constituted less than 10 percent of the population and enjoyed many political rights and privileges.12 About fifteen to twenty families, most notably the Czartoryskis and Potockis, constituted Poland’s power elite (or the magnates). They had an enormous amount of wealth and land and controlled over 60 percent of Polish peasants. The magnates also exercised tremendous political influence, selecting the members of Poland’s seventy local assemblies, which, in turn, chose the delegates to the national assembly, the Sejm. But most importantly, the magnates elected the king.13 Unlike other European monarchs who owed their authority to hereditary succession, Stanislaus owed his legitimacy to the magnates, who had elected him in September 1764.14 The king was well read in the books of the philosophes and was educated and had lived in London, Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. In 1750, he had met the British ambassador to Prussia, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams. When Sir Charles became Britain’s ambassador to Russia, he hired 23-year-old Stanislaus as his secretary.15 Once in St. Petersburg, Stanislaus attracted the attention of Russia’s future empress, the Grand Duchess Catherine. They began a love affair that lasted into 1757 and produced a daughter. In July 1762, six months after Grand Duke Peter ascended the Russian throne as Tsar Peter III, he was deposed by the imperial guard and murdered. Catherine was immediately proclaimed empress of Russia. She formed an alliance with Prussia’s equally imperialistic King Frederick II and shrewdly collaborated with the powerful Czartoryskis to ensure that her former lover Stanislaus was elected king of Poland.16 Charles Lee entered this political context in the spring of 1765. In Warsaw, the British ambassador, Sir Thomas Wroughton, introduced him to Stanislaus’s cousin, Prince Adam Casmir Czartoryski, a leading patron of the arts, the commandant of Poland’s military academy, and an Anglophile who had studied British history and literature. Lee found both men excellent companions, especially Prince Adam Casmir. Lee was impressed by [ 68 ]

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the way the prince “speaks and writes English fluently and critically.” His library “has almost every book in our language,” he exclaimed. “The longer I am acquainted with this man, the more I like him, the more I admire his talents; a retentive memory, solid judgment, and quickness, are seldom united in the same person, yet they are so superlatively in him.” Prince Adam Casmir was also a “master of several languages and possessed . . . an extensive knowledge of things,” including Latin and ancient Greek, classical literature, and world and Polish history.17 Lee was also impressed with Warsaw. Located along the Vistula River, the city stood at the crossroads of several major trade and transportation routes that connected Western Europe to the eastern European provinces of the Ottoman Empire and beyond that to Russia. By the 1760s, Warsaw had gained a reputation as one of Eastern Europe’s leading artistic and scientific centers, sustained by a steady influx of French-educated intellectuals and Italian artists. Lee found the city cosmopolitan, refined, and libertine; its avant-garde atmosphere was similar to that of London or Philadelphia. Prince Adam Casmir introduced him to many of the artists and intellectuals who were in residence at Warsaw. Lee was delighted to be included in their endless rounds of parties, costume balls, dinners, banquets, debates, art exhibits, theatrical performances, musical concerts, gambling clubs, and salacious carnivals.18 Stanislaus’s preference for placing talented and highly educated foreigners in coveted military posts increased Lee’s hopes for a position in the Polish service. But the king had no intention of expanding his military and offered Lee the post of chief aide-de-camp at court. Lee was disappointed with the offer, but it was “better than Idleing at Home,” he wrote.19 Lee’s primary responsibility was to educate Stanislaus about British politics. He dined at the king’s table and became acquainted with him as a public figure and as a person. Stanislaus “is indeed as far as I can be allow’d to judge . . . fraught with good qualities.”20 He confessed that “the life of a Courtier is not the best adapted to my disposition,” but he liked “the King’s character.”21 Stanislaus “is really an accomplished person,” Lee informed James Caulfeild, the Earl of Charlemont. “He is competently conversant with books, his notions are just, his intentions honest, and his temper not to be ruffled.”22 The king knew “the English language perfectly, altho’ for want of practice, he does not speak it fluently” and was “intimately conversant with all [England’s] best writers.” The two men shared a love for [ 69 ]

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Shakespeare and often discussed the works of the English bard.23 In Stanislaus, Lee had found his intellectual soul mate. Lee discussed a variety of topics with Stanislaus and learned that the king envisioned a Poland that was in a constant state of political and social improvement. But to achieve this goal, Stanislaus had to check Russian encroachments and intrigue, not an easy accomplishment given that he owed his election to Catherine’s manipulative influence over the magnates.24 Stanislaus’s desire to reform the Polish state was complicated by three additional factors: the absence of unity among the nobility, the vast number of local assemblies that existed in the nation, and the paralyzing political practice of the liberum veto (free veto), which protected the magnates’ privileged political status. The liberum veto allowed any delegate to the Sejm who believed that a proposal was detrimental to the interests that he represented to cease debate on an issue indefinitely and force the assembly to temporarily disband. The practice was frequently used to stop the progress of political reform and to help perpetuate a government that was prone to factionalism and corruption.25 After three months of daily conversations with Stanislaus and living among the Polish elite, Lee believed that the king would not succeed in reforming Poland. “This country is a wretched one,” he wrote to Charlemont, “nor do I think there is the least chance of bettering her situation, for, any attempt, either on the part of the King, of the leading men, or the common gentry, to mend the Constitution, are protested against by her neighbors . . . though, it must be confessed that, were her neighbors not to interfere, there would be no great probability of a reform.” The Polish nobility “have . . . an insurmountable negative power,” Lee explained. “A single veto dissolves the diet [Sejm].”26 He also described the Polish nobility as “ignorant, obstinate, and bigoted,” noting that “whether it is from despair, or their natural disposition, [they] pass their hours in such consumate idleness and dissipation.”27 Lee sympathized with Stanislaus because he saw Britain moving in a similar direction. Lee lamented that in British society, virtue and honor were becoming increasingly disregarded in favor of corruption and incompetence; placemen were rewarded and men of action were ignored. He declared in his conversations with the Polish king and other notables that the British government was moving toward tyranny as George III and his ministers sought to control Parliament, consolidate power, and deprive the people of their liberties. “For God’s sake, you patriot [ 70 ]

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few at home,” he pleaded with Charlemont, “absolute power is a serpent of that wriggling, penetrating kind, that, if it can but introduce its head, it is in vain to pull at the tail.”28 Stanislaus listened quietly and intently to Lee’s frequent lectures (or, more appropriately, to his rants) about the state of British politics. Lee appreciated the opportunity that Stanislaus afforded him to “advance my doctrines, not the most favourable to monarchy” and demonstrated his appreciation by presenting the king with one of his prized possessions, a sword believed to have been owned by the seventeenth-century Puritan revolutionary Oliver Cromwell.29 Stanislaus, “though a King, is a great admirer of that extraordinary man,” Lee told Sidney.30 Lee was also troubled by what he believed was a disregard for liberty within the British political system. In an unpublished treatise, “A Political Essay,” which he wrote sometime between 1765 and 1770, he defined liberty as the ability to voice one’s opinions and to act and to live as one pleased without the fear or threat of government oppression and imprisonment.31 In a free society, the people have the right to protest unjust, coercive, and corrupt actions of government that threatened their ability to choose the way they wanted to live. “An abhorrence of tyrants, or even of those who have a semblance of tyrants . . . is inseparable from the jealous spirit [of liberty] and the principle of resistance; whoever would extinguish the one, would extinguish the other,” he wrote. Lee warned that “mercenaries and court-retainers” were working within the British government to “extinguish the necessary jealous spirit of liberty and inculcate the principles of nonresistance.” The people needed to rise in mass protest to curtail the insidious designs of a corrupt and tyrannical monarchy. “Keeping alive the jealous spirit of liberty is a common cause,” he declared. “A detestation of tyrants, or even those who lean to tyranny, is inseparable from this spirit. . . . The duty of every common citizen, who has the interest of his country at heart, [is] to exert continually whatever force he has to defeat their purposes; or, to at least, weaken their influence; for in mechanics, the smallest force continually applied will overcome the most violent motions communicated to bodies.”32 Lee’s political radicalism took shape in Eastern Europe, and the longer he remained there, the more radical his views became. He believed that Eastern Europe’s political and social strife were indicative of the despotic and corrupt absolutist regimes that dominated the region. He was particularly troubled by the number of peasants who were relegated to serfdom. [ 7 1 ]

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Lee witnessed Poland’s serfs doing backbreaking labor and routinely being mistreated. “Were I to call the common people brutes, I should injure the quadruped creation,” he wrote of the Polish peasantry. “This certainly must be the effect of slavery.”33 Lee’s stay in Poland heightened his awareness of the inhumanity of slavery: “I have, if possible, since . . . my residence here, a greater horror of slavery than ever,” he wrote to Charlemont.34 Lee empathized with Poland’s peasants. He probably read the popular epistolary novels of the time such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–1748) and Rousseau’s best-selling Julie, or the New Héloise (1761), which featured tragic heroines who suffered under the patriarchal tyranny of the family. These novels produced a popular empathy for the victims of injustice and helped readers develop a sense of compassion for the aspirations of others, especially the desire to live free.35 The empathy these novels elicited was eventually transferred to the political discourse of the period, offering readers literary parallels to the American colonists who were struggling with their own form of parental tyrant, the British government.36 The relationship between Britain and its American colonies had developed within an imperial system dominated by economic loopholes, corruption, the diffusion of political power, and a relative lack of oversight. The colonists took advantage of the haphazard nature of imperial governance to pursue their own social, political, and economic agendas. But the political and economic realities of the years after the French and Indian War forced British officials to institute new imperial reforms that would help defray the cost of the war and tighten the government’s control over the empire. They reformed the customs service and enacted a series of taxes and laws, beginning with the stamp tax in 1765, that were designed to raise revenue, standardize imperial governance, and assert Parliament’s sovereignty. The Americans saw in this new policy an assault on their rights and liberties as free-born Englishmen. Lee was delighted that the Americans were willing to stand up to Britain’s attempts to exert greater control over their lives. “May God prosper the Americans in their resolutions,” he exclaimed, “that there may be one Asylum at least on the earth for men, who prefer their natural rights to the fantastical prerogative of a foolish perverted head because it wears a Crown.”37 Although Lee delighted in providing Polish intellectuals and political figures with his assessments of the Anglo-American crisis and British politics, he grew increasingly restless in Warsaw. When he asked Stanislaus for [ 72 ]

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a new assignment, the king agreed to send him to Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) as an escort for the new Polish ambassador to the court of the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa III.38 The Dardanelles had captured Lee’s imagination ever since he had read Homer’s classic tales of King Agamemnon, Helen of Troy, Achilles, and Odysseus as a schoolboy. “To see these countries, the Theatre of so great actions, which we are so well acquainted with from School had been long the object of my wishes and curiosity,” he exclaimed.39 Lee abandoned the Polish emissary’s slowmoving entourage and joined a detachment of Ottoman soldiers who were transporting gold tribute from Moldavia (now Moldova) to the sultan.40 The detachment took a route through the mountainous regions of Bulgaria at the height of the winter. “I suffer’d many inconveniences,” Lee complained to Sidney. “The cold in the mountains of Bulgaria was excessive.” He also found his company inept. “We pass’d some nights . . . without fire or provision for ourselves or horses from the stupid improvidence of our conductors. . . . Several men and Horses dyed of cold.” Lee informed Sidney that had it not been for his experiences braving the cold and inclement weather in America, he “shou’d perhaps have accompany’d ’em.”41 The circuitous route through the Balkans was not without its value, however. Lee witnessed almost daily the poverty and wretched conditions of many Eastern Europeans. This experience helped sharpen his critique of unchecked political authority. Lee denounced Eastern Europe’s absolute monarchies and suggested that Britain’s Tories take a trip to the region to see for themselves the effects of monarchy and arbitrary rule. “On my journey I cou’d not help reflecting upon the . . . Monarchical Writers who wou’d entail upon us their favourite absolute Government; at least we must imagine these to be their intentions when they wou’d weaken our jealousy which is the preservation of liberty, and lesson the horrors of despotism,” he told Sidney. The “finest provinces” in Eastern Europe had become “one continued desert; the few Inhabitants who survive the oppression of Their Tyrants presenting famine and apprehensions of still greater misery on their countenances.” In village after village, Lee witnessed “burying places of so prodigious extent” and “every species of wretchedness.”42 Lee arrived in Constantinople in February 1766. The severe weather in the Bulgarian mountains triggered a serious bout of rheumatism that confined him to his room for several days. Lee remained in the Ottoman capital for three months, touring its sites and enjoying its public baths and [ 73 ]

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covered bazaars. He also survived an earthquake that devastated the city. “Five nights ago happen’d here a most dreadfull Earthquake,” he informed Sidney. “It has thrown down the greatest part of the stone buildings, demolish’d their most magnificent Mosques, and bury’d an infinite number of People under the ruins.”43 The Constantinople earthquake of May 1766 killed many residents and damaged or toppled several buildings, including the fifteenth-century imperial Fatih Mosque.44 Lee breathed a sigh of relief as the wood-framed building in which he was living “receiv’d no damage.”45 In the aftermath of the Constantinople earthquake, Lee received news of his mother’s death. His response reveals that perhaps he had reconciled his differences with Isabella. More than likely, time and distance had helped heal the rift between mother and son. Although his mother had been a constant source of criticism and disapproval, Lee confessed that “in the latter part of her life . . . my affection for her was much stronger.”46 The news from Britain was not all melancholy, however. Lord Thanet informed him that a new opportunity had emerged to obtain a permanent promotion in the British military. He did not give Lee an explanation for this new opportunity, but the downfall of the ministry of George Grenville and the elevation of the Whig Charles Watson-Wentworth, Lord Rockingham, as chief minister, may have had something to do with it.47 Lee left Constantinople in the middle of June, returning to Warsaw, where he asked for and received permission from Stanislaus to go to Britain to pursue this new opportunity for a preferment. The Polish king promised Lee that he would “continue me in the capacity of Aid de Camp” and provided him with a letter of recommendation to George III. Stanislaus hoped that Lee would repay the favor by acting as his unofficial agent in London.48 By August, Lee was on his way back to Britain, stopping briefly at the French spa resorts of Calais and Lyon, where he mingled with some of continental Europe’s prominent citizens. Lee arrived in London in late December. He frequented the city’s coffeehouses, taverns, inns, and salons and engaged in political debates and discussions with intellectuals and politicians such as Catherine Macaulay, Irish statesman and MP Edmund Burke, and Dr. Samuel Johnson. The Anglo-American crisis and the emergence of a vocal political radicalism in the city, which was represented by the flamboyant MP John Wilkes, dominated the conversations. London’s radicals championed liberty and democracy and opposed Britain’s new imperial policy. Lee’s time in Eastern Europe had helped develop his [ 74 ]

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political radicalism, and in London he expressed it with confidence. Yet Lee soon discovered that political radicalism came with a heavy price.49 Lee asked for and (remarkably) received an audience with George III, but he found the reception icy.50 Undoubtedly his rants against the British monarchy had reached the king, who declined to accept Stanislaus’s recommendation and flatly rejected Lee’s request for a promotion.51 Lee’s critique of his commanding officers and of the British government, his anti-monarchical views, and his personal attacks against George III had placed him at a disadvantage, and no friend or influence could intervene.52 Lee seemed to be the only person who was surprised at his failure. His old acquaintance from Warsaw, Sir Thomas Wroughton, wrote that he was “not at all surprised that you find the door shut against you by the person [George III] who has such unbounded Credit, as you have ever too freely indulged a liberty of declaiming, which many infamous & invidious people have not failed to inform him of.”53 Wroughton admired Lee’s habit of speaking his mind but warned that it was “not politic.” He offered him unheeded advice: “Common prudence should teach us to hold our tongues rather than to risque our own fortunes without any prospect of advantage to ourselves or neighbors.”54 In London, Lee learned of the repeal of the Stamp Act. Parliament’s enactment of a stamp tax for the American colonies in 1765 had aroused a vocal reaction in America that had given birth to the Sons of Liberty in Boston and in New York. Until passage of the stamp tax, Parliament had enacted numerous laws for the regulation of colonial trade; these laws occasionally generated some revenue for the British government. But the stamp tax marked a major change in the distribution of political power in the empire. It threatened home rule and was a potent assertion of Parliament’s authority. The vocal and sometimes violent American protests against the Stamp Act had caused Parliament to repeal the law in March of 1766. Lee’s reaction was typical; he interpreted the American resistance to the tax as a victory for the cause of liberty and of English rights. “Nothing could make the American colonists cast off their obedience, or even respect to their mother country, but some attempt on the essence of their liberty, such undoubtedly the stamp act was,” he declared.55 Lee argued that had the stamp tax “remained unrepealed, and admitted as a precedent,” the Americans would have been “to all intents and purposes” reduced to a condition of servitude. He applauded the Americans’ challenge of the new imperial [ 75 ]

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policy and asserted that had they not protested this measure, their “property would lie at the mercy of the Crown’s minister and the minister’s ministers . . . and the House of Commons . . . would find no end to the necessity of taxing these people.”56 Lee contended that the Stamp Act represented an attack “upon [the Americans] by a wicked blundering” ministry.57 Lee also condemned the British public for its indifference toward the Anglo-American crisis, claiming that the cause of America was also their cause. “In whatever part of the empire a flagitious minister manifestly invades” English rights and liberties, “whether in Great Britain, Ireland or America, every Englishman . . . ought to consider their cause as his own,” he declared. Lee interpreted the public’s silence as complicity with the government’s war against English rights and liberties. Lee hoped that the British people would demand that their government end its assault on English rights and liberties in America. If they did not, he warned, they would eventually suffer the same fate.58 The potential for a mass movement to reform the British government appeared in the spring of 1768 in the political controversy that centered on the radical MP John Wilkes. In 1763, Wilkes had written an editorial in his newspaper The North Briton that criticized the government’s handling of the peace negotiations that ended the French and Indian War.59 George III felt that Wilkes had attacked his credibility in the editorial and ordered him arrested for seditious libel. Wilkes was also expelled from the House of Commons. After a brief period of self-exile in France, he returned to Britain, and was elected to Parliament from Middlesex. Wilkes was arrested, tried, and convicted of seditious libel in April 1768 and sentenced to twenty-two months in King’s Bench Prison in St. George’s Fields, London. One month later, as a group of Wilkes’s supporters gathered outside the prison to protest his conviction, British troops, who were on the scene for crowd control, fired on the protestors, killing six and wounding fifteen. The London press called this event the “massacre” at St. George’s Fields. Less than two years later, a similar occurrence would take place in Boston, Massachusetts, and the example of the first “massacre” would not be lost on the participants in the second.60 Lee warned that the St. George’s Fields “massacre” was a signal that unchecked political authority combined with access to a large standing army would “inevitably end in the destruction of our liberties.”61 Lee praised the “brave spirit” that the Wilkes controversy awakened and hoped that it would lead to another “glorious Revolution in national [ 7 6 ]

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affairs.”62 He declared that the people needed to rise up and replace the monarchy with a representative government of informed, virtuous, and civically engaged citizens. “Virtue . . . [is] the basis of republics,” Lee exclaimed, “a public and patriotick spirit reigning in the brest of every individual superceding all private considerations, it was this spirit alone that carried several of the Grecian states and the Roman Republick triumphantly through so many ages.” Lee believed that for republics to survive, civic virtue, patriotism, and sacrifice had to be instilled in each succeeding generation of citizens.63 Who was in the best position to become the guarantors of a republic’s survival? Lee’s answer was women. In their roles as mothers, women would be responsible for rearing patriotic children, for shaping their moral choices, and for inspiring in them civic virtue. Lee’s understanding of republicanism led him to question the lack of attention paid to the relationship between women and the state. “I have long lamented the accursed prevailing notion that women ought to have defective educations,” he confided to his cousin Annabella Bunbury Blake, Lady Blake, “it was the most cunning fiend in hell who first broached this doctrine; which had it not prevailed, the better part of the globe would not have groaned in the wretched state of slavery we at present see it.”64 Lee argued that women should be educated in the subjects that would help them rear the next generation of republican children: politics, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. Thus he anticipated by twenty years the concept of republican motherhood. “For God’s sake, Madam,” Lee commanded his cousin, “have as many daughters as possible . . . and some descendant of Catherine M’Caulay may attribute the salvation of the state to your progeny.”65 Although Lee had hoped that the British public would see the need for political change, he was not overly optimistic. His pessimism was based on the assumption that corruption was endemic within British society, causing apathy and a lack of respect for rights and liberties. The British people were blind to the possibility that their traditional rights and liberties could be threatened by a government that was steadily becoming more corrupt and tyrannical. The Wilkes controversy and the Anglo-American crisis fired Lee with thoughts of running for a seat in the House of Commons. Britain needed leaders who would bring “vigour and integrity” to government and who would hold George III and the ministry accountable for their actions. However, Lee never stood for election. Instead, he had reached a personal crossroad. Military preferment no longer seemed a reality, but bankruptcy did. Although Lee had [ 7 7 ]

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inherited the family estate after his mother’s death, his extravagant, peripatetic lifestyle and his reckless spending threatened his financial security. He needed another source of income. George III offered all half-pay officers who had served in America during the French and Indian War generous land grants in the territories Britain had acquired from France and Spain. Lee applied for and received grants of 20,000 acres in East Florida and 10,000 acres on St. John’s Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But stipulations attached to these grants restricted their profit potential.66 Lee’s East Florida speculation failed to yield much of a profit, but his investments on St. John’s Island eventually produced some modest financial gains.67 Lee had a cavalier attitude about money and was often in financial straits, but Sidney believed that he had enough assets to marry and to raise a family. The unmarried Sidney prodded Charles to give matrimony some thought. She loved her brother dearly and was concerned about his lifestyle. Sidney wanted to see him settle down to the life of a country gentleman. Charles doubted whether his personality was suited for married life. “If I had a good opinion of my own temper and constancy as I have of some women’s, I shou’d certainly marry,” he told her, explaining that “without a thorough confidence in one’s self,” marriage was “a measure not only rash but dishonest.” Lee described marriage as “an accursed connection” that placed both partners in the “odiousness of dependency,” and he refused to be pushed into it by his sister or by social conventions.68 In December 1768, Lee wrote to Sidney with some important news. Was he coming to Chester? Maybe he was getting married? Or perhaps he had finally obtained his military promotion? It was none of these. Lee was returning to Eastern Europe to take part in the recently begun RussoTurkish War. He had stayed in contact with Stanislaus after his return to Britain, and the Polish king had offered to help secure a commission for him in the Russian army. “In Spring I intend with the recommendation of the Polish King to join the Russian Army, and serve the ensuing campaign against the Turks,” Lee informed Sidney. He still held to the hope that by demonstrating his military abilities on the battlefield, even at the head of a Russian army, he could obtain a permanent promotion from George III. “I flatter myself a little more practice will make me a good soldier,” Lee told his sister, who tried to convince him to reconsider his decision.69 Sidney believed that Charles stood a good chance to finally gain the promotion that he so desired, as rumors abounded that George III would once again [ 7 8 ]

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appoint the Whig Lord Rockingham as his chief minister. “You express a regret in my leaving England when there is a chance of Ld Rockingham’s coming into Power,” he responded. “My absence will never hurt my interest; on the contrary it will meliorate it—practice in war will enhance my pretentions.”70 Lee revised his will; left a copy with one of his friends, the poet and playwright George Colman, the elder; and told Sidney that he had “settled all . . . [of his] affairs more distinctly than you will think me capable of.”71 Lee left Britain in late December 1768. His destination was Paris, where he was to meet his escort to Poland, Prince Adam Casmir. In the French metropolis, Lee suffered from another severe case of gout. He hoped to find relief in the spa resort of Marseilles, in southern France, where he could bathe in its mineral waters and swim in the Mediterranean. Lee also wanted to travel to Corsica to observe the Corsican rebellion against French authority before departing for Poland. His plans quickly changed, however. Prince Adam Casmir arrived in Paris in early January 1769 and notified him that there was no time for spa baths, swims in the Mediterranean, or Corsican revolutionaries. Poland was in the middle of a civil war and a major military campaign between the Russians and the Turks would begin in the spring.72 The two men traveled to Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburg Austrian Empire, where they waited for an armed escort to take them to Warsaw.73 Lee put his life on hold for the military campaign in Eastern Europe. He was overjoyed by the thought of commanding Cossack swordsmen and Wallachian cavalry. These were his kind of soldiers.74 Lee viewed war as a glorious adventure, a great test of manliness and virtue. He felt a comfortable attachment to the battlefield. Although this was an opportunity for him to demonstrate arête on a much larger and grander scale than he had done previously, there was something else that drew Lee back into the fight. Perhaps it was the adrenaline rush produced by combat or the recognition that war was the only profession for which he was properly suited. But it may have been something more sinister. Brutalized and dissocialized by combat, Lee had become accustomed to living by the gun.

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5

The Brutality of Love and War

L e e h ad e m e r g e d f r om h i s f i r s t t r i p t o E as t e r n Europe a political radical. His next foray into the region would transform him into a military radical. Although Lee had seen and experienced the brutality of war in North America and Portugal, nothing could have prepared him for the slaughter he would witness in Eastern Europe, where unconventional tactics more than conventional strategies shaped warfare. Many of Lee’s contemporaries continued to support highly disciplined battalions and linear formations as the proper model for conducting wars, but Lee saw things differently. His interest in unconventional methods of warfare, which had initially taken shape in North America, became fully developed in Eastern Europe. By the 1770s, Lee was vigorously promoting tactics that emphasized simplicity, mobility, adaptability, and psychological warfare. Eastern Europe, especially Poland, was a politically turbulent region. Although Polish dissenters could own land and practice their faith, they were denied political rights. The Russian empress Catherine insisted that Polish nobility of the Eastern Orthodox faith be given political rights equal to those of the predominant Catholics. By 1768, she was joined by Prussia’s King Frederick II, who asserted his desire to protect the interests of Protestants in Poland.1 Catherine instructed her representative in Warsaw, the charming, intelligent, and volatile Nikolay Repnin, to force Poland’s Sejm to grant political equality to dissenters.2 Repnin ordered Russian troops into Poland, but the Sejm was not intimidated and refused Catherine’s demands.3 Repnin arrested several Polish Catholic leaders and supported the organization of two confederations (or military associations) of dissenters who demanded equal rights from the government.4 “The important affairs of the Dissidents were . . . refused,” Sir Thomas Wroughton informed Lee. “Those gentlemen [the dissenters] have formed two confederations [ 80 ]

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in Poland & in Lithuania, supported by a Russian army of 30, or 40,000 men.”5 In March 1768, Repnin’s strategy succeeded, and the Sejm gave Polish dissenters political equality.6 Catherine’s meddling and Repnin’s heavy-handed tactics aroused the ire of the Polish Catholic nobility, who organized the militarily formidable Bar Confederation and declared that they would fight to defend the privileged position of their faith and to undermine Russian influence in Poland.7 Simultaneously, Orthodox Christian serfs in a region of Poland that is today located in the Ukraine rebelled against their Catholic masters. This rebellion quickly spread into areas controlled by the Bar Confederates. By the summer of 1768, Poland was plunged into a civil war that was complicated by the presence of Russian troops and by Stanislaus’s ineffective leadership.8 Relying on a strategy that combined methods of irregular warfare with aggressive cavalry tactics, the Bar Confederates engaged the Russians. After one military confrontation, Bar Confederate forces retreated across the Dniester River,9 which served as Poland’s eastern border with the Ottoman Empire. Russian troops in pursuit sacked the Ottoman town of Balta (now in the Ukraine), massacring its mainly Jewish population. This incident provoked the Ottoman sultan Mustafa III to declare war on Russia.10 In the spring of 1769, Stanislaus decided to mobilize his 24,000-man army on the side of Russia. The Bar Confederates answered by laying siege to Warsaw.11 Lee and Prince Adam Casmir quietly arrived in Warsaw shortly after the siege had begun. Stanislaus granted Lee a commission as a major general in the Polish army and conferred upon him the Order of the Knights of St. Stanislaus.12 Only a few months earlier Lee had been just another halfpay British officer who had been overlooked for a preferment by George III. Now he was a major general in the Polish army and one of Eastern Europe’s highest honors had been conferred on him. “This testimony of so excellent a Prince’s esteem flatters me extremely,” Lee gushed. “He treats me more like a brother than Patron and Master.”13 For the first time in his life, Lee felt validated. Lee viewed the Bar Confederates as undisciplined selfish “banditties of robbers” who were more concerned with their Catholic faith and its privileges than they were for the welfare of their nation.14 The Bar Confederates controlled the main roads leading to Warsaw, making any attempt to leave or enter the city risky. The residents of Warsaw lived in constant fear [ 81 ]

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of bombardment and death. The Polish troops in the city were ineffectual. “Our station here . . . is whimsical,” Lee informed Lady Blake. “We have few troops, the bulk of these totally disaffected and the town is full of . . . Confederates.”15 Acts of sabotage by Bar Confederate sympathizers (mostly involving setting fires) added to residents’ fears as an intense paranoia gripped Warsaw. “We have frequent alarms, and the pleasure of sleeping every night with our pistols on our pillows,” Lee wrote.16 He knew that Britain had given superficial support to Poland’s dissenters and that several British naval officers were unofficially advising the Russian navy, but he wanted to know whether or not the British government was going to become officially engaged in these Eastern European conflicts. Lee asked Lord Thanet to try to ascertain where some of Britain’s “very knowing, wise politicians” stood on the Eastern European situation. “Give me some hints of what these worthies intend,” he pleaded.17 Lee’s experience in Eastern Europe brought British imperial policy into sharper relief for him. He continued to exhibit resentment toward the British government’s treatment of the Americans and was often “thrown into strange agitations of passion” whenever he heard of or read news about “the state of . . . American politics.” Lee seethed every time he thought about Britain’s attempt “to disfranchise three millions of people of all the rights of men.”18 He also lamented that the Anglo-American crisis and the Wilkes controversy had damaged Britain’s international reputation. “How sunk are we . . . from the summit of glory, opulence, and strength, to the lowest degree of poverty, imbecillity, and contempt.” All of Europe “is astonished at the rapidity of the change; high and low, men of every order, from the ministers, of state to the political barbers, make it the subject of their admiration. How can it happen, say they, that Great Britain, so lately the mistress of the globe, with America in one hand, Asia and Africa in another, instead of the glorious task of giving laws and peace to nations, protecting the weak and injured, checking the powerful and oppressive, should employ her time in trampling on the rights of her dependencies, and violating her own sacred laws, on which her superiority over her neighbors is founded?,” Lee asked.19 “Every nation, even those who have the least idea of the dignity of liberty . . . laugh and hoot at us.”20 Lee was repeatedly asked: “Is not every of your most boasted laws trampled upon, or eluded? Is not perjury, desolation, and murder encouraged and rewarded with the national money? Are not your magistrates, from the sole merit of being declared enemies of [ 82 ]

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the law, become factious partizans? Is not the choice of your people in their representatives, treated with contempt and annulled? Are not your citizens massacred in the public streets and in the arms of their households . . . by the military, and the military thanked for their fiend-like alertness?”21 It became increasingly difficult for him to answer these questions, but he tried nevertheless. “When I attempt to assure them that the body of the nation [Britain] is still untainted, that they still have sentiments of freedom,” Lee told Lord Thanet. “They answer that such sentiments are of little consequence, when courage is wanting to put them in motion.”22 Who was to blame for Britain’s downfall? Who was responsible for undermining the rights and liberties of the British people at home and throughout the empire? George III and his “blundering knavish” ministers, of course. Their corrupt practices were manifest in the British government and in society, “pushing servility farther than the rascally Senate of Tiberius,” Lee wrote.23 “It was some consolation . . . for the generous few of the Romans who survived the liberties of their country,” he remarked sarcastically, “that it was a Julius Caesar, a man with more than mortal talents, who was their subverter; and the patriots of England had some mitigation for their spleen, that it was a Cromwell who had over-reached them; but that a clod” like George III, whose character is shaped by “perverseness, obstinacy, dissimulation and timidity[,] should be able to encompass the enslaving of a spirited nation whose every law seems dictated by Liberty herself, is too much to bear.”24 The British people needed to act immediately to protect their rights and liberties. “It is time something should be done,” Lee informed Lady Blake. “The virtue which I believe to exist in the body of the people . . . [must] be set in motion.”25 In Warsaw, Lee found time to tutor a young Polish woman whom he identified simply as Louisa in his correspondence. Louisa’s identity remains a mystery, but she was more than likely from the Polish nobility. In letters to acquaintances, Lee affectionately referred to her as “my scholar.”26 He had professed an interest in several women during his life, but his feelings for them could not match those he had for Louisa. Lee fell deeply in love and asked Louisa for her hand in marriage, but she rejected his proposal. Perhaps Louisa knew his faults too well. Yet Lee persisted. “I am born of a reputable family, I hope my character is rather a fair one; and as my fortune is sufficiently ample to make an honest man independent and an honest woman content, I cannot see the mighty crime in wishing to [ 83 ]

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unite your fortune with mine.” While Louisa relished Lee’s company, she probably believed that his nature would make a sustained union impossible. Lee again pleaded with her, “O Louisa! you ought, you must, have seen this ambition giving place to another less tranquil sentiment. Why did you not check it in its birth, by affecting to find difficulties in the task you had undertaken?” When he failed to convince her, his emotions turned to enmity, Lee lashed out at her for “pretending to more than common friendship” and for taking advantage of his feelings. “Why did you not, on some such humane pretext, remove me from your side before the flame had acquired such inextinguishable fierceness? . . . This you should in charity have done, as you was determined to treat me as an enemy the moment I declared I loved [you].” He told her that “you know your own charms, your own powers too well” and described her as “vain, or, what is worse, hypocritical and deceitful.”27 Rejected in public life, Lee now felt the sting of romantic rejection as well. But it was time for him to leave Warsaw. By the summer of 1769, the stranglehold of the Bar Confederates on the city had weakened. The Russian military faced major challenges from the Ottomans on Russia’s southwestern frontier. Catherine gave Repnin the rank of field marshal and assigned him to command a Russian force encamped near Warsaw.28 Repnin was to move his troops to the Dniester River, where he was to rendezvous with the main Russian army (the First Army) under the command of Field Marshal Alexander M. Golytsin for an assault on the Ottoman fortress of Khotin on the eastern bank of the upper Dniester in presentday Ukraine. Lee was assigned to Repnin’s staff as chief military advisor. “I am happily very well acquainted with [Repnin],” he informed Sidney, “and I believe am a sort of favorite of his.” Lee was thrilled that he would be actively involved in the military campaign against the Ottomans and to be associated with someone of Repnin’s stature.29 On June 20, Lee quietly left Warsaw with Repnin. In tow was Spado, a small black Pomeranian that had been given to Lee as a gift by an acquaintance in the Polish nobility. Spado became Lee’s constant companion; wherever he went Spado was by his side.30 Lee and Repnin reached the Russian encampment near Warsaw and prepared their troops to march to the Dniester. It took several weeks to reach the river, where Golytsin’s 80,000-man army had been preparing since April for a campaign against Khotin and its garrison of 30,000 well-trained and well-equipped troops.31 [ 84 ]

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While still in Warsaw, Lee had heard that Poland was “in one general state of confusion, filled with devastation and murder.” On the long march to the Dniester, he witnessed that devastation up close. Southeastern Poland, in particular, was an area of violence, lawlessness, and pillaging. Disease and famine contributed to the state of chaos in the region. Isolated geographically and away from the center of the conventional war, the residents of southeastern Poland experienced both the brutality and the terror that comes with unconventional warfare. The Bar Confederates and the Polish government had a small military presence and very little political organization in the region. This power vacuum was filled by local independent warlords who essentially commanded small paramilitary gangs that indiscriminately attacked Russian, Polish, Ottoman, and Bar Confederate troops and their sympathizers and carried out depredations against villages that did not recognize their authority. Bar Confederate and Ottoman forces used guerrilla tactics to keep the Russians and their Polish allies off balance. The Russians, in turn, chose to terrorize into submission the Bar Confederates and their base of popular support by razing villages and estates sympathetic to the insurgency. The belligerents left farms devoid of crops or livestock as they sought to deny each other sustenance. The region’s noncombatants were caught in the middle of a raging conflict that seemed to have no end in sight. As Lee passed through southeastern Poland with Repnin’s forces, he witnessed the consequences of the Eastern European variation of irregular warfare.32 While the irregulars that Lee encountered in Poland were not as skilled or as sophisticated in guerrilla warfare as Native Americans and colonists in North America, they left a trail of death and destruction in village after village. The sight of families rummaging through the smoldering remains of their houses and the smell of rotting corpses strewn across dusty roads or hanging from makeshift gallows and trees remained with Lee. “Their method of carrying on war is about as gentle as . . . in America,” he commented. “The Confederates hang up all the Russians (generally by the feet) who fall into their clutches, and the Russians put to the sword the Confederates.” The Cossack troops, in particular, had a reputation for brutality. “The Russian Cossacks have a . . . sang froid in these executions,” Lee recounted “The other day at a place called Rava, forty or fifty Confederates were condemned to the bayonet, but as they were tolerably well dressed, they were desired to strip for the ceremony, the Cossacks not choosing to [ 85 ]

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make any holes in their coats.”33 Meanwhile, partisans affiliated with local warlords “rob, strip, and generally murder every body of every religion, color, and complexion who falls into their hands.”34 Lee noted in his personal campaign journal that the army’s march was “tedious unedifying, and not very glorious.” It was often slowed by random skirmishes against Ottoman and Bar Confederate troops or by attacks from independent partisans. The natural elements also proved troublesome. “In all the skirmishes . . . we have been victorious,” Lee reported to Sidney, but “we had a cursed deal of rain, and were a great part of the time without tents, the water very bad, and the little wine we had worse.”35 While persistent rains left dirt roads muddy and impassable, the destruction of villages and farmlands left those same roads clogged with frightened refugees. This kind of death and destruction could cause any person to become hardened and pitiless, detached from the suffering of other humans. In Lee’s first trip to Eastern Europe in 1765, he had taken notice of the suffering endured by the region’s peasantry. Now his letters demonstrated the effects of wartime brutalization on his psyche. Lee’s correspondence was devoid of empathy. In its place were mechanical commentaries about fighting and winning battles and the suffering that he endured, not that of others. At the Dniester, Lee and Repnin learned that Golytsin had already moved his forces toward Khotin and had encountered heavy resistance along the way from the Ottomans and their allies. Golytsin’s army eventually forced the Ottomans to retreat to the fortress.36 The next two days and nights were an ordeal for Lee and Repnin’s forces as they made their way through the forests, hills, and ravines that dominated the terrain in this part of Eastern Europe. They experienced incessant ambushes and fought several skirmishes against Ottoman-allied Crimean Tatar cavalry and local partisans.37 “By what miracle we reached [Golytsin’s army] I am at loss to expound,” Lee exclaimed, “as the whole country was filled with Tartars to the right, to the left, on every side of us; however we did after being in a cursed sweat for two days and nights without a guide in that wild country, and fancying every bush a Tartar, stumble upon the army.”38 The Russian army was slowly advancing toward Khotin when it was suddenly attacked. Tatar cavalry hit “chiefly on the left wing of the advanced corps,” where Lee was “mounted most superbly on a cart horse.” The Tatars scattered the Russians’ advance corps. Ottoman infantry pounced on the panicked Russians pouring shot into their confused lines. “The Turks [ 86 ]

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entered at this crisis, trampled down part of our infantry, drove us all who were mounted, headlong” into a nearby deep, narrow ravine, Lee recalled. The Russian infantry, however, reestablished its lines and “with valour and firmness . . . fired on the . . . pursuing Turks, and on the faces of those who were advancing, which . . . checked their progress till the second line of infantry consisting of eight thousand men” formed on the other side of the ravine. The Ottomans were again forced to retreat to Khotin.39 The Russians quickly regrouped and pressed the initiative against Khotin, but they had very few siege guns large enough to batter the fortress’s thick outer walls.40 By early August, a large Ottoman army arrived to reinforce Khotin’s garrison, precipitating several days of intense fighting. On August 14, the weary Russians withdrew to the northern banks of the Dniester and eventually crossed back into Poland.41 Lee fumed at the incompetence the Russian commanders demonstrated, including Repnin. “Your Majesty will have heard of our retreat,” he wrote to Stanislaus, “a thousand reasons will undoubtedly be given, and probably not one founded in justice.” Lee informed him that “the operations have been miserably concluded” because the Russians “opened with a capital defect—without a certainty of the state of the place (Chotzim).” They marched against the Ottoman fortress without the means to carry out a successful assault against it. The Russians brought “pop guns” instead of “battering artillery” and decided to lay siege to the fortress knowing that an Ottoman army of “an hundred and fifty thousand men” was expected to arrive in the area, Lee explained.42 He noted that the Ottomans were positioned in a way that exposed their flanks: “Why we did not attack . . . [the] exposed . . . army . . . I cannot conceive.” Lee blamed the Russian officers for this missed opportunity.43 He wrote to Sidney that before his latest military experience in Eastern Europe he had known that “blockheads in command cou’d render abortive the valour of troops.”44 Now he was even more certain of it. Although Lee voiced his displeasure with the decisions the Russian commanders made, he did not witness the close of the campaign, which ended in September with the Russians capturing Khotin.45 Lee had been struck with rheumatic fever on the campaign, complaining that the “bad water . . . and lying in the mud without a tent” had aggravated his already fragile health. In severe pain, he left the Russian army just before it began its retreat to the Dniester and made his way to the Polish border town [ 87 ]

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SWEDEN

Riga

Moscow

BALT IC SEA PRUSSIA

Gdansk PRUSSIA

Berlin

N

Vilna LITHUANIA

RUSSIAN EMPIRE

POLISH COMMONWEALTH

Warsaw

SAXONY

Lublin

Dresden

Kiev

POLAND

Krakow AUSTRIA

Vienna 0 0

100

200 mi

Kamieniéc

Spisz (Zips) Khotin Fortress

U K RAI N E

Moldavia (Moldova) TURKEY

(OTTOMAN EMPIRE)

100 200 300 km

CRIMEA

Map of Poland and Eastern Europe in the 1760s showing Khotin.

of Kaminec (or Kamieniéc), where he was advised to “try the waters of Buda.”46 He immediately traveled to the spa at Buda, which is today in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, suffering from intense pain in his joints and a fever that left him delirious. Lee fully recovered, however, and spent the upcoming winter in Italy, where he intended to keep a daily regimen of exercise, swimming, and horseback riding.47 On his way to Italy, Lee stopped at Vienna. He had enjoyed his brief stay in the multinational capital of the vast, polyglot Hapsburg Empire in central Europe earlier in the year and now he wanted to remain in the city a little longer. Vienna was a melting pot of peoples: Slavs, Magyars, Austrians, and many others provided the city with a rich cultural setting. Countless musicians, composers, and artists were drawn to Vienna, seeking their fortunes at the imperial court or in the city’s many institutions that supported the cultural arts. Vienna was crowded with churches and monastic institutions, and Italian and Viennese operas were performed throughout the city. Lee was enchanted by this oasis of cosmopolitanism in central Europe, and attended banquets, balls, and musical recitals in the palaces of Vienna’s social elite.48 He occasionally astonished his hosts by arriving [ 88 ]

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at social events accompanied by Spado, who often graciously offered his outstretched paw to them. Lee was also enamored of the Viennese women, describing them as “divinely handsome, gracious, unaffected, and civil.” The highlight of Lee’s time in Vienna, however, was meeting the heir to the Hapsburg throne, the future Joseph II. Lee predicted that “the Emperor will, I believe, one day make a [fine] figure.”49 Joseph, who was the eldest of the reigning empress Maria-Theresa’s sixteen children, was captivated by the works of the French philosophes Voltaire and Denis Diderot and had a keen interest in current world events, political philosophy, military science, geography, and contemporary writings related to the “rights of man.” Lee spent hours in conversation with Joseph, who was eager to hear his guest’s opinions on the Russo-Turkish conflict and on the state of Anglo-American affairs. While Lee was not surprised at Joseph’s curiosity about the Russo-Turkish conflict, he “could not help admiring his general knowledge of what has passed in America, of the geography of the country, and what is more, of the interest of Great Britain with respect to it.” Lee sarcastically wrote to a friend that even George III was “not quite so well acquainted” with the issues involved in the Anglo-American crisis.50 In late March 1770, Lee resumed his trip to Italy, arriving in the port city of Leghorn (or Livorno) on the Ligurian Sea two months later. “The journey, change of air, or something has made a wonderful alteration for the better in my health; nay I sometimes think that I am stronger, fresher and younger than I was before my illness,” Lee wrote to an acquaintance. In Leghorn, he met Giuseppe Minghini, a jack-of-all-trades whom he hired as his personal valet.51 Lee remained in Italy for over a year, living first in Leghorn and then in the Tuscan town of Lucca and traveling throughout the Italian peninsula and to Sicily and Malta.52 In March 1771, Lee was involved in an altercation with an Italian military officer, the details of which are not clear, but both men felt it was serious enough that they were willing to defend their honor through the code duello. They initially sparred with swords, and Lee lost the tips of two fingers. Several days later, Lee challenged the officer to a second duel, this time with pistols. The Italian officer accepted the challenge. In the second contest, Lee mortally wounded his opponent and fled from Italy.53 By June 1771, Lee was back in London.54 Active military service in Eastern Europe had exposed him to a kind of warfare that mainstream military theorists viewed as largely ineffective. In popular British newspapers and [ 89 ]

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periodicals, Lee argued for the effectiveness of guerrilla tactics against conventional armies and on the importance of the connection between military strategy and political goals. He also used the press to discuss his experiences with the enlightened monarchs of continental Europe and to channel his venom against George III and the British government.55 By the 1770s, literacy rates had increased throughout the English-speaking world and the emergence of public opinion as a force in politics opened opportunities for men who could wield the power of the pen. As Lee used his literary skills to promote his radicalized notions of politics and military strategy, he became a pariah to the British political and military establishment. At the same time, the leaders of the American resistance movement had begun to take notice of him. On July 27, the readers of London’s Public Advertiser opened the paper to find an anonymously written essay titled “The Character of the Present Emperor of Germany.” The essay writer praised Hapsburg emperor Joseph II while making several thinly veiled criticisms of George III. He extolled Joseph II’s “very generous notions of the rights of mankind” and applauded his respect for his subjects, implying that George III was lacking in both of these areas.56 Although Lee published the essay anonymously, he did not hide his authorship.57 He had been in Britain for six weeks, during which time he had become a semi-recluse, focusing his energies on writing and rewriting “The Character of the Present Emperor of Germany” and on starting new literary projects. Lee wanted to see his old friends again but believed that the task at hand was too important for frivolous distractions. “I think it necessary to inform you,” he told John Hall-Stevenson, “that . . . I was much mortify’d in not catching you by accident in London, as it is not certain that I shall have time to pay the tribute of love and esteem out of the great stock which I profess to have for you viva voce at your Palace . . . at Shelton.58 Lee revealed to Hall-Stevenson that he was the author of “The Character of the Present Emperor of Germany” and informed him that he was working on several more important essays that included a portrayal of George III as corrupt and manipulative and a critique of the Scottish philosopher/historian David Hume’s The History of England under the House of Stuart (1759).59 Catherine Macaulay, who had just completed the fifth volume of her The History of England from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line, read drafts of Lee’s essays and enthusiastically approved of them.60 [ 90 ]

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Lee was a formidable polemicist, radical in print as well as in thought and speech. He acknowledged that his ideas were “not very gentle and may pass with moderate men (that is men who are indifferent about the fate of their Country if they individually are not disturb’d) for seditious.” His prediction was prophetic. Publishers, even those known for their radical Whig views, shied away from publishing Lee’s essays. Lee’s literary career was stifled and, more importantly, his political ideas were censored. Lee again felt betrayed by his country.61 By late August, Lee’s health had waned. His growing frustration with the British government and society had begun to take an emotional and physical toll on him. In January 1772, Lee traveled to Dijon, a spa resort in Burgundy, France, where he spent two months bathing in mineral pools and swimming in hot springs.62 But his physical and emotional health did not improve. Lee felt extreme pain in his extremities and appeared to suffer from rage and depression. “I begin in my cooler candid moments to be sensible then my temper is alter’d for the worse,” he explained to Sidney. “Whatever the causes may be, I feel the effects, and I wish I only felt ’em myself, but I am afraid that those who by accident are much connected with me must feel ’em still more sensibly.”63 Lee wrote to an acquaintance Clotworthy Upton, who lived in Geneva, Switzerland, that his physical pain was worsening and that he felt “an unnatural insatiable appetite, grow very weak, my eyes glassy, my complexion yellow, and am universally relaxed.”64 Lee hoped to travel to the Swiss town of Lausanne to consult with the highly regarded physician Samuel Auguste André David Tissot, who in 1761 had published the popular medical advice book Avis au Peuple sur la Santé (Advice to the People with Respect to Their Health).65 In March, Lee left Dijon for Geneva. His journey took him to the picturesque French town of Lyon, where he decided to remain for a few months. “The air of this place has . . . been beneficial to me, the fits of this strange disorder have been shorter and less violent,” Lee informed Sidney.66 As his health returned, he yearned for political news from Britain. “The great principle of liberty seems to be worn out in this Hemisphere,” he wrote after he had heard that several Whig MPs had lost their seats in the parliamentary elections of 1772. “If your countrymen are so void of feeling and judgment . . . damn ’em,” Lee told Charles Davers, who had lost his seat in the House of Commons.67 In Lee’s opinion, Britain’s political situation had worsened because of “the declension of publick virtue,” which had [ 91 ]

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allowed “tyranny, corruption . . . North [British chief minister Frederick Lord North], and the devil” to thrive.68 In April, Lee traveled to the Swiss canton of Geneva, the birthplace of his favorite philosophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He had read and heard much about the Swiss cantons, “those bless’d regions of manly Democracy” where “the people are certainly happy, as they have neither King, Courts, nor Aristocrats; and where the Clergy are not taught to anathematize the Champions of their Country, and consecrate the Tyrants.”69 Lee stayed with his friend Upton. After several weeks, he managed to meet with Tissot in Lausanne. We do not know what advice he received from Tissot, but the Swiss physician probably recommended treatments for his gout and rheumatism that were commonly prescribed by the medical authorities of the day—plenty of bed rest and moderation in food, drink, and sexual activities.70 Given Lee’s highly charged personality, it must have been difficult for him to follow a moderate regimen. Lee returned to Geneva and remained there for much of the summer, keeping a low profile most of the time. By the late fall of 1772, Lee was back in London, but he felt out of touch in the British metropolis. Lee believed that there was nothing left for him to accomplish in Britain, where his enemies were great in number and where his military skills and his love of liberty were ignored and shunned. The political climate in Britain convinced him that he had to make his home somewhere else. But where could he go? “America stretches forth her capacious arms,” Lee declared.71 Lee had always viewed America as a land of abundance where liberty was paramount and respected. And he believed that in America—that “one Asylum” in the world where men preferred “their natural rights to the fantastical prerogative of a foolish perverted head because it wears a crown”—he would be enthusiastically welcomed.72

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6

The Greatest Son of Liberty in America

On August 16, 17 73, Lee boarded the brig L o n d o n in the southern English port of Falmouth, bound for New York. Traveling with him were his former schoolmate Major William Butler, fellow 44th Regiment officer and friend Major William Dunbar, his personal attendant Giuseppe Minghini, and his black Pomeranian Spado. Looking back, Lee could see Britain fading in the distance; looking ahead, he saw the promise of America on the horizon. Arriving in New York, Lee lodged with Thomas Gamble, a merchant who had served with him in the 44th. Lee’s October 8th arrival coincided with the escalation of protests in the city against British imperial policy by the Liberty Boys, a group of ambitious merchants, artisans, and lawyers. Lee connected with their leaders, the Scottish-born merchant Alexander McDougall and the spirited former privateer Isaac Sears.1 Thomas Gamble wrote to British general John Bradstreet that winter that their old acquaintance was “more abusive then ever” toward George III, the British government, and the British people. Gamble concluded that Lee was “the greatest Son of Liberty in America.”2 Lee enthusiastically supported the Liberty Boys and became a vocal champion of their methods.3 The Liberty Boys had mobilized protests against the Tea Act of May 1773, which allowed the financially ailing East India Tea Company to sell its tea directly in America for a fraction of its previous price. The British believed that the Tea Act would give financial assistance to the nearly bankrupt company, raise revenue for the king, and confirm Parliament’s sovereign right to tax the colonies. The Americans viewed the law as a conspiracy to enrich the personal fortunes of British political leaders who were shareholders in the company. In protest, they held mass demonstrations; implemented a boycott of British goods; burned effigies; used violence and intimidation against customs officials, East India [ 93 ]

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Company tea merchants, and ship captains; and organized “tea parties” to destroy the company’s tea.4 Lee’s ardent support for the Liberty Boys earned him praise from the publisher of The New-York Gazetteer,5 James Rivington, as “a sincere friend to liberty in general, and an able advocate for the freedom and rights of the colonies in particular.”6 In late November, Lee decided to visit his lands in East Florida. He stopped at Philadelphia, a city whose intellectual circles and women held a special charm for him, lodging at the City Tavern, where he met with radicals such as Charles Thomson, who would become the secretary of the Continental Congress; Dr. Benjamin Rush; the Irish merchant Stephen Moylan; and Benjamin Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache.7 Lee also mingled with the leaders of Philadelphia’s mechanics, who had organized their own protest group, the Patriotic Society.8 As much as Lee enjoyed Philadelphia, he was anxious to inspect his East Florida landholdings. In early March 1774, Lee and his entourage, which now included four dogs, arrived in the Virginia town of Hampton.9 En route, he received a letter from Irish statesman Edmund Burke, one of the few MPs who supported the American colonists. Burke reported that during a meeting of the Privy Council in late January, Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn had accused Benjamin Franklin of instigating the Boston Tea Party (December 1773) and of masterminding Britain’s troubles in America.10 Lee was incensed at Wedderburn’s treatment of Franklin and viewed it as proof of the ministry’s shortsightedness on the American issue. In Virginia, Lee met with several prominent public figures who gave him the particulars of the political debates occurring in the colony’s assembly, the House of Burgesses.11 By May 1774, representatives to this body were focused on Britain’s response to the Boston Tea Party. The British government had enacted a series of laws to punish the residents of Massachusetts and to send a message to the other colonists. These measures, which the British called the Coercive Acts and the Americans called the Intolerable Acts, represented a new and forceful assertion of Parliament’s sovereignty. “What think you of our blessed Ministry?” Lee asked Horatio Gates, who had resigned from the British military. Gates and his wife Elizabeth were living on a plantation that he called Traveller’s Rest in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. “Do they not improve in absurdity and wickedness?” Lee added. British chief minister Frederick Lord North hoped colonists [ 94 ]

Benjamin Rush, ca. 1813, by Thomas Sully, oil on canvas. Rush, a Philadelphia physician, political radical, and reformer, became one of Charles Lee’s key supporters in the Continental Congress. Courtesy of the Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

[ 95 ]

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James Peale, Horatio Gates, copy after Charles Willson Peale, ca. 1782, oil on canvas. Gates knew Charles Lee from their days in the British army. In 1775, he was appointed adjutant general by the Continental Congress; he reached the pinnacle of his military career defeating a British army commanded by General John Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777. Gates was later implicated in the Conway Cabal, a plot to remove George Washington from the post of commander-in-chief and was disgraced at the Battle of Camden in South Carolina. Eventually, his relationship with Lee grew strained. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/ Art Resource, NY.

would not support Massachusetts, and that Americans in other colonies would be afraid of risking the penalties Massachusetts had suffered. Lee did not view the issue as unique to Massachusetts, but saw it as a common cause in defense of liberty. “Seriously Gates, I think it incumbent on every man of liberality or even common honor to contribute his mite to the Cause of mankind and of liberty, which is now attacked in her last and only asylum,” he wrote. “She is drove from the other Hemisphere, for in England she has been for some time to me only a name.” The Americans had to immediately define a strategy to resist these parliamentary measures, and Lee was “determin’d . . . not to be slack in whatever mode my service is required.”12 [ 96 ]

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News of the Coercive Acts led the House of Burgesses to pass a resolution setting June 1 as a day of fasting and prayer, “to implore the Divine interposition for averting the heavy calamity which threatens destruction to our civil rights, and the evils of civil war; to give us one heart and one mind firmly to oppose, by all just and proper means, every injury to American rights.” On that day, Boston was to be closed to commercial traffic until restitution was made for the destroyed East India Company tea. On May 24, Virginia’s royal governor, John Murray, Lord Dunmore, dissolved the assembly in retaliation for its support of Massachusetts. The members reconvened at the Raleigh Tavern, where they adopted a resolution calling for an intercolonial congress to meet in Philadelphia to address the Coercive Acts and the plight of Massachusetts. By this time, Lee had abandoned plans for his trip to East Florida and was heading north to Boston to meet with Samuel Adams and other Massachusetts radicals. He carried a letter of introduction from the Virginia revolutionary Richard Henry Lee (no relation) that described him as “a most true and worthy friend to the rights of human nature in general, and a warm, spirited Foe to American oppression. . . . [His] principles do him honor . . . [and] his acquaintance will give you much pleasure.”13 On his way to Boston, Lee stopped briefly in Philadelphia, where he learned of General Thomas Gage’s appointment as governor of Massachusetts. “It is a very fortunate circumstance, that the power both civil and military hath fallen into the hands of so moderate a man as General Gage,” Thomas Gamble informed him. “I hope he will gain great credit on this critical occasion; his abilities are good, and with respect to his heart, you who know him so well will allow him to be possessed of one of the best kind.”14 Lee also heard from Gates, who believed that Gage could “heal the wounds that threaten the life of American Liberty; surely a man so humane, so Honorable, so Independent in his Circumstances, & so great from Family expectations would never undertake a business fit only for an abandoned Desperado, or a Monster in Human Shape.” Gates cautioned Lee “to watch your words and actions . . . for be assured Gage knows you too well, and knows you know him too well not to be glad of any plausible pretence to prevent your good services in the Publick Cause.”15 Gates invited Lee to Traveller’s Rest, where they could “philosophize on the vices & virtues of this Busy world, the Follies and The Vanities of the Great Vulgar & the Small.” He offered him “a good bed . . . [and] two [ 97 ]

Samuel Adams, by John Singleton Copley, ca. 1772, oil on canvas. Adams was the second cousin of John Adams and a passionate advocate of American liberties. He supported Charles Lee’s appointment to the Continental officer corps in 1775. Source: Library of Congress.

[ 98 ]

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or three slaves to supply all your wants & whimsies, and space enough about us for you to exercise away all your spleen & Gloomy Moods, whensoever they distress you.” He hoped to convince Lee to purchase “a Fine Farm Mill & Tract of Land” near Traveller’s Rest called Hopewell. This 2,752-acre estate included a farmhouse made of log and limestone. Gates was confident that Lee could purchase the property at “a very great bargain” from its owner Jacob Hite, who had suffered financially after the collapse of the credit market in Virginia in late 1773.16 Lee declined Gates’s offer, preferring to remain in Philadelphia where the political atmosphere was charged. Lee’s political radicalization was deepening. America as “the last asylum of liberty,” a notion often thought to originate with Thomas Paine’s 1776

Portrait print of Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, ca. 1820s, engraved by Peter Maverick and James B. Longacre from a drawing by Longacre from an original miniature. On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented a resolution on independence to the Continental Congress. He was an avid supporter of Charles Lee in the congress. Source: Library of Congress. [ 99 ]

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best-selling pamphlet Common Sense, appeared two years earlier in Lee’s passionate essay “To the Citizens of Philadelphia.” Published in the Pennsylvania Journal under the pseudonym “Anglus Americanus,” Lee’s essay argued that the time for moderation had passed. “Moderation and moderate men, is at present the Countersign or Badge” of those Americans “who find their interest (or fancy they find their interest) in betraying the common cause. . . . Moderation, moderate men and moderate measures are . . . the spells which are to charm us into a destructive supineness; and most dangerous spells they are,” Lee wrote.17 He suggested the use of economic coercion through the adoption of an intercolonial nonimportation and nonexportation agreement, a step that was later taken by the First Continental Congress.18 As in Paine’s later pamphlet, Lee challenged Americans to act decisively to protect their liberties, for in so doing they would inspire others living under oppression to fight for their freedom. Paine arrived in America in late November 1774 and did not begin working on Common Sense until the fall of 1775. Lee’s publication had already boldly set forth the belief that the implications of the American struggle were universal and not simply local.19 Lee wrote: “The liberties of Great Britain are so involved in those of America, that the instant the latter is enslaved, that instant absolute despotism is established in the former; and the generous and liberal of all nations turn their eyes to this continent as the last asylum of liberty, which by a . . . conspiracy of the tyrants of the earth has been rooted out from the other hemisphere; hither they pursue her with inexpiable rage; here, if their machinations prevail, not only the substance but the name and every vestige of liberty will be obliterated from the face of the globe.”20 “Gen Leigh passed thro’ this Town to Boston last Week,” Rev. Ezra Stiles jotted in his diary. “He is an European but talks high for American Liberty, and seems to endeavor to enspirit the People to take Arms.” He also noted that Lee had publicly declared that “the King is a fool & his Ministers Rogues & Villains” and “talks writes & prints for American Liberty.”21 Lee had met Stiles, the Congregational minister and future president of Yale College, in Newport, Rhode Island, after stopping in New York in late July 1774 to discuss political strategy with McDougall and Sears. Lee arrived in Boston in early August and stayed at the Cromwell’s Head Inn, where he met several times with Samuel Adams and other leading radicals, offering his services to the American cause.22 [ 100 ]

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Lee declined to meet with Gage, however, fearing that such a meeting would raise questions about his loyalty to the resistance movement. Instead, he wrote to Gage proclaiming his personal affection for him but also denouncing him as the tool of a king and a ministry who would “willingly put . . . [their] country to the expense of furnishing forth an Army and fleet for the sole pleasure of destroying” liberty anywhere in the world. Lee could not “bear to see a man, from whom my affections can never be wean’d, in the capacity of one of [the British ministry’s] instruments.” Lee hoped that Gage could “with honour . . . dissolve the spell which has charm’d you into a situation so incompatible with the excellence of your natural disposition.”23 Lee departed Boston without a reply from Gage. Lee alone among the noted revolutionaries had toured the four largest and most important colonies—New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Massachusetts—in the time before the American Revolution. He was embraced by radicals in all of these colonies. “I have now lately run through the colonies from Virginia to Boston,” he informed his friend Charles Davers, “and can assure you, by all that is solemn and sacred, that there is not a man on the whole continent (placemen and some high churchmen excepted) who is not determined to sacrifice his property, his life, his wife, family, and children, in the cause of Boston, which he justly considers as his own.”24 Lee returned to Philadelphia in September, in time for the opening session of the First Continental Congress. Lee also wrote a significantly underrated pamphlet titled Strictures upon “A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans” in which he expressed great confidence in the military potential of the American yeoman even against British regulars who had been trained by experts.25 Lee’s extensive military experience, broad scholarly education, and polemical gifts made him the perfect person to write a rebuttal to a pamphlet titled A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans, which appeared in November 1774 in James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer. While he published anonymously, Rev. Dr. Myles Cooper, an Anglican clergyman who was president of King’s College (now Columbia University), argued that the Americans were delusional to claim that Britain’s imperial policies were tyrannical. They were being led astray by a small group of self-interested fanatics. Cooper also warned that the British government would use its powerful military to maintain imperial authority in the colonies. Lee claimed that Cooper’s allegations were based on “audaciously false assertions, and monstrous absurdities” and were [ 101 ]

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meant to “seduce or intimidate” the Americans “out of their rights and privileges.”26 More important, in his pamphlet, Lee scoffed at the idea that the British could easily subdue America. Lee expressed a contempt for the conventional model of military training the British Army used, which he called the European Plan.27 The British regulars were experts “in all the tricks of the parade . . . attaching themselves principally or solely to the tinsel and show of war” and could “acquit themselves tolerably in the puerile reviews, exhibited for the amusement of royal Masters and Misses. . . . Upon the whole . . . men may be smartly dressed, keep their arms bright . . . be expert in all the anticks of a review and yet be unfit for real action,” Lee asserted.28 “In the beginning of the late [French and Indian] war, some of the most esteemed regular regiments were sent over to this country, they were well dressed, they were well powdered, they were perfect masters of their manual exercise, they fired together in platoons, but fatal experience taught us that they knew not how to fight.” Lee argued that the “yeomanry of America . . . are accustomed from their infancy to fire arms . . . [and] are expert in the use of them: whereas the lower and middle people of England, are, by the tyranny of certain laws, almost as ignorant in the use of a musket as they are of the ancient Catapulta.” If Americans could be trained in military basics and “the necessary maneuvers” could be simplified, “[they] may become, in a very few months, a most formidable infantry,” Lee predicted. “Let them be instructed only in so much of the manual exercise as to prevent confusion, and accidents in loading and firing; let them be taught to form, to retreat, to advance, to change their front, to rally to their colours; let them be taught to reduce themselves from a line of fire to a line of impression . . . [and] in three months . . . you may have an army . . . equal to all the services of war.”29 Lee again anticipated Paine’s Common Sense when he argued that the Americans’ struggle to protect their liberties was part of the ongoing human struggle for freedom and that they should not hesitate to take up that fight. Like the people of the ancient Greek city-states of Thebes, Sparta, Athens, and Syracuse who “recovered their liberty and destroyed their tyrants,” the Americans had the potential to “demolish those badges of slavery” associated with tyranny. This was the time for action: while the “monster Tyranny . . . begins to pant; press her now with ardour, and she is down.” Lee [ 102 ]

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argued that moderate measures would “make no impressions on our callous Court, and abandoned Parliament” and could be exploited to defuse American zeal.30 The Americans’ success would have universal implications; it would restore civic virtue to the world, inspire others to resist oppression, and “immortalize” them “through all the ages, as the champions and patrons of the human race.”31 Strictures was a brilliant piece of propaganda that gave Lee the public notoriety and recognition he craved. The Newport Mercury praised him as one of “the greatest military characters of the present age” while the Essex Gazette reported that he was “an able advocate for the freedom and rights” of America.32 Samuel Adams expressed the opinion that Lee was “an able officer . . . deeply embarked in the American cause.”33 The future continental cavalry officer Henry (Light-Horse Harry) Lee, a cousin of Richard Henry Lee and father of future Confederate general Robert E. Lee, was so impressed with Strictures and with Lee’s military knowledge that he hoped for the opportunity to learn the art of war from him.34 On September 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress held its inaugural session, and many delegates sought Lee’s advice on issues from trade policy to military preparedness.35 John Adams recalled that Lee had “excited much . . . enthusiasm, and made many proselytes and partisans.”36 Yet he had become persona non grata in Britain. William Legge, Lord Dartmouth, the British secretary of state for the colonies, urged Gage to “take every legal method to prevent his continuing these practices.”37 London’s General Evening Post described Lee’s motives as self-interested and warned chief minister Frederick Lord North “to take care that [Lee] does not prove a second Coriolanus,” a reference to the legendary fifth century BC Roman general Gaius Marcius Coriolanus who, after his exile from Rome, returned with an army to exact revenge on the government.38 Lee was impressed by the way the Continental Congress had responded to the Coercive Acts: it had approved measures that included a declaration to withhold the payment of British taxes imposed on the colonists without their consent (the Declaration of Rights and Grievances), it had issued a call for military preparedness (the Suffolk Resolves), and it had implemented a nonimportation, nonexportation, and nonconsumption system known as the Continental Association.39 Yet Lee was under no illusions about the state of mind of Britain. He interpreted the results of the 1774 parliamentary elections, which showed a sizable majority for the king [ 103 ]

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and his ministers, led by the uncompromising Lord North, as a message that the British people would support military action against the Americans. “Great God! what a dreadful situation the whole empire is now in; can it be possible that the ignorance or corruption of the English nation should be so transcendent as to suffer and to sanctify such measures?” Lee asked Charles Davers.40 “What cou’d put it into our Blockheads’ heads that these people cou’d be trick’d out of their liberties by cunning, or bullied by any force which They can send over?” Charles asked another acquaintance, Hugh Percy, the Duke of Northumberland.41 During the winter of 1774–1775, militias mustered and drilled in towns from Massachusetts to Georgia and local committees were created to enforce the Continental Association.42 “I have . . . run through almost the whole Colonies from the South to the North—I have convers’d with all orders of men from the first estated Gentlemen to the poorest Planters, and cannot express my astonishment at the good sense and general knowledge which pervades the whole—but their elevated principles, their enthusiasm in the cause of freedom and their Country is still more admirable,” Lee declared.43 He warned Edmund Burke that “the tyranny exercised over Boston . . . seems to be resented by the other colonies in a greater degree than by the Bostonians themselves . . . [and] they are determined to sacrifice everything, their property, their wives, children, and blood, rather than cede a tittle of what they conceive to be their rights.”44 In late December, Lee met with George Washington at Mount Vernon, his plantation along the banks of the Potomac River.45 Lee was aware of Washington’s growing influence among the revolutionaries and asked him for a recommendation should the next Congress decide to organize a field army. Washington, impressed by Lee’s extensive combat experience, agreed to recommend him for a military position if the need arose. Lee’s visit, however, tried the patience and hospitality of Washington and his wife Martha. His poorly behaved dogs, which now numbered eleven, prowled around Mount Vernon, lunged and nipped at anyone who approached, and sat under the table during dinner.46 On January 4, 1775, Lee departed Mount Vernon, but not before borrowing £15 from Washington, which he promised to repay.47 Lee traveled to Williamsburg, where he discussed the growing AngloAmerican tensions with several Virginia radicals. From Williamsburg, Lee moved on to Traveller’s Rest, where he tried to convince Gates to actively [ 104 ]

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join the American resistance. Lee also toured Hopewell and came away impressed. He agreed to purchase the estate for £4,504 and retained the services of Alexander White, a noted attorney from Winchester, Virginia, to handle the transaction. Still, Lee did not wish to settle into the lifestyle of a country gentleman. Instead, he hoped that the purchase of the estate would solidify his finances as well as his legitimacy among the revolutionaries as a stakeholder in American society.48 Lee also continued to contribute propaganda to the American cause. In mid-January 1775, he wrote an anonymous essay, “Queries Proposed to General Gage,” which originally appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet, in which he urged Gage to resign his post.49 While this essay did not have much of an impact, “On a Famous Trial in the Court of Common Pleas, between General Mostyn, Governor of Minorca, and an Inhabitant of That Island,” published in the Virginia Gazette in late February, was one of Lee’s best pieces. In it, he argued that George III was firmly set on using military force to establish tyranny in the British Empire and claimed that the monarch was willing to support and to enforce “measures . . . repugnant to the spirit of our constitution and the rights of mankind.” The Americans had to resist this emerging tyranny with arms or suffer the “enslavement of their posterity.”50 Lee’s calls for armed resistance and, potentially, for independence alarmed conservatives and moderates. “A certain wandering being has just made his appearance,” editorialized a conservative reader of the Virginia Gazette. “Nature has not given him a face to belie his heart . . . he has a sour, restless, discontented countenance . . . [and] is an ever constant attendant of the Daemon of Discord.” Lee’s most incessant critic was James Rivington, who had once praised him for his support of colonial rights and liberties. In the New-York Gazetteer, Rivington described Lee as a vulgar, vain, and ambitious person who displayed a superficial knowledge of various subjects, thrived on creating factions, and had done nothing distinguishable as an officer in the British Army. He also accused Lee of sowing discord in Anglo-American affairs to gratify his own ambitions and satisfy his exaggerated sense of self-worth.51 Rivington’s critique of Lee’s ambition was merited, but his other claims were not. Lee responded by drafting a sarcastic attack on the publisher, “A Breakfast for Rivington,” but uncharacteristically decided not to publish it. Perhaps Lee felt that the best way to counter Rivington’s claims and accusations was to simply ignore them, or [ 105 ]

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maybe he believed that engaging him in a public debate would become a distraction as the drumbeat for war grew louder.52 In early April, Lee met again with Washington and argued that an American army composed of small detachments of properly trained soldiers drafted from the colonial militias and working in conjunction with roving partisans was capable of carrying out a successful irregular war against the British. Lee envisioned a war of mass resistance and was confident that the idea of citizenship in a free society and the desire to defend family and property would inspire Americans to unite against the forces of British tyranny.53 Washington doubted the efficacy of using militia as regular soldiers. Unlike Lee, who saw the militia as the core of an American strategy that would harass and impede the enemy, Washington hoped to create a regular army composed of highly disciplined full-time troops who were trained to fight in open-field engagements. He wanted to use the militia only for certain ancillary functions such as local defense.54 In Boston, Gage had received reinforcements from the British government that brought the size of his army to 5,000 troops and was ordered to apprehend the revolutionaries Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were hiding in Lexington, a town twelve miles from the city. He was also directed to seize any weapons and ammunition the colonists had stockpiled.55 On the evening of April 18, Gage sent a detachment of 800 hundred regulars to surprise and capture Adams and Hancock and to seize a large supply of gunpowder stored in the town of Concord, eighteen miles away from Boston. But American spies effectively warned the residents in the Massachusetts countryside of the British maneuvers. At dawn on April 19, the British detachment arrived at Lexington, where the town’s militia awaited them on the Commons. Shots were fired, and eight Americans were killed and ten were wounded. Discovering that Adams and Hancock had fled the location hours earlier, the British advanced to Concord, where most of the gunpowder that they expected to find had been removed. As the British troops returned to Boston, they were met by fierce resistance from local militia and suffered 250 casualties, nearly three times the number of casualties the Americans suffered. The revolutionaries portrayed the military confrontations at Lexington and Concord as a willful act of British aggression from which they could not retreat. Thousands of New England militiamen converged on Boston, forming the Army of Observation. They besieged Gage and his troops in [ 106 ]

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the city.56 Lee immediately returned to Philadelphia after hearing of the events at Lexington and Concord and witnessed a people transformed as several militia companies drilled in the streets.57 William Bradford, the editor of the radical-leaning Pennsylvania Journal, praised Lee for helping to ignite this martial mood, describing him as “a gentleman whose steady attachment to the rights of human nature, and to the principles of the British constitution in particular, hath endeared him to all the colonies.”58 The Second Continental Congress, which convened on May 10th, took several steps that committed the colonies to a war against Britain. On June 14, it established the Continental Army by placing the Army of Observation under its authority.59 The next day the delegates addressed the question of who would command the army. Lee was on a short list of candidates for the post that included Washington. Unlike Washington, Lee actively lobbied for the command, emphasizing his extensive military experience and familiarity with the British army and its officers.60 The question of who should command the Continental Army was not a trivial matter. “I have never, in all my lifetime, suffered more anxiety than in the conduct of this business,” John Adams declared.61 Adams made no formal nomination, but he often alluded to Washington as his choice. “I had but one Gentleman in my Mind for that important command and that was a Gentleman from Virginia who was among Us and very well known to all of Us,” he explained. This person had “Skill and Experience as an Officer” but also an “excellent universal Character.”62 Samuel Adams echoed his cousin’s sentiments but argued that a demonstration of colonial unity should also be considered.63 On June 15, Washington was officially nominated for commander-inchief. The vote was unanimous in the affirmative. The tall, handsome, elegant, and graceful Washington exhibited leadership qualities and virtues that impressed many of the delegates. In true republican fashion, he feigned disinterest in the post yet quietly wore his buff-and-blue Virginia militia jacket during the congressional sessions. Many delegates concluded that he could be trusted with the power that would be bestowed upon him.64 Washington had also played a key role in the congress’s military planning, chairing several committees that had been responsible for establishing an intercolonial supply system, preparing a scheme for American defenses, and drafting the rules and regulations that would govern the recruitment and training of soldiers. As chair of these committees, Washington worked closely with delegates from every colony. He was also from the South, and [ 107 ]

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even more, from Virginia, the wealthiest and most populous colony in America, and his appointment at the head of an army composed largely of New Englanders would project a sense of colonial unity.65 Washington’s appointment “removes all jealousies, [and] more firmly Cements the Southern to the Northern,” wrote Eliphalet Dyer of Connecticut.66 Washington humbly thanked the delegates and told them that he was “truly sensible of the high Honour done me, in this Appointment, yet I feel great distress, from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important Trust.” The Continental Congress had already voted a monthly salary of $500 for the army’s commander-in-chief, but Washington refused to accept any pay for “this arduous employment.” He asked only that he be reimbursed for the expenses he might accrue while actively serving in the post.67 The politically savvy Washington essentially asked the congress for an expense account. By declining a regular salary, he added to his reputation as a trustworthy, disinterested republican. Lee’s extensive military experience put him in line for second-in-command. “General Lee was . . . most strenuously urged by many . . . [to] serve cheerfully under Washington,” recalled John Adams. Pennsylvania delegate Thomas Mifflin declared that “Lee must be, aut secondus, aut nullus [second in command or nothing].”68 Yet moderates feared Lee’s extreme rhetoric, his martial attitude, and his sometimes strident advocacy of American independence.69 There were also questions about Lee’s character and social behavior. Many delegates found his acerbic and contentious nature, perpetually unkempt appearance, and profanity-laced conversations troubling. Although Lee’s heritage and education were those of an English gentleman, his actions were interpreted as eccentric or as unbecoming someone of his social standing. Others were suspicious of his foreign birth and of his public lobbying for command of the army.70 Massachusetts revolutionary Elbridge Gerry declared that although Lee would “render great service by his presence and councils with our officers,” his foreign birth would very likely trouble many Americans. “General Lee must be . . . heartily engaged in the service without being Commissioned at present,” Gerry advised. “He is a stranger and cannot have the Confidence of a Jealous people when strugling for their Liberty.” John Adams admired and appreciated Lee’s scholarly pursuits, his support for America, and his military knowledge, but he agreed with Gerry. Lee’s “great experience and confessed abilities . . . in [ 108 ]

General George Washington at Trenton, ca. 1900 – 1915 from a 1792 painting by John Trumbull. Source: Library of Congress.

[ 109 ]

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a council of officers, might be of great advantage to us, but the natural prejudices, and virtuous attachment of our countrymen to their own officers” would be a major obstacle to a military commission.71 Samuel Adams was puzzled by the opposition to Lee’s appointment. “Why should any of our Friends hesitate about the propriety of giving a command to Genl Lee?” He might not have been “born an American, but he has heartily espoused the Cause of America and abhors the oppressive Measures of the British Government against America.”72 Adams successfully convinced his cousin John to see the merits of giving Lee a commission in the Continental Army. The Adamses argued that the American war effort would benefit from Lee’s military knowledge; in addition, he would enhance the army’s reputation and give it some credibility with the British military in Boston and with potential foreign allies. But perhaps their most powerful argument was that Washington had personally requested the appointment, making good on his earlier promise to recommend Lee for a position in any army created by the congress.73 On June 17, the Continental Congress staffed the highest ranks of the Continental Army’s officer corps. In deference to the New Englanders, Artemas Ward of Massachusetts, who commanded the Army of Observation, was appointed first major general and Washington’s immediate second-in-command; Lee was commissioned as the army’s second major general.74 John Adams described the vote as a “Scuffle” and admitted that “Dismal Bugbears were raised” at Lee’s appointment. “There were Prejudices enough among the weak and fears enough among the timid, as well as other obstacles from the Cunning: but the great Necessity for officers of skill and Experience, prevailed.” He confessed, “I have never formed any Friendship or particular Connection with Lee, but upon the most mature Deliberation I judged him the best qualified for the Service . . . and therefore gave him my Vote.”75 Samuel Adams was gratified: “I am more and more satisfied in the Appointment of General Lee, he is certainly an able officer and I think deeply embarked in the American Cause.”76 Many revolutionaries were willing to overlook Lee’s social behavior in exchange for the benefits his military expertise brought to the army. Benjamin Rush admitted that he could ignore Lee’s “oddities,” for he was a true soldier.77 John Adams described Lee as “a Queer Creature” and “a great Man” but was willing to accept his “Oddity” and to “forgive a thousand whims for the Sake of the Soldier and the Scholar.”78 Mercy Otis Warren [ 1 10 ]

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commented that Lee lacked the “graces that recommend the soldier to the circles of the polite,” but no one “was better qualified . . . to penetrate the designs, or to face in the field an experienced British veteran” than him.79 Washington described Lee as “zealously attached to the cause, honest and well-meaning” and was willing to overlook the flaws in his personality because of his extensive military knowledge and the combat experience that he brought to his staff.80 Lee promised that “no effort in his power shall be wanting to serve the American cause.” Yet, he insisted that the Continental Congress discuss financial compensation with him before he officially accepted his commission. Lee gave a detailed report of the personal finances that he would risk by accepting a commission in the Continental Army, placing a value of £11,000 on his English estate.81 The Continental Congress found Lee’s “estimate of the Estate that he risqued by this service” reasonable and agreed to “indemnify [him] . . . for any loss of property which he may sustain by entering into their service,” assuring him “that the same be done by this or any future Congress as soon as such loss is ascertained.”82 Here Lee again demonstrated a lack of political savvy and personal diplomacy. His financial demands contrasted sharply with Washington’s refusal to accept a regular salary as commander-in-chief.83 Although Lee’s decision to ask for financial guarantees before accepting his commission did not reflect the American ideal of a disinterested republican, the Continental Congress agreed to compensate him. “So desirous was the Congress, that this Country should avail it self of the Abilities of Lee,” wrote Samuel Adams, “that they have voted to indemnify him for the Loss of property he may incurr by engaging in this Service.”84 By accepting a commission in the Continental Army, Lee was exposing his British property and investments to the threat of confiscation regardless of the war’s outcome. Few, if any, of the American revolutionaries had to deal with this kind of a dilemma; their losses would be incurred only in defeat.85 On June 22, Lee officially resigned his commission in the British Army. To Secretary of War Lord Barrington, he wrote: “In the most public and solemn manner  .  .  .  I do renounce my half pay from the date hereof,” explaining that the “present measures seem to me so absolutely subversive of the rights and liberties of every individual subject, so destructive to the whole Empire at large, and ultimately so ruinous to His Majesties own person, dignity, and family, that I think myself obliged, in conscience, as a [ 1 11 ]

Charles Lee, Esq’r. Major General in the Continental Army in America, ca. 1776–1790, engraving by Johann Michael Probst. It originally included a verse in French and German: “Only slaves voluntarily give themselves to slavery; But we seek to acquire liberty by breaking with force the iron chains because we believe in victory or death!” Source: Library of Congress.

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citizen, Englishman, and soldier of a free state, to exert my utmost to defeat them.”86 That evening, Lee joined Washington, Philip Schuyler (who had been appointed to command the army’s Northern Department), and several other Continental officers for dinner. Before retiring for the evening, the officers discussed a report about the Battle of Bunker Hill, which had taken place on June 17 on the Charlestown peninsula near Boston.87 The next morning, the Continental officers departed the city. Lee wore his Polish major general’s uniform, the Cross of St. Stanislaus hanging proudly from his chest and two gold inlaid pistols stuck in the waistband of his breeches. Spado shared Lee’s saddle, a loyal companion willing to go to battle with his master. The officers were escorted by a troop of Philadelphia cavalry to the accompaniment of fifes and drums. Crowds of onlookers—militia, delegates, and civilians—lined the streets. Loud huzzahs were shouted as the men rode past them. Trailing behind were wagons carrying their belongings which, in Lee’s case, included his ten other dogs. At Washington’s side was his African American slave William “Billy” Lee, a stark reminder of the inconsistencies of the American struggle for liberty. The parade was truly a spectacle. “Musick playing etc etc, Such is the Pride and Pomp of War,” recorded John Adams.88 The crowds dispersed five miles outside Philadelphia, while Washington and the others, including Major General Charles Lee, rode off to fight a war that would change their lives and the world forever.

[ 1 13 ]

7

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The military entourage crossed the Delaware River and traversed the Trenton Road in a driving rainstorm, arriving that evening at New Brunswick, New Jersey, where lodgings had been reserved for them. The next morning, they pushed on toward Boston. In town after town, farmers and shopkeepers, men and women, and young and old lined the road, hoping to catch a glimpse of the men who would play an important role in shaping their destinies. But would their destinies include an independent America? In the summer of 1775, no one knew the answer. Lee was the exception. He was confident that a successful war against Britain could lead to independence and was ready to make it happen, even if the Continental Army, the Continental Congress, and many Americans were not. On June 23, 1775, the officers arrived at Paulus Hook (now Jersey City), across the Hudson River from New York. That same day, the Juliana arrived from Britain carrying New York’s royal governor, William Tryon, who had been in London on leave.1 The New Yorkers faced an acute dilemma: how would they welcome both parties? They decided to hold two separate ceremonies: one for the Continental officers just north of the city at 4 p.m. and one for Tryon in the city at 8 p.m.2 New York’s dilemma reflected the divided nature of American public opinion. Washington and Lee were on their way to Massachusetts, where the conflict between Loyalists and revolutionaries was intense. That same tension existed in New York, where the war had further fractured a community already torn by familial, religious, political, and economic rivalries. Crossing the Hudson River, the Continental officers could see the 64-gun British warship Asia anchored in the harbor, a sign of the uneasy political situation in New York. They landed on Manhattan Island near present-day Canal Street, which in 1775 was north of the city limits, and [ 114 ]

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were met by a cheering crowd. The entourage rode to the country estate of merchant Leonard Lispenard, where they received reports confirming the result of the Battle of Bunker Hill. The British victory at Bunker Hill had cost them dearly in lives, and confirmation that the Americans had been driven off the Charlestown peninsula troubled Washington and Lee. After dinner, the officers marched into the city to “bells ringing [and] drums beating.”3 They arrived at Hull’s Tavern around 8 p.m., just as Governor Tryon was greeted by a more subdued crowd. In the morning, Washington met with members of New York’s Provincial Congress before returning to Hull’s to review the day’s travel plans with Lee and to say goodbye to Philip Schuyler.4 Washington and Lee continued to Boston, passing through New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale College students drilled in the town square. At Watertown, Massachusetts, where the Massachusetts Provincial Congress was holding its sessions, the officers were welcomed with individual addresses thanking them for their service.5 The delegates announced that they were confident in Lee’s “attachment to the rights of mankind . . . and to the distresses which America in general, and this colony in particular, are involved.” The provincial congress concluded that Lee’s “great abilities and military experience, united with those of the Commander in Chief, under the smiles of Providence” would bring the army success against Britain.6 The officers replied to their respective addresses in the New England Chronicle. Washington’s three-page response was intricate, cautious, and politically calculated, demonstrating his diplomatic tact. Lee’s reply was one paragraph long. He thanked the provincial congress “for an address which does me so much honor,” said that he would “labour to deserve it,” and reiterated his “reverence for the rights of mankind” and “for the people of America.” Lee assured the delegates that they could count on his “zeal and integrity.”7 On July 2, Washington and Lee reached the army’s camp at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their entrance was quiet and unassuming, lacking the pomp of their departure from Philadelphia and their arrival in New York. They met with Artemas Ward, whom Lee described as “an old church-warden,” and Israel Putnam of Connecticut.8 The men discussed the condition of the Continental Army and the location of the British positions in Boston and on the Charlestown peninsula. The conversation went late into the evening.9 The next morning they inspected the troops. Many of the regiments were below strength; only 14,000 of the 20,000 soldiers encamped [ 1 15 ]

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outside Boston were present and fit for duty. The army also faced critical shortages of muskets, gunpowder, tents, uniforms, and money. During drills, the soldiers’ movements were not in sync. Officers had only tenuous control over their men; sentries fell asleep at their posts and soldiers looted and destroyed private property, discharged their weapons unnecessarily, or deserted. The troops were huddled in overcrowded makeshift shelters, animals roamed freely through the camp, and open latrines emitted foul odors and were breeding grounds for diseases such as dysentery. The state of the Continental Army was very different from the way the Continental Congress had described it to the officers. Lee complained to Robert Morris that “we found every thing exactly the reverse of what had been represented. . . . We were assured . . . that the army was stock’d with Engineers. We found not one. We were assur’d that we should find an expert train of Artillery. They have not a single Gunner, and so on.”10 Washington, the former colonel of militia, viewed the citizen-soldiers at Cambridge as an unruly mass of provincials who might never display the cohesion and courage necessary to defeat British regulars. He believed that without discipline and a clear military hierarchy the army was destined for failure. “Discipline is the soul of an army,” Washington declared. “It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.”11 He remembered the bickering and discord that undermined AngloAmerican military operations during the 1750s and the failure of the Albany Plan of Union in 1754. Washington was confident that victory against Britain required troops that thought of themselves as Americans first and citizens of their particular colonies second. He hoped to eventually transform the Continental troops outside Boston into a national army of soldiers who were not constrained by regional limitations, were willing to serve long term, and understood the procedures of specific complex drills for openfield combat.12 Conversely, Lee, the professional soldier, lauded the troops besieging Boston as “really very fine fellows.”13 He claimed that the courage and marksmanship of the American soldiers were far superior to those of their British counterparts and that their knowledge of the terrain and their enthusiasm for liberty gave them a distinct military advantage over the professionally trained British soldier. Historian Charles Royster notes that even though the Americans lacked the discipline and military perfection of Britain’s professional army, they overcame those deficiencies with the [ 1 16 ]

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belief that “as the guardians of liberty, they could animate each other to valor.”14 Lee was confident that with some training in a few simple military maneuvers and with “the proper uniforms, arms, and proper officers, their zeal, youth, bodily strength, good humour and dexterity, must make ’em an invincible army.”15 Regardless of their differences over the military capabilities of the American soldiers, Washington and Lee agreed that as it was now constituted, the Continental Army was unprepared to face the British in combat. They worked closely together to form the troops into a more effective fighting unit and improve camp conditions. Lee helped Washington devise and issue orders to improve the camp and reorganize the Continental lines.16 With Lee’s assistance, Washington arranged the 14,000 Continental troops fit for duty into two brigades of six regiments each and divided them into three divisions: Ward commanded the right wing, Putnam was in charge of the center, and Lee had command of the army’s left (or northern) wing at Winter and Prospect Hills, west of the Britishheld Charlestown peninsula. Brigadier Generals John Sullivan of New Hampshire and Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island were under Lee’s command. Both of these officers enjoyed serving under Lee, especially Greene, who viewed him as a mentor.17 Lee’s division was tasked with guarding the routes from Charlestown. Ezra Stiles, a Congregational minister, praised the generals’ work, particularly noting that “Gen. Lee [was] assiduous in reform’g and modeling the Army.”18 Within six weeks of their arrival, Washington and Lee had initiated new measures for camp reform and discipline. These included strict obedience to the Articles of War, written in early June 1775 by a committee of the Continental Congress chaired by Washington.19 However, the poorly paid Continentals ignored orders about the destruction of private property, work assignments, and camp cleanliness. Desertion and plundering continued, as did profanity, intoxication, and public lewdness. The behavioral difficulties in the army became more pronounced with the arrival of ten companies of riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. These troops, mostly of Irish, Scots-Irish, and German ethnicity, were recruited from the frontier regions of their respective colonies and had a reputation for individualism, contentiousness, and desertion.20 Lee was fond of the riflemen’s fighting spirit, but he did not tolerate their lack of discipline.21 One Massachusetts [ 1 17 ]

The tenacious John Sullivan had been a New Hampshire politician before his appointment as a brigadier general in the Continental Army. He served as one of Charles Lee’s chief subordinate officers, along with Nathanael Greene, during the siege of Boston in 1775. He commanded Lee’s army after the general’s capture by British Light Dragoons in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, in December 1776. Source: Library of Congress.

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soldier recalled that Lee threatened to cane an officer of one of the rifle companies for his troops’ “unsoldierly conduct.”22 Although the army’s new disciplinary code forbade conversing with the enemy, Lee continued a correspondence that he had begun before the Battle of Bunker Hill with his former commanding officer from Portugal, General John Burgoyne. In Lee’s initial letter of June 5, he attempted to lure Burgoyne and General William Howe, both of whom had arrived in Boston along with General Henry Clinton to assist Gage, to the American side. Lee lamented that “men of such a stamp as Mr. Burgoyne and Mr. Howe,” who held Whig sentiments, could be “seduced into so impious and nefarious a service by the artifice of a wicked and insidious court and cabinet.” He reminded Burgoyne of Lord North’s “wickedness and treachery” in the tea crisis of 1773 and described Gage as “totally poisoned.” Lee urged him to avoid becoming “infected” by “the same miscreants who have infatuated General Gage” and warned about underestimating the Americans. Lee was

Nathanael Greene, 1812, copy by David Edwin after Charles Willson Peale, stipple engraving on paper. Greene was a Quaker from Rhode Island who became the youngest brigadier general in the Continental Army when he was appointed in 1775. Greene would later command the Hudson River forts, serve as the Continental Army’s adjutant general, and command the army’s Southern Department. In the latter capacity, he effectively used some of the tactics of irregular warfare against the British that Lee promoted. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY. [ 1 19 ]

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convinced that “it was not the demolition of the tea, it was not any other particular act of the Bostonians, or of the other provinces, which constituted their crimes; but it is the noble spirit of liberty manifestly pervading the whole continent, which had rendered [the Americans] the objects of ministerial and royal vengeance.” Lee accused the British of waging an “inexpiable war against America . . . the last asylum of persecuted liberty.”23 Burgoyne curtly replied that he hoped Lee would return to the British fold.24 On July 4, Lee wrote to Burgoyne again, asking him where he truly stood on the current conflict.25 On July 9, Burgoyne responded that his position regarding the American conflict rested on the idea that the British constitution guaranteed the supremacy of the king in Parliament. Although Burgoyne admired Lockean ideas and “those immortal Whigs who adopted and applied such doctrines during part of the reign of Charles the First and in that of James the Second,” he could not support accusations that George III was corrupt and tyrannical. Burgoyne believed that the American war was really “a struggle for total independency,” not merely to relieve “the weight of taxes imposed” or a plea for representation in Parliament. He extended an invitation to Lee under the promise of “a parole of honor for your safe return” to meet with him in Boston to continue their dialogue.26 Lee was suspicious of the invitation and asked the Massachusetts Provincial Congress for advice. He was told to refuse the offer because a meeting with Burgoyne might cause some revolutionaries to question his sincerity to their cause.27 Lee demonstrated some modicum of political savvy by asking the provincial congress for advice and by refusing to meet with Burgoyne.28 While trying to convince Burgoyne of the validity of the American cause, Lee was also working hard to help Washington improve the Continental lines outside Boston. The army was deficient in skilled engineers, and its fortifications and entrenchments reflected this deficiency. Lee wrote to Benjamin Rush that he believed “not a single man of ’em is capable of constructing an Oven.”29 Both Washington and Lee diligently oversaw improvements to the Continental lines. Lee tirelessly rode through camp shouting orders, correcting and commending the men. Massachusetts revolutionary James Warren ran into him at a formal gathering in Cambridge. “Your friend Lee . . . is a soldier, and a very industrious, active one,” he informed Samuel Adams. “He came in just before dinner, drank some punch, said he wanted no dinner, took no notice of the company, mounted [ 120 ]

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his horse, and went off again to the lines.”30 The constant need to supervise the troops left Lee tired. “I work like ten post Horses. Our miserable defect of Engineers imposes upon me eternal work. . . . The undoing what we found done gives us more trouble than doing what was left undone,” he told Robert Morris. But he was determined to make the army’s lines as secure as possible.31 In September, a British attack from the Charlestown peninsula against Lee’s lines seemed imminent, but Lee ordered brigadier general John Sullivan to direct 2,500 men in building fortifications on Ploughed Hill, a high ground that overlooked the Mystic River and was less than one mile from the British positions on Bunker Hill. The British tried to dislodge the Americans with a barrage of artillery fire, but Lee’s men withstood the bombardment and completed the fortifications.32 “I took possession of Plow’d Hill with the loss of only four men,” Lee informed Robert Morris. “We have made it a very strong post.”33 By early October, the hard work of Washington, Lee, and the other Continental officers began to pay dividends as their fortifications were reinforced with adequate trenches and sturdy breastworks. Ezra Stiles, who had toured the Continental lines, exclaimed: “The Works are astonishing! The lines are done with a sufficient Degree of Elegance, but their Strength & the Quantity of Line & Fortifications are amazing.”34 Washington believed that Gage would not assault the Continental lines until he had been adequately reinforced. He wanted to take the initiative and attack the British positions. At a council of war,35 his senior officers rejected this idea, however, arguing that the British defenses were too strong to overtake without heavy artillery. Washington took their advice and decided to delay any action until heavy artillery could be procured. The stalemate outside Boston continued into the fall and winter of 1775.36 Lee was pleased with the Continental defenses and bragged about them to guests who visited him at his first headquarters, a three-story brick house in Medford, Massachusetts, once owned by the Loyalist merchant Isaac Royall. Lee nicknamed the house “Hobgoblin Hall” after Yester Castle in Scotland, which was later made famous by Sir Walter Scott’s 1808 epic poem Marmion.37 Numerous persons commented on the prostitutes who frequently visited Lee at the elegant mansion, and visitors often described him roaming through its hallways with his menagerie of dogs trailing close behind. [ 121 ]

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The relationship between Lee and his dogs was more than a personal idiosyncrasy that charmed some people and shocked and made others feel uneasy; it revealed a modern sensibility toward keeping pets. He treated his dogs as family: he talked to them, ate at the dinner table with them, and believed that they understood his feelings, moods, and words. Modern society does not judge most people who treat their pets in this way with contempt or skepticism, yet many of Lee’s contemporaries viewed his behavior as humorous, eccentric, or both. “I consider the reputation of being whimsical and eccentric rather a panegyric than sarcasm, and my love of dogs passes with me as a still higher compliment,” Lee admitted.38 His dogs were his trustworthy, reliable companions. “Once I can be convinced that men are as worthy objects as dogs, I shall transfer my benevolence,” he wrote to John Adams. To Benjamin Rush, Lee confessed, “when my

Print depicting bust of John Adams, ca. 1880s, H. B. Halls Sons, engravers. Adams, the second cousin of Samuel Adams and the husband of Abigail Adams, was a delegate to the Continental Congress from Massachusetts. Although he admired Charles Lee’s passionate support of the American cause, his broad education, and his military knowledge, Adams favored the Virginian George Washington for the position of commander-inchief of the Continental Army. Source: Library of Congress. [ 122 ]

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Portrait of Abigail Adams, ca. 1766, Benjamin Blyth, pastel. The wife of Massachusetts revolutionary John Adams, Abigail made quite an impression on Charles Lee when they first met at a dinner party hosted by Colonel Thomas Mifflin and his wife Sarah in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1775. Perhaps Abigail’s wit, charm, and intelligence reminded Lee of his sister Sidney. Source: Library of Congress.

honest quadruped Friends are equal’d by the bipeds in fidelity, gratitude, or even good sense I will promise to become . . . a philanthropist, to say the truth I think the strongest proof of a good heart is to love Dogs and dislike Mankind.”39 Lee and his canines caused quite a stir at a banquet in Cambridge hosted by one of Washington’s aides, Pennsylvanian Thomas Mifflin, and his wife. Many of the guests were visibly upset when Lee’s dogs joined them at dinner. Rev. Jeremy Belknap, a Congregational minister who was also an [ 123 ]

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army chaplain, noted that Lee had two of his dogs “at dinner with him, one of them a native of Pomerania, which I should have taken for a bear had I seen him in the woods.” Lee dazzled those in attendance with stories of exotic European spas, Polish serfs, and warfare against the Ottomans and paid close attention to the female guests, especially John Adams’s wife Abigail.40 Although Lee was enthralled by the opinionated, intelligent, and attractive Abigail, she was less impressed by him. “General Lee looks like a careless hardy Veteran,” she wrote to John. “The Elegance of his pen far exceeds that of his person.”41 Abigail felt uncomfortable knowing that her husband had made some insensitive remarks about Lee’s love of dogs in a private letter to James Warren. The letter had been intercepted by the British and published in the Loyalist press. “You observe in your letter the Oddity of a great Man,” Adams wrote to Warren. “But you must love his Dogs if you love him.”42 To Abigail’s surprise, however, Lee acted the perfect gentleman and invited her to “dine with him . . . at Hob Goblin Hall,” an invitation she declined. However, as she reported to her husband, “the general was determined that I should not only be acquainted with him, but with his companions too, and therefore placed a chair before me into which he ordered Mr. Sparder [Spado] to mount and present his paw to me for a better acquaintance.” Abigail did not want to offend Lee and accepted Spado’s paw. “That Madam says [Lee] is the Dog that Mr. Adams has rendered famous.”43 John Adams’s comments about Lee’s affection for dogs prompted a rare diplomatic response from the general. Perhaps Lee viewed the incident as a way to strengthen his standing with the influential Massachusetts revolutionary. “As you may possibly harbor some suspicions that a certain passage in your intercepted letters (may) have made some disagreeable impressions on my mind, I think it necessary to assure you that it is quite the reverse,” he wrote to Adams.44 “Your opinion . . . of my attainments as a soldier and a scholar is extremely flattering. . . . Spado sends his love to you, and declares in very intelligible language, that he has fared much better since your allusion to him, for he is caressed now by all ranks, sexes, and ages.”45 Ezra Stiles noted that Lee took “no Offence” by Adams’s letter; instead he “smiled & said upon it, then I perceive they know me.”46 Lee’s handling of the situation earned him kudos. “I am much pleas’d that my laughing at Mr Adams’s description of me in his intercepted Letter has met with approbation,” he told Benjamin Rush.47 [ 124 ]

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Adams admired the way Lee had handled the embarrassing situation. He apologized to him, explaining that “a little Whim and Eccentricity, so far from being an objection to any one in my Mind, is rather, a Recommendation, at first Blush, and my Reasons are, because few Persons in the World, within my Experience or little Reading, who have been possessed of Virtues or Abilities, have been entirely without them; and because few Persons have been remarkable for them, without having Something at the same Time, truly valuable in them.” The repentant Adams wanted Lee to know that “a Fondness for Dogs, by no means depreciates any Character in my Estimation, because many of the greatest Men have been remarkable for it; and because I think it Evidence of an honest Mind and an Heart capable of Friendship, Fidelity and Strong Attachments being Characteristicks of that Animal.” He assured Lee that he never doubted his “Sincerity . . . any more than I did my own, when I expressed or implied an opinion of your Attainments as a Schollar and a Soldier.”48 When Adams visited the army’s camp at Cambridge in late 1775, Lee showed him great hospitality. They toured the Continental lines with Spado and Lee’s other canines in tow, venturing to the furthest posts on the lines, which were about one mile from the British fortifications at Charlestown. Lee “found his dogs inconvenient, for they . . . insisted on keeping [so] close about him . . . [that] . . . he expected . . . the British” to recognize him and “discharge . . . balls, grape, or language about our ears,” Adams noted.49 Lee also discussed with Adams some remarks that Adams had made about Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, the leader of the moderates in the Continental Congress who was the author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767–1768), which had defined the basic American position on imperial relations. In Adams’s intercepted letter to James Warren, he referred to Dickinson as a “piddling Genius” who “has given a silly Cast to our whole doings.” Lee thought Adams’s comments could potentially alienate moderates and undermine the American war effort. This was a remarkable observation for a man who never guarded his own tongue.50 “I am sorry that we have reason to apprehend bad consequences from the publication of Adams’s letter, surely Dickenson cannot be so ill arm’d in zeal for liberty as to suffer private pique to slacken him in the public cause—if it has this effect, he must forfeit all title to the reputation of a truly virtuous citizen,” Lee told Benjamin Rush.51 Lee wrote to Dickinson that Adams had confessed to him that “you are indisputably a man of genius and integrity.” Lee [ 125 ]

John Dickinson, ca. 1835, copy by John B. Longacre after Charles Willson Peale, sepia ink and opaque white gouache on Bristol board. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.

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also told Dickinson that he agreed with Adams that the ultimate goal of the war should be independence.52 The question of whether American rights and liberties could be effectively protected within the British Empire was an issue that confronted the Second Continental Congress from its first meeting on May 10, 1775. Moderates believed that it was acceptable to engage in armed self-defense of American rights and liberties; for them, the war was about gaining concessions from Britain. They hoped that armed resistance would lead to reconciliation, but by the fall of 1775, George III no longer favored reconciliation. He rejected Congress’s Olive Branch Petition, a proposal Dickinson had written. The cries for independence from American radicals also grew louder as British forces raided and burned coastal towns such as Falmouth, Massachusetts, and the British government declared all American shipping subject to seizure by its naval vessels.53 In early November, Samuel Adams rejoiced: “I believe the Time is near when the most timid will see the absolute Necessity of every one of the Colonies setting up a Government within itself.” He added, “It is the Age of George the Third; and to do Justice to our most gracious King, I will affirm that it is my Opinion, that his Councils and Administration will necessarily produce the grandest Revolutions the World has ever yet seen.”54 Lee felt that the time to declare independence had arrived. “You will have heard long before this of the inhuman busyness of Falmouth—the tragedy acted by these hell-hounds of an execrable Ministry with a more accursed Tyrant at their head now calls for decision,” he told Alexander McDougall. Many Americans had not thought about independence “until the most intolerable oppression forced it upon them,” Lee claimed. They wanted “to remain masters of their own property, and be governed by the same equitable laws which they had enjoyed from the first formation of the Colonies. The ties of connection which bound them to their parent country, were so dear to them, that he who would have ventured to touch them, would have been considered as the most impious of mortals; but these sacred ties . . . so dear to every American . . . are now rendered asunder.”55 The revolutionaries could no longer delay declaring independence, especially when “whole communities are laid waste by the Dogs of War.” They had to clearly state that their goal was independence and immediately open their ports to world trade, a sentiment Thomas Paine later echoed in Common Sense.56 [ 127 ]

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But by late 1775, the American war effort seemed in jeopardy as many Continental troops refused to serve beyond their enlistments. On Lee’s lines, soldiers from Connecticut announced that they would leave the service despite an order from Washington to remain with the army until reinforcements had arrived. Lee was livid at the troops’ defiant pronouncement. “Men, I do not know what to call you. You are the worst of all creatures,” he exclaimed in an expletive-filled tirade. One soldier remembered that Lee “flung and curst and swore” and declared that “he would order us to go to Bunker Hill [i.e., to attack the British stronghold] and if we would not go he would order the riflemen to fire at us.” This threat caught the attention of some of the men; others, however, ignored him and began to leave the ranks. Lee immediately placed them under arrest. As they were led to the guardhouse, they tried to encourage others to quit. Lee pulled his sword out of its scabbard and struck one of them with the hilt, causing a deep gash on the man’s head. Lee rewarded the soldiers who remained with an extra dram of rum in their rations.57 The desperate situation confronting the Continental Army made Lee impatient with the American political leadership, especially Dickinson and the moderates. “What a tryal is a civil war, or as I find that it is not quite decent at Philadelphia amongst your wise ones to term slaughtering of men, women & children and laying waste with fire and sword your sea coasts, a civil war—what a tryal are civil contentions? if the Ministry had not pushed affairs to their present extremity—the writer of the Farmer’s letters [Dickinson] wou’d have passed for the first of citizens, capable of leading the world— but now . . . I am afraid the most honorable inscription on his monument must be un passable homme du plume.”58 Lee advised the Continental Congress “not to hesitate a single instant, but decisively to cut the Gordian knot, now besmeared with civil blood” and warned Benjamin Franklin that “I am persuaded that if you loudly proclaim that nothing shall induce you to break the bands You risk the total loss of your liberties.”59 Lee was more direct with Robert Morris, “At present there appears no alternative—We must be Independent or Slaves. Great Britain is so sunk in corruption and stupidity that she is no longer fit to be the presiding power.”60 It seemed that many Americans needed to be nudged toward independence. That nudge came in the form of the pamphlet Common Sense, which was first published anonymously in Philadelphia in early January 1776. Its author, Thomas Paine, had, like Lee, recently arrived in America from [ 128 ]

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Thomas Paine, ca. 1900–1950 from a ca. 1876 painting by August Miliére. Source: Library of Congress.

Britain; he had emigrated to Philadelphia in late 1774. His skill as a writer was immediately recognized by Benjamin Rush who, in the fall of 1775, encouraged him to write Common Sense. In powerful yet simple language, Paine set the conflict in the context of the human struggle for freedom and constructed persuasive arguments for declaring independence. “Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation,” Paine wrote. “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’tis time to part.” He asserted that the Americans had the potential to create a new “asylum for mankind.” Common Sense sold more than 150,000 copies in its first three months and went through twenty-five editions in 1776 alone, making it the first best seller in American literary history.61 Lee described Common Sense as “a masterly, irresistible performance.”62 More than likely, he was acknowledging the effectiveness of the pamphlet’s language and appeal rather than its originality, for two years earlier in Strictures he had made the claim for the universality and revolutionary potential [ 129 ]

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of the American struggle and had argued that the colonists should declare their independence from Britain. Paine may have read Lee’s Strictures, perhaps on the recommendation of their mutual acquaintance Benjamin Rush. In 1774, Lee’s call for a war of independence was premature. But in 1776, he predicted that Common Sense “in concurrence with the transcendent folly and wickedness of the ministry, [will] give the Coup-de-grace to Great Britain.”63 Lee welcomed the opportunity to play a more active role in making American independence a reality and told the Continental Congress that “every Governour, government man, placeman, tory, and enemy to liberty, on the continent” should be arrested and have their property confiscated “or at least . . . lay them under heavy contributions [taxes] for the publick.” These persons should be “secured in some of the interior towns as hostages.” Lee advised the delegates to reinforce the army in Canada, urged them to organize two companies of the tallest men in each battalion to be armed with thirteen-foot spears (or pikes) in the manner of the Roman legion, called for the creation of “a general Militia” that would become the military’s primary source of manpower, and proposed the establishment of roving units or “flying camps” to undertake guerrilla operations against British outposts and supply lines and local Loyalist units. Lee also believed that serious consideration should be given to razing communities with large Loyalist populations.64 By late 1775, the British had begun to rethink their military strategy and had concluded that holding Boston provided no advantages. They viewed New England as the heart of the rebellion, but with little or no support outside the city any military action the British launched into the New England countryside would be risky, as the expedition against Lexington and Concord had demonstrated.65 The British army also confronted major shortages of food, fuel, and tents and had to deal with overcrowded unsanitary conditions that had led to the spread of diseases such as smallpox and dysentery. Thus General William Howe, who had succeeded Gage as commander-in-chief of British forces in America in November 1775, and other strategists decided to abandon Boston in favor of an attack against New York.66 The new British strategy hinged on blockading the New England coastline from Newport, Rhode Island, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in addition to amphibious operations attacking seaports in Rhode Island and New York. [ 130 ]

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Print of Charles Lee, ca. 1775. Source: Library of Congress.

The British also intended to occupy the St. Lawrence River Valley and to secure several key crossings along the northern end of the Hudson. Once New York was captured, they planned to advance an army northward into the lower Hudson River Valley that would eventually link with an army commanded by John Burgoyne driving southward from Canada. The successful execution of this strategy would give the British control of the Lake Champlain–Hudson River corridor, driving a wedge between the colonies, [ 131 ]

General William Howe, Esqr., of the Conecticut [sic] and comander [sic] Army in America, engraving by Johann Michael Probst, ca. 1776–1790. Source: Library of Congress.

[ 132 ]

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squeezing New England into submission, and, they hoped, bringing the rebellion to an end. Washington had read several reports that indicated that the British might abandon Boston for New York. He was warned that the Loyalists around the city were eager to assist the British and that the New York Provincial Congress was allowing civilians to provision the British warships anchored in the harbor. Washington reacted by asking the Continental Congress to deploy “some of the Jersey Troops” to New York “to prevent an evil, which may be almost irremediable, should it happen: I mean the landing of [British] Troops at that place, or upon Long Island near it.”67 Defending New York would be one of the most difficult challenges for the Continental Army. To accomplish this nearly impossible task, Washington turned to his most experienced officer—Charles Lee. Lee had just returned to the Continental encampment from Rhode Island, where he had been supervising the construction of the colony’s coastal fortifications and helping to curtail Loyalist activities. In Newport, he had forced Loyalists and those suspected of Loyalist behavior “to take a most solemn oath of allegiance to the Continental Congress.” Those who refused to take the oath were promptly detained. “The General’s Presence here strikes Awe through the Tories,” declared Ezra Stiles, a Newport resident. “They are as obsequious & submissive as possible.”68 Rhode Island moderates chafed at Lee’s efforts, while the colony’s radicals praised him. Like Washington, Lee was convinced that New York was important strategically for both belligerents. He argued that the city should either be “strongly garrisoned, and fortified, or destroyed.”69 To Robert Morris, Lee wrote that “the circumstances of New York render me uneasy almost to distraction—for Heaven’s sake why have you [Congress] not fortify’d and garrison’d that City with a strong force from Connecticut Jersey and Pennsylvania? for if the enemy once take post there, we cannot paint [in] our imagination the magnitude of the calamities which must flow to the Continent from our amazing negligence.” Lee pressured the Continental Congress to allocate resources for New York’s defense and proposed a plan that featured constructing fortifications at key strategic locations in and around the city.70 He also advocated “the expulsion or suppression” of the Loyalists and detaining Governor Tryon. “Not to crush these serpents, before their rattles are grown, would be ruinous,” Lee declared.71 “The consequences of the enemy’s possessing themselves of New York have appeared to me so [ 133 ]

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terrible, that I have scarcely been able to sleep from apprehensions on the subject.”72 Lee asked Washington to allow him to recruit “a body of volunteers” from Connecticut who would work with the New Jersey regiment commanded by Colonel William Alexander that was stationed at Elizabethtown, New Jersey, in order to implement this plan. But Washington had some doubts about the extent of his authority over New York. In an attempt to encourage him, Lee advised: “You have it in your power, at present, to prevent this dreadful event. . . . Congress have given you authority to take any step . . . which you shall think necessary for the public service; but if they have not given you expressly and literally authority with respect to the city of New York, I am confident that any measure you think right to plan and put in execution will be approved.”73 Washington remained unsure of his authority to order Continental troops to New York and asked John Adams for his opinion. The Massachusetts revolutionary assured him that New York’s defense was “within the Limits of your Excellency’s Command. . . . Your Commission constitutes you Commander of all the Forces now raised or to be raised . . . and [you] are vested with full Power and Authority to act as you shall think for the good and well fare of the service. . . . That [New] York is within your Command as much as . . . Massachusetts cannot bear a Question.”74 Adams’s assurance was enough for Washington, who directed Lee to recruit volunteers to put New York “into the best posture of defence, which the season and circumstances will admit,” for “it is a matter of the utmost importance to prevent the enemy from taking possession of the city . . . and the North [Hudson] River, as they will thereby command the country, and the communication with Canada.” Washington warned Lee that many New Yorkers were “not only inimical to the rights and liberties of America, but, by their conduct and public professions, have . . . a disposition to aid and assist in the reduction of that colony to ministerial tyranny.” He authorized Lee to disarm and if necessary to detain “all such persons . . . whose conduct and declarations have rendered them justly suspected of designs unfriendly to the views of Congress.” Lee was also to “inquire into the state and condition of the fortifications up the North [Hudson] River, and as far as shall be consistent with the orders of Congress, or not repugnant to them . . . have the works guarded” against a surprise attack.75 The defense of New York, which was crucial to the American war effort, would be a major test of Lee’s military skills and expertise. [ 134 ]

8

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Lee started for New York on January 8, 17 76, as heavy snows blanketed New England. He was escorted along the snow- and ice-covered roads by a group of Virginia riflemen until he reached New Haven, Connecticut, where he learned that an American expedition against Canada commanded by General Richard Montgomery and Colonel Benedict Arnold had met a disastrous end at Quebec in late December.1 The failure of the Canada expedition made Lee’s mission to defend New York more urgent, since the British would now be able to concentrate most of their forces on securing the city and eventually the whole Lake Champlain–Hudson River corridor. At New Haven, Lee met with the New York revolutionary Isaac Sears and found two regiments of Connecticut militia, a total of 1,200 men who had been called up by Governor Jonathan Trumbull, waiting to join him.2 The defeat of the Canada expedition made it imperative to deploy more Continental troops to New York, and Lee urged Washington to raise and deploy more Continentals to the city. “We have now occasion for exertion and decision[.] The affairs of Canada, will I suppose very soon, if not instantly require a very considerable force” to defend New York, “for which reason I should think it advisable immediately to raise some additional regiments in Massachusetts-Bay,” Lee wrote to Washington.3 The situation in New York was further complicated by the absence of defensive preparations in the city and the large number of Loyalists in its vicinity. In the fall of 1775, the Continental Congress had advised local committees to arrest any persons whose activities were detrimental to the security of their respective colonies. New Yorkers were slow to implement this policy. For example, they had allowed royal governor William Tryon to flee to the British merchant ship Duchess of Gordon in the East River, from where he rallied the city’s Loyalists and continued to hold meetings of the New York [ 137 ]

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Executive Council.4 The New York Provincial Congress also returned military stores and supplies that the revolutionaries had seized to the British, at a time when American soldiers outside Boston lacked provisions, uniforms, and equipment. On January 3, 1776, the Continental Congress had ordered two regiments, one commanded by Colonel Nathaniel Heard of New Jersey and the other by Colonel David Waterbury of Connecticut, into Queens County on Long Island to disarm and arrest suspected Loyalists. But before the operation could commence, the congress ordered Waterbury “to disband his regiment,” leaving only Heard’s troops to accomplish the task. Lee admonished the Continental Congress and the provincial congress. He believed that their conservative policies toward the Loyalists could undermine any future “measures so absolutely necessary to the salvation of New York.”5 From New Haven, Lee led his forces to Stamford, Connecticut, where his progress was hampered by his gout.6 News of the impending arrival of Lee’s army caused panic in New York, and residents fled to the countryside or to New Jersey.7 On January 21, the New York Committee of Safety wrote to Lee to warn him that his arrival “with a considerable body of forces” would more than likely be construed as an invasion and would cause the British warships in the harbor to blockade the port or, worse, fire on the city. The committee asked him to clarify his mission and was perturbed that it had not been informed of his arrival “by the Continental Congress, General Washington or yourself.” The committee ordered Lee to remain “on the western confines of Connecticut” while it tried to “allay the fears of our inhabitants.”8 Lee responded that he did not seek to provoke “active Hostilities against the Men of War” anchored in the harbor; rather, his mission “was solely to prevent the enemy from taking post in your City, or lodging themselves in Long Island, which we have the greatest reason to think is their design.”9 This impasse revealed that the jurisdictional authority of the Continental Congress, the Continental Army, and Washington had yet to be tested and defined. Although John Adams had assured Washington that it was in his power to send Lee to New York, the New Yorkers sharply disagreed, arguing that the expedition had to be invited by local authorities. The New York Committee of Safety insisted that the Continental Congress appoint delegates to mediate the situation.10 Lee wrote to John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, to voice his disappointment with the New [ 138 ]

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Yorkers. “As General Washington has informed the Congress of his motives for detaching me, it is needless to trouble you upon the subject,” he told Hancock. “I am sensible, Sir, that nothing can carry the air of greater presumption, than a servant’s intruding his opinion, unasked, upon his master; but at the same time, there are certain seasons when the real danger of the master may not only excuse, but render laudable the servant’s officiousness.” Lee informed him that he planned to march his army “directly to New York to execute the different purposes for which I am detached.” Lee also wrote that he planned to disarm New York’s Loyalists, distribute their weapons to the Continental troops, and administer “the strongest oath that can be devised.” Lee believed that an iron-clad loyalty oath would effectively act as “a sort of criterion by which you will be able to distinguish the desperate fanaticks from those who are reclaimable.” Those who refused to take the oath would be sent “into some interior part of the Continent, where they cannot be dangerous,” while those who took the oath would have to “deposit at least the value of one half of their respective property, in the hands of the Continental Congress, as a security for their good behaviour.”11 Hancock informed the Continental Congress of the dispute between civilians and the military that was taking place in New York and of Lee’s plans for the city’s defense. The congress sent a three-man committee— Andrew Allen (Pennsylvania), Benjamin Harrison (Virginia), and Thomas Lynch (South Carolina)—to confer with Lee and the New Yorkers.12 On January 30, the three delegates arrived in New York, where they met with the committee of safety and with Lee’s representative, Colonel David Waterbury, who apologized for the general’s absence and explained that he was still feeling the painful effects of gout.13 The New Yorkers wanted Lee’s assurance that he would submit to the committee’s authority once he and his troops were in the city. Waterbury argued that Lee’s orders had originated with Washington, whose authority was set by the Continental Congress. Ultimately, both parties agreed that Lee would answer directly to the Continental Congress.14 Lee was still in great physical pain when he finally set out for New York. But before Lee departed from Stamford, he received a note from Washington informing him of the departure from Boston of a British fleet under the command of General Henry Clinton. “Some say he has between 4 & 500 men—others part of Two Regiments,” Washington wrote, adding that the fleet’s destination was “very probably . . . New York.”15 Lee arrived in [ 139 ]

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New York on February 4, “but not without some difficulty.” His gout had worsened and he had to be carried in a litter for much of the journey.16 Although the day was very cold, Lee, “dressed with a coarse blue duffel overcoat,” reviewed the troops and gave them “a short address” that was filled with “pith and brevity.”17 Shortly after Lee’s arrival, Clinton’s fleet was sighted off Sandy Hook in Lower New York Bay, causing great terror among the residents.18 “The alarm and confusion in this city . . . was truly distressing, occasioned chiefly by the unexpected arrival of General Clinton, in the Mercury frigate, and two other vessels, a ship with troops and a brig from Boston,” remarked one New Yorker.19 Clinton calmed the tension by announcing that the fleet’s destination was the Carolinas and that the purpose of his stopover was to pay a friendly visit to Tryon. Lee was aware of the possibility that Clinton was deceiving him. “I shou’d apprise You that General Clinton arriv’d almost at the same instant with myself,” Lee notified Washington. “He says it is merely a visit to his Friend Tryon—if it is really so it is the most whimsical piece of civility I ever heard of.”20 Clinton did not intend to assault New York, but his arrival was certainly strategic, as he reconnoitered the area and received valuable intelligence about the condition of the city’s defenses from local Loyalists. The crisis dissipated in mid-February when Clinton’s fleet finally sailed for the Carolinas.21 Although Clinton’s fleet was gone, Lee’s problems remained. He immediately recognized that New York did not hold the same advantages for the Continental Army that Boston did. The geography of New York and the strength of the Loyalists in its surrounding communities created strategic burdens unlike those in Boston, where the Continentals enjoyed strong support outside the city. The numerous islands and waterways that dominated the New York area favored the British navy. “What to do with the city, I own, puzzles me. It is so encircled with deep navigable waters that whoever commands the sea must command the town,” Lee presciently surmised.22 In an attempt to neutralize the British naval advantage, Lee ordered the construction of fortifications at the key water approaches to the city. He also barricaded the city’s main streets and erected redoubts fifteen miles to the north near King’s Bridge,23 which connected Manhattan Island to the mainland. Lee posted troops at the passes through the Hudson Highlands, filled the Hudson and East Rivers with various obstacles designed to impede navigation, and constructed “inclos’d Batteries” and [ 1 40 ]

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trenches around the city and at strategic locations: Brooklyn Heights on western Long Island, Paulus Hook (now Jersey City) at the entrance to the Hudson River, and Horn’s Hook on the northeastern end of Manhattan Island, overlooking the treacherous body of water known as Hell Gate. Lee also ordered any remaining artillery in the royal battery removed to the liberty pole located in the commons at the northern limits of the city.24 At the core of Lee’s defensive scheme was the idea that the British navy would have to run a gauntlet of artillery fire if it attempted to land forces on Manhattan Island for an assault on New York. Once on the island, the British would have to fight through an elaborate system of trenches and breastworks to take possession of the city. “We are endeavouring . . . by diverse little works to prepare [New York] as a disputable field of Battle, shou’d the Enemy chuse to attempt possessing themselves of the city,” Lee wrote to Benjamin Rush.25 Lee did not believe the Continentals could hold New York for any length of time, but he hoped to make the British pay dearly in lives for their attempt to capture it. Lee surmised, “As the city of New York is almost environed by navigable waters, it is undoubtedly very difficult to fortify it against a powerful sea armament; but still . . . I must observe, once for all, that New York, from its circumstances can with difficulty be made a regular tenable fortification; but it may be made a most advantageous field of battle—so advantageous indeed, that if our people behave with common spirit, and the commanders are men of discretion, it must cost the enemy many thousands of men to get possession of it.”26 He also established an evacuation route to King’s Bridge, where the Continentals could cross to safety in Westchester County. From there, they could coordinate operations with local partisans to harass isolated British units on Manhattan Island. Lee’s overall strategy was not about holding New York or about gaining territory; his goal was simply to kill as many British regulars as possible while preserving the Continental Army and wearing down the enemy through attrition. It would take more than the fortifications to successfully defend New York. Lee believed that the safety and security of the city also depended upon effectively controlling the local Loyalists.27 “The Tories [here] are damn’d mad,” he exclaimed to Joseph Reed, Washington’s aide-de-camp. He warned the Continental Congress that “the Tories will take arms when encouraged by the appearance of Royal Troops,” adding that “the delicacy of our situation, the dangerous crisis of affairs have therefore determin’d me [ 1 41 ]

X

Hudson Highlands

th ( Hu • F dson) R i ve r or tW ash ing to n

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r Be The Kills

o ws

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er n o I. r ’s

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R Ph o a d f il a d r o elp m h ia

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n ge

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an

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YO

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Fortifications planned by Lee

0

Map of Charles Lee’s plan for the defense of New York City, 1776.

Statute Miles

5

10

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to take a decisive step which alone according to my judgment, can secure us.”28 Lee was determined to implement strict measures against the Loyalists, and Washington encouraged him. “To me it appears that the period is arrived, when nothing less than the most decisive and vigorous measures should be pursued. Our enemies from the other side of the Atlantick, will be sufficiently numerous; it highly concerns to have as few internal ones as possible,” Washington wrote to Lee.29 As in Rhode Island, Lee compelled individuals to swear an oath of allegiance to the rebellion. He imprisoned those who refused and confiscated their livestock and firearms.30 In late February 1776, Lee devised a special test oath to be administered to the residents of Queen’s County, where the Loyalists were especially active. “Some vigorous, decisive mode must now be adopted, of discovering on whom you may depend, on whom not,” he wrote to Nathaniel Woodhull of Suffolk County, the president of the New York Provincial Congress. “The crisis will admit of no procrastination. I cannot, therefore, help wishing for the common safety and the honor of this province in particular, that some test may be immediately offered that we may be enabled to distinguish our friends from our foes.”31 He drew up a test oath “in such terms that refusal or consent to take it must be a criterion by which We may be able to distinguish whose swords are whetted to plunge into the vitals of their Country and whose (if not drawn in defence of the Common rights) may be expected to remain quietly in their scabbards.”32 In early March, Lee ordered Isaac Sears to administer the test oath to the residents of Queens County and New York City.33 “It appears to me that I should be culpable to God, my Conscience, and the Continental Congress in whose Service I am engaged, shou’d I suffer at so dangerous a crisis a banditti of profess’d Foes of Liberty and their Country to remain at liberty to co-operate with and strengthen the ministerial Troops, openly in arms, or covertly, and consequently more dangerously furnish ’em with intelligence,” Lee told Sears. “I must desire that you will offer the . . . tests to every individual. . . . Their refusal must be construed in no more or less than an avowal of their hostile intention.” Those who refused to take the oath were to be transported “without loss of time to Connecticut where they can be no longer dangerous.”34 Lee informed the New York government that although his actions might seem excessive, “when the enemy is at our door, forms must be dispensed with; my duty to you, to the Continental Congress, and to my own conscience, have dictated the necessity of the measure.” Lee was willing to “undergo the censure [ 1 43 ]

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of the public” because he strongly believed in the American cause and because only the “most pure motives of serving the public cause uncontaminated by pique or resentment to individuals, have urged me to the step.”35 Sears administered Lee’s test oath to the residents of Queens County and New York City, who “swallowed [it] as hard as if it was a four pound shot, that they were trying to git down.” He also detained several individuals who refused to take it.36 Lee’s measures neutralized the Loyalists’ political and military power and compelled moderates to take a stand on the rebellion.37 Many New Yorkers feared that Lee’s actions would provoke the British warships in the harbor to open fire on the city. The Committee of Safety in the Queens County town of Hempstead lodged a protest with the provincial congress, claiming that Lee’s oath had made an already precarious situation worse.38 Lee scoffed at these concerns and warned the commanders of the British warships that firing on the city would be considered “a wanton piece of cruelty” and that “retaliation is not only justifyable in the eyes of God and Man, but in our circumstances absolutely necessary.” Lee warned that “the first house set on fire by your guns shall be the funeral pile” of the Loyalists in his custody.39 The provincial congress reproached Lee, arguing that regardless of whether his actions were beneficial to New York’s defense, he had overstepped his authority. “It may not be improper to remind you, Sir, that the right of apprehending, trying, and punishing citizens who violate the resolutions of Congress, or act inimical to the liberties of America, is by the Continental Congress, delegated to the Provincial Conventions in the respective Colonies. This right we think it our duty to insist upon, as essential to the security of our constituents.” The New Yorkers were “ready to co-operate” with Lee “in every measure that may be thought necessary to promote the common cause of the continent, and to frustrate the arbitrary designs of a wicked Ministry,” but “as faithful guardians of the people” the provincial congress must “protect the liberty and property of our constituents as much as possible in our present unhappy situation.”40 The provincial congress instructed its delegation in Philadelphia to bring a protest against Lee’s methods to the floor of the Continental Congress. The delegates debated the issue and decided that Lee’s actions encroached upon the jurisdiction of the “Representatives of a free people.” They also agreed that he should have been reprimanded in December of 1775 for administering a similar test oath to the residents of Rhode Island. The [ 1 44 ]

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Continental Congress admonished Lee for assuming authority that had not been granted to him and mandated that “no oath, by way of test, be imposed, exacted, or required of any of the inhabitants of these colonies, by any military officer.”41 Although Lee felt unfairly censured, his response was uncharacteristically subdued. He lamented that his decision to administer “an oath to the disaffected . . . should have brought down such a thundering stigma on my head.” Lee confessed to “the irregularity of the proceeding” and admitted that sometimes it is necessary to “bridle the impetuosity and license of the military.” Nevertheless, the Continental Congress had ordered the military “to take every step for the security of N. York,” and in his orders Washington had emphasized the importance of suppressing the Loyalists. Lee believed that the congress’s reprimand could have been done “in a less severe manner than by a public resolve” and confessed that the “censure sinks deep in my spirits.” He promised that in the future he would not allow the “warmth of temper and . . . an immoderate zeal for the rights and safety of this country” to cause him to “hurry . . . into any measures which may so justly merit reprehension.”42 Perhaps Lee’s response to the Continental Congress’s reprimand was tempered by the thought that many of the delegates had applauded his revolutionary zeal. Richard Henry Lee informed him that “every Gentleman [in Congress] acknowledged the necessity under which you acted, and approved the measure,” adding that it was “the precedent alone they feared, when less judgment was used.” The reprimand and resolve were not intended “to reflect on you,” the Virginian wrote; instead the congress directed “their Resolve to future occasions.”43 Lee was also criticized for his handling of the defense of Staten Island, a Loyalist stronghold. Lee had decided to leave the island, and by extension, the narrows, the one-mile wide body of water that separated Staten Island and Long Island, undefended. This decision was problematic given his larger defensive scheme. The Continental Congress hoped that Lee would have considered “the practicability of obstructing or . . . of fortifying . . . [the Narrows] so as to prevent the entrance of the enemy.”44 If riflemen and artillery were placed on the heights and along the shorelines on either side of the Narrows, British warships sailing through the channel would be vulnerable to a deadly cross fire. Although these fortifications would not prevent British regulars from landing on Staten Island or Long Island, they would make it more difficult. But Lee had barely 2,500 men and only a small number of heavy artillery pieces to implement his [ 1 45 ]

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defensive scheme.45 The shortage of men and artillery forced Lee to make difficult choices regarding New York’s defenses. He eventually determined that given his lack of resources, fortifying Brooklyn Heights, Manhattan Island, and the approaches to the Hudson and East Rivers were his best options. The most crucial aspect of Lee’s plan for the defense of New York was the fortification of Brooklyn Heights, which commanded the city and the lower approach to the East River. “This is the capital object; for should the enemy take possession of New York, when Long Island is in our hands, they will find it almost impossible to subsist,” he declared. Lee warned that should the British take possession of Brooklyn Heights, it would be the reverse of the situation in Boston, where the Continental forces occupied the high ground overlooking the city.46 This did not mean that Lee had not thought about Staten Island strategically. He had monitored the situation on the island and believed that its Loyalists were as dangerous as those in Queens County and New York.47 In his “Report on the Defence of New York,” Lee warned the Continental Congress’s Board of War that Loyalist activities on Staten Island threatened to undermine the defense of the city and recommended that the island’s residents should “without loss of time, be disarmed, and their arms delivered to some [American] regiment already raised, but unfurnished with muskets.” Lee felt that disarming the island’s Loyalists alone would “not incapacitate them from acting against us” and that harsher measures were necessary to guarantee that they would not assist the British. He suggested that the congress threaten to take the island’s children to detention centers as a means of preventing their parents from aiding the enemy. Lee acknowledged that this policy was harsh and would be difficult to implement, but felt that “the children’s children of America may rue the fatal omission.”48 This was the type of psychological warfare he had witnessed in Eastern Europe. The arrival of Clinton’s fleet also prompted Lee to recommend the removal of the island’s livestock to prevent it from falling into British hands.49 The New York Committee of Safety turned to the New Jersey Provincial Congress for assistance in executing this recommendation.50 The New Jersey government responded by sending Colonel Nathaniel Heard and his New Jersey militia to Staten Island. The Staten Islanders refused to cooperate with Heard, who responded by arresting four prominent residents on the suspicion that they were conspiring to assist the British. Heard sent them to Elizabethtown, New Jersey, where they were [ 1 46 ]

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held in the local jail. The detainees were eventually released, but Heard’s actions exacerbated the Loyalist sympathies of the majority of the island’s roughly 3,000 residents.51 Lee bemoaned the provincial congress’s policy of allowing civilians to provision the British warships in the harbor.52 This practice created the peculiar situation where New Yorkers were supplying the British with provisions while Continental troops outside Boston were trying to cut off supplies to the British army in that city. “For my own part the measure of suffering ourselves to be plundered and at the same time feeding our plunderers, appears a degree of lowness of spirit which reflects dishonour, and must encourage the enemy to take still greater liberties,” Lee declared. His particular concern was the frequent meetings Tryon held aboard the Duchess of Gordon with various influential Loyalists. Lee asked the provincial congress to disallow any communication with the British ships and to specifically prevent Tryon from receiving visitors until he gave “some security that he will not intrigue, cabal, or machinate mischief of any kind to the Continent or Province.” The provincial congress refused to comply with Lee’s request. But Lee was determined not to allow the civilian authorities to interfere with something that he deemed a military necessity and ordered the port master of New York to post guards at the city’s wharves to prevent all trade and communication with the British ships.53 The provincial congress acknowledged the difficulties that Lee faced in trying to secure New York, but they overruled him and reopened trade and communication with the British vessels.54 Lee protested this decision and was admonished by the provincial congress. “We are sensible of the many difficulties you have to struggle with. . . . This consideration, Sir, induces us to inform you that . . . [if ] this practice [was] continued, we are apprehensive it [would] greatly distress the inhabitants.”55 Lee was incensed at the nature and tone of the reprimand. “I have just received an uncertified paper, the purport of which seems to imply that the men of war and Governor Tryon are to be supplied as formerly with provisions,” he declared. “Subsequently to this order of the Provincial Congress, the Continental Congress have instructed me to put the city in the best state of defence possible. I am so unfortunate as not to be able to discover how furnishing the enemy with the necessities of life can contribute to that end; it certainly must open the means of their receiving every sort of [ 1 47 ]

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intelligence which ought to be withheld from them.” Lee acknowledged the provincial congress “as the true representatives of the people and proper Legislature of the Province,” but the information he had received from Washington and from the Continental Congress about a potential British assault against New York “justify me in most humbly entreating the Congress” to stop allowing “any intercourse of any kind with Mr Tryon, who must be considered as a most dangerous enemy.”56 Lee also derided the New Yorkers’ decision to pardon several alleged Loyalists after a pledge of good behavior as naïve, “extremely ill-imagined,” and “an act of absolute idiotism” and warned that the pardoned Loyalists will feel emboldened to assist the British as soon as “a few Regiments and Ships of War appear,” making it easy for the British to capture the city.57 The release of “the notorious enemies of liberty . . . on giving bonds for their good behaviour, appears to me in our present situation . . . far from a security. . . . It is rather adding virus to their malignancy.”58 Lee advised the New Yorkers to adopt “some vigorous, decisive mode . . . of discovering on whom you may depend, on whom not.”59 Lee’s persistence and strong arguments influenced the provincial congress to stop issuing passes for people to visit the British warships in the harbor.60 Historian John Shy writes that Lee’s actions “shocked [New Yorkers] out of their lethargy.”61 He effectively strengthened the position of the city’s radicals and gained the attention of the Continental Congress.62 John Adams wrote effusively, “We want you at N. York—We want you at Cambridge—We want you in Virginia.”63 The delegates were eager to utilize Lee’s military skills and zeal for the American cause wherever and whenever possible, including attempts to salvage the disastrous Canadian expedition.64 Lee had been seriously considered for the Canadian command from the expedition’s earliest inception. His fluency in the French language and his experience in the region during the French and Indian War had made him a logical choice to command the army’s operations in Canada.65 “The Congress . . . [will] cast their Eyes on You,” Horatio Gates told him.66 In a letter dated January 30, 1776, Washington informed Lee that the Continental Congress wanted “an active General” in Canada and that “should they . . . fix on you to take the command there” it would be “a fine field for the exertion of . . . [your] admirable talents.”67 [ 1 48 ]

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Lee was well aware of the Continental Congress’s interest in him for the Canadian command. “Several members of Congress have indicated a desire I should go to Canada,” he told Washington. “I have . . . assured them most honestly of my willingness.”68 Lee had already given much thought to the Canadian front and had warned the Continental Congress that “the salvation or perdition of America, in great measure depends upon the management or mismanagement of Canada.”69 Lee wrote to Robert Morris that he would go “wherever I can be of most service” to the American war effort but that “the service of Canada is very flattering to my ambition and opens a most tempting field of honour.” Morris must have informed his congressional colleagues of Lee’s desire to command in Canada, for on February 17, they appointed him to the post.70 Lee received congratulatory notes from John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, and even from the moderate John Dickinson. They praised him for his efforts to secure New York and predicted success for him in Canada. The bearer of these letters was Thomas Paine, who met with Lee in New York and personally congratulated him on his new command.71 Lee displayed great energy in preparing for the Canadian command. He hoped to secure aides who were bilingual in French and English and asked Washington for permission to take either Nathanael Greene or John Sullivan as his second-in-command. Although neither officer was bilingual, they had served admirably under him at Boston and he had great confidence in their abilities.72 Lee was scheduled to leave for Canada on February 28, but John Hancock notified him that there had been a change of plans and told him to remain at New York until further notice.73 The Continental Congress had reassessed the military situation and decided to place Lee in command of the newly created Southern Department, which included Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Although there was a clear need for military direction in Canada, the delegates believed that there was a strong possibility that the British would invade the South. After the sobering news of Lexington and Concord and the pyrrhic victory at Bunker Hill, British strategists were encouraged by reports of Loyalist strength in the South. In December 1775, the British government approved of a southern military campaign and ordered General Clinton to take an army to the mouth of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, where he would rendezvous with a fleet from Britain carrying five Irish regiments commanded by General Charles Cornwallis.74 Clinton was to strike in North Carolina as [ 1 49 ]

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a preliminary step to restoring royal authority in the southern colonies and then join General William Howe in time for the main campaign against New York City.75 The potential for a major British expedition against the South led the Continental Congress to send Lee to Williamsburg, Virginia. As in New York, Lee would be thrust into a complex situation in Virginia, where the political and economic interests of civilian authorities would be in direct conflict with his military objectives.

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The Continental Congre ss’s decision to create the Southern Department was based on concerns that the southern colonies were extremely vulnerable to a British attack. The threat of a British invasion had caused southern delegates to demand Lee’s services for this department.1 South Carolinian Edward Rutledge moved “to countermand Gen. Lee’s Journey to Canada & send Him to command the Southern Colonies.” Rutledge’s motion passed, to the disappointment of the northern delegates who wanted Lee to remain in the North.2 John Hancock informed Lee that in light of “the high Estimation the Members of the Congress have of your worth and abilities, every one wishing to have you where he had most at stake, the Congress have . . . determined to supercede the orders given you to proceed to Canada, and have this day come to a Resolution, that you shall take the command of the Continental forces in the Southern Department, which comprehends Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.”3 The southern post was independent of Washington; Lee would be reporting only to the Continental Congress. He would not need Washington’s approval on decisions and could use his new command to implement his military vision for the Revolution. Washington was surprised at Lee’s appointment to the Southern Department. “I was just about to congratulate you on your appointment to the command in Canada, when I received the account that your destination was altered,” he told Lee. “As a Virginian I must rejoice at the change; but as an American, I think you would have done more essential service to the common cause in Canada. For, besides the advantage of speaking and thinking in French, an officer who is acquainted with their manners and customs and has travelled in their country must certainly take the strongest hold of their affection and confidence.”4 Lee concurred with Washington’s [ 151 ]

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assessment. “As I am the only General Officer on the Continent who can speak and think in French, I confess it would have been more prudent to have sent me to Canada, but I shall obey with alacrity, and hope with success.”5 Lee had always been interested in a southern command. He had once written to Benjamin Franklin that “Virginia is our weak vulnerable part” and suggested that “a Man who has the reputation of being a Soldier” should be sent to oversee its defenses. Lee did not believe that a civilian such as Patrick Henry, who was in charge of Virginia’s military forces, was suited for such a task. “I have the highest opinion of Mr. Henry, but it is inconceivable how necessary it is in order to inspire the Common People with confidence that a reputed Soldier shou’d be at their head,” he argued. “They cannot be perswaded that a Man who has seen no service (altho of the first abilities) shou’d lead them to victory. This, I know, is folly and superstition; but it is a folly and superstition You must give way to. Upon the whole, I must repeat, that I think Virginia in danger and that you ought to take your precautions.”6 During Lee’s last days in New York, he worked on the city’s defenses. He also dined with Thomas Paine, who impressed him.7 “Your Mr. Payne . . . has genius in his eyes—his conversation has much life—I hope he will continue cramming down the throats of squeamish mortals his wholesome truths,” he wrote to Benjamin Rush.8 Paine’s first impression of Lee is lost, but he later remembered that he was a “sarcastic genius” who possessed “a great fund of military knowledge.”9 On March 7, Lee left New York with his menagerie of dogs, his personal servant Giuseppe Minghini, and some anxiety over the city’s fate.10 Lee left several bills unpaid. He owed a substantial sum of money to contractors, his tailor, and to the person who sold him his wine.11 Loyalist jurist Thomas Jones, while not a reliable source, especially when it came to the revolutionaries, recalled that when the female proprietor of the tavern where Lee had been staying gave him the bill, he “damned her for a tory, cursed her for a bitch, and left the house without paying her a sixpence”12 Lee stopped at Philadelphia to receive his instructions from the Continental Congress and present his “Report on the Defence of New York” to the Board of War. By March 15, Lee was determined to be on his way to Virginia, but the congress had not provided him with its instructions.13 He grew frustrated with the delegates because he was losing precious time.14 The Continental Congress eventually conveyed its instructions to Lee and he finally departed for Virginia.15 [ 152 ]

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Lee traveled to Havre de Grace, a small port town on Maryland’s eastern shore, and on to Baltimore, where he befriended a young German engineer named Massenbach.16 Although Maryland was outside Lee’s military jurisdiction, he inspected Baltimore’s defenses and found them “well concerted.” Lee also suggested that the Baltimore Committee of Safety detain Maryland’s royal governor, Robert Eden, who, like Tryon in New York, had been left unmolested and could not be trusted. This had caused an uproar among Maryland’s moderates.17 On his way to Williamsburg, Lee learned that the British had left Boston on March 17.18 “I most sincerely congratulate you, I congratulate the publick, on the great and glorious event of our possession of Boston,” he wrote to Washington. “It will be a most bright page in the annals of America, and a most abominable black one in those of the Beldam Britain.”19 Lee concluded, “Go on, my dear Genl, crown yourself with glory and establish the liberties and lustre of your country on a foundation more permanent than the Capitol Rock.”20 The Americans were convinced that Howe would descend on New York immediately, but the British general took his beleaguered army to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to regroup, obtain provisions, make repairs to his ships, and wait for the arrival of a fleet commanded by his brother, Admiral Richard Howe, with reinforcements from Europe. Howe remained in Halifax throughout the spring of 1776, delaying an attack on New York for three months. On March 28, Lee arrived in Williamsburg in a heavy rainstorm and was met by one of his new aides, Francis Otway Byrd, the son of the prominent Virginia conservative William Byrd III of Westover Plantation. Lee and his new aide dined in the Governor’s Palace with members of Virginia’s Committee of Safety, who presented him with an inspirational address by the colony’s militia officers. It read: “Your much wished for arrival in Williamsburg affords a pleasing opportunity, to the Officers of the Virginia Forces in this City, to express the high satisfaction they have in your appointment to the command of the Southern Department. . . . Perfectly convinced of your great abilities as a Commander, and of your firm attachment to the cause of America . . . we shall rejoice to unite with you . . . to establish American freedom on a lasting and Permanent Basis.”21 Lee thanked his hosts for their hospitality, but he soon drew their ire when he established his headquarters in the Governor’s Palace without consulting the committee and then allowed his dogs to freely roam the building’s rooms and grounds.22 [ 153 ]

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Lee had arrived at a moment when Virginia was embroiled in an internal crisis. Historian Michael A. McDonnell describes the colony as “a society at war—at war almost as much with itself as with Britain.” He points out that the imperial crisis and the war against Britain had upset Virginia’s social and economic hierarchy. The white elite found many privileges curtailed, while at the same time others found new opportunities.23 Virginia’s revolutionary leaders, many of whom were tobacco planters and slave owners, grew increasingly concerned about their ability to secure the support of their less fortunate white neighbors and keep popular protests in check. The enthusiasm for liberty Virginia’s white revolutionaries exhibited was confronted by the fervent aspirations for freedom of enslaved Virginians.24 By April 1775, several enslaved Virginians were encouraged by the colony’s royal governor, John Murray, Lord Dunmore, to seek their freedom behind British military lines.25 As news of Dunmore’s intention to arm slaves spread across Virginia, many white elites incited protests and encouraged violence against him. Dunmore fled Williamsburg in early June, taking refuge on the HMS Fowey, a British warship anchored in the Chesapeake Bay. He proceeded to assemble an army of Loyalists in the area of Hampton Roads, and in November 1775, he issued a proclamation that declared “all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms . . . for the more speedy reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty, to HIS MAJESTY’S Crown and Dignity.”26 Dunmore’s proclamation was inspired by the expediency of war and opened an avenue to freedom for slaves that did not exist before the conflict.27 Enslaved Virginians who fled from plantations owned by revolutionaries and many free blacks joined Dunmore’s forces in an attempt to liberate their families or to abolish slavery in the colony. They were organized into the Ethiopian Regiment and wore sashes emblazoned with the words “Liberty to Slaves.” The knowledge that the British were arming blacks exacerbated the fears of white Virginians of a colony-wide slave insurrection and motivated many of them to join the revolutionaries.28 Dunmore’s army successfully executed a series of raids against plantations owned by revolutionaries in the Chesapeake counties of Norfolk and Princess Anne. The dangers Dunmore posed forced many inhabitants of these counties to support the royal governor. They took an oath of allegiance to the Crown and provided him with supplies and information out of concern for the safety of their persons [ 154 ]

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and their property. Dunmore hoped that the success of his raids would convince the British to invade Virginia.29 By late 1775, Virginia’s revolutionary government, known as the Virginia Convention, had decided that the independent volunteer companies, which were established in late 1774 to defend the colony, were ineffective against Dunmore’s forces. The revolutionary government tried to solve the problem by centralizing Virginia’s military establishment: it created a regular militia of 1,000 paid full-time soldiers and formed eight “minutemen” battalions as support units.30 The minutemen battalions, however, were unattractive to poor whites; they made an enormous demand on their time, and unlike the officers of the independent companies, the officers of these battalions were appointed by special committees and paid eleven times as much as the men they commanded. Virginia’s poor whites also protested the government’s use of a regressive tax to fund the regular militia and its decision to exempt anyone who paid taxes on more than three slaves from minuteman duty.31 The tensions between Virginia’s white elite and poor farmers were also exacerbated by cash-strapped landlords—many of whom were prominent revolutionaries such as George Washington—who continued to demand rents from their cash-strapped tenants.32 The presence of Dunmore’s forces and the seemingly fractured nature of white Virginia society presented additional incentives for the British to attack the colony. That Charles Lee was sent into such a political and military powder keg was a testament of his importance to the revolutionaries. Lee was appalled at the deplorable condition of Virginia’s defenses and concluded that any military operation to repel a British invasion would be impossible to conduct unless corrective measures were taken immediately. Lee instructed his subordinates to give him a detailed report on the strength of Dunmore’s positions, the topography of Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties, and “whether it is practicable or impracticable to prevent” the royal governor from “being supply’d by fortifying and possessing ourselves of the watering places.”33 The Virginia militia was woefully armed and equipped and was positioned in a thin line along the major tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay.34 Lee also faced serious problems with Virginia’s Continental line, which lacked experienced engineers, entrenching tools, artillery, arms, and ammunition and whose ranks were far from complete. The threat of a slave rebellion initiated by British arms hampered recruitment for the Continental [ 155 ]

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service, as many white Virginians chose to join the militia to remain close to their families and their property. The commander of the 5th Virginia Regiment informed Lee that his companies were not yet complete and that his men were “very indifferently armed or accoutred, and no ammunition come to hand.”35 Most of the men of the 4th Virginia Regiment were inattentive to their duties and were “eternally petitioning for leave to visit their families.”36 Lee was inundated with reports of artillery that was “in a very unfit Condition for service” and of soldiers who had “very few guns” and who were “greatly in want of their Pay.”37 Moreover, Virginia’s Continental regiments were weakened by smallpox.38 The dearth of experienced engineers and the lack of entrenching tools resulted in fortifications that were laughable at best. “There is not a man or officer in the Army [here],” Lee complained to Hancock, “who knows the difference betwixt a Chevaux de Frise, and a Cabbage Garden.”39 Disciplinary issues added to the dire situation of Virginia’s Continental units. Several soldiers threatened to stage a mutiny to protest the Continental Congress’s decision not to appoint Patrick Henry as their commander, while others blatantly ignored orders or caused major disturbances in the ranks.40 Lee believed that backcountry troops, who were mostly Irish, Scots-Irish, and Germans, were the source of the disciplinary problems. He referred to these ethnic groups as “Banditti” and warned that if recruiters continued to recruit them, the army would suffer dearly.41 Ironically, Lee questioned the loyalties of recruits born in Britain and directed regimental officers “not to take any natives of Great Britain . . . unless they have been some time residents in the country, and have wives and children, or unless they can bring a strong and sufficient recommendation.”42 Lee was desperate to remedy the dire situation facing his command in Virginia. He applied to the Continental Congress for muskets, artillery, and gunpowder and directed his subordinates to purchase rifles and provisions from civilians at a fair price. Lee also took the opportunity to implement his idea of arming two companies of the tallest men in each battalion with thirteen-foot spears in the fashion of the Roman legions.43 The men “made a fine effect to the eye,” he informed Richard Henry Lee, and “seemed convinced of the utility of the arrangement.”44 Lee carefully assessed his military options. “I am exactly in the same situation I expected, puzzled where to go, or fix myself from an uncertainty of the Enemies design: I can therefore only act by surmise, the general [ 156 ]

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opinion is that [the British] will aim at . . . Virginia . . . or that they will fix their head Quarters in North Carolina,” Lee told Edward Rutledge.45 He argued that the British might attempt to capture Williamsburg and Yorktown, which would give them control of the James and York Rivers and access to the abundant farms of upcountry Virginia, an advantage that would not be lost on General Charles Cornwallis during the war’s final campaign in 1781. Lee was certain that the capture of these towns would boost the confidence of Virginia’s Loyalists and the pro-British Native Americans along the frontier and would also incite a slave rebellion. “I am apt to think that Williamsburg and York will be their [British] object,” he wrote to Richard Henry Lee. Their “possession would give an air of dignity and decided superiority to their arms, which, in a slave country, is of the utmost importance.”46 Lee believed that a successful British invasion of Virginia would have “important consequences by the impressions it would make in the minds of the Negroes.”47 The very real possibility of a slave revolt instigated by British arms led Lee to request three or four regiments from the middle colonies to reinforce his troops. “If [the British] carry on a piratical war and can raise an insurrection of Negroes, we must apply for some Battalions to our middle Colonies and indeed I could wish [Congress] cou’d spare us three or four immediately, which as Boston is now evacuated I shou’d think very practicable—for the Army which was employed in the blockade of that place, have now their arms at Liberty,” he wrote to Robert Morris.48 Unlike Virginia’s civilian authorities, Lee was more interested in preventing a general slave revolt precipitated by British arms than in preventing the slaves of individual plantation owners from running away. He understood that for slaves owned by revolutionaries, Dunmore’s policy had transformed the British army into their best chance for freedom. He explained that the authority of white plantation owners over their slaves was based primarily on the voluntary nonresistance of the slaves. Once slaves made the conscious decision to resist, the slaveholder’s authority over them ended. “Your dominion over the black is founded on opinion; if this opinion falls, your authority is lost,” he warned Richard Henry Lee.49 The rhetoric of the revolutionaries claimed that they were fighting a “just” war to achieve their rights as free Englishmen against the “slavery” of British rule. For African American slaves, joining the British was a personal choice based on individual liberty, while for slave-owning [ 157 ]

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white revolutionaries, their fight for liberty included the freedom to keep others in bondage.50 Lee was so confident that the British would target Williamsburg and Yorktown that he repositioned Virginia’s Continentals and militia in the areas around these towns. He also converted the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg into a barracks and military hospital and demanded that the Council of Safety form a cavalry unit and construct a fleet of small riverboats (or bateaux) to patrol the James and York Rivers.51 The residents of Williamsburg and Yorktown were pleased with this new defensive scheme, but it was not well received in other areas of Virginia. Thomas Jefferson’s brother-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Eppes of the 1st Virginia Regiment, informed Lee that if he withdrew his men from their posts near the town of Kemp’s Landing in Princess Anne County, “the whole country” would be vulnerable to Dunmore’s raids.52 The Gloucester County Committee of Safety pleaded with Lee not to remove the 7th Virginia Regiment from their county. “That Regiment properly disposed & assisted on an emergency by the militia will always be sufficient to repel any force that Lord Dunmore can send against us,” they wrote.53 The Virginia Committee of Safety protested that Lee should have conferred with them before rearranging the colony’s defenses.54 Although the Virginia Committee of Safety had approved Lee’s order to convert the College of William and Mary into a barracks and military hospital, it voiced its displeasure at the way he had done it. “As we wish to continue on terms of the most cordial Friendship with you, Sir, and that no occasions may be given for uneasiness or jealousy between the civil and military powers in this Colony, we feel it an indispensible duty to mention that your quartering Soldiers in the College & ordering it to be prepared for an Hospital without our previous consent which might have been easily obtained, was, in our opinion, an improper step . . . [that] may . . . convey to the people an Idea of our being subjected to an absolute military Government whilst we are straining every nerve in defence of liberty,” wrote the committee’s chair, Edmund Pendleton.55 Lee apologized for his actions, but the Virginia Committee of Safety’s caution and indecisiveness exasperated him. “I am sorry to grate your ears with a truth, but must at all events assure you that the Provincial Congress of New York are angels of decision when compared with your countrymen— the Committee of Safety assembled at Williamsburgh,” he complained to [ 158 ]

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Washington.56 Many Virginians ignored the possibility of side excursions like that of Clinton’s fleet and believed that the major British military offensives for 1776 would occur in the North. Thus, paying for a new and quite possibly unnecessary defensive scheme for Virginia seemed to them fiscally unwarranted. “Their economy is of a piece with their wisdom and valour; to save money, we have no carriages for our guns; to save money, we have no blankets for our men, who are, from want of this essential, dying by dozens,” Lee complained.57 He was also frustrated with the Virginians because many Americans had begun to look to them to lead the movement for declaring independence. In the spring of 1776, rumors of a British peace commission slowed the momentum for American independence, leaving some revolutionaries, including Lee, to believe that the Continental Congress had to issue a declaration before it was too late. He pressed the delegates to declare independence, arguing that it would allow America to gain commercial and military support from France, Spain, and the Netherlands. These governments would not be willing to entertain an alliance with the Americans as long as they remained under the authority of the British Empire. “The timidity of the senatorial part of the Continent . . . grows and extends itself: by the eternal God, unless you declare yourselves independent . . . you richly deserve to be enslaved, & I think it far from impossible, that it should be your lot, as without a more systematical intercourse with France and Holland, We cannot, We have not the means of carrying on the War,” Lee warned Edward Rutledge.58 To Robert Morris, he wrote that each day that passed without a declaration of independence meant “the loss at least of 100,000 pds. in money, and the blood of an hundred men.”59 Lee believed that the initiative for a declaration of independence had to come from somewhere other than New England, for that region’s radical reputation brought with it the potential for a backlash against the revolutionaries. He tried to convince the Virginians to take the lead on declaring independence. Lee assured Patrick Henry that “the spirit of the people . . . cry out for this Declaration.” Independence had to be declared immediately; otherwise, the soldiers “will become so dispirited that they will abandon their Colours and probably never be perswaded to make another effort,” he argued. Lee urged Henry to pressure his fellow Virginia revolutionaries to support the declaration of independence that was “so necessary to our salvation.”60 There was no other alternative; the Virginians [ 159 ]

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had to advocate declaring independence in the Continental Congress. “For God’s sake, why do you dawdle in the Congress so strangely? why do you not at once declare yourself a separate independent state?” he asked Richard Henry Lee. “If you do not declare immediately for positive independence, we are all ruined.”61 As Lee met with many leading Virginians, he became increasingly confident that they would take the lead on the issue of independence. On May 10, he wrote to Washington that a “noble spirit possesses” the Virginians. “They are almost unanimous for independence, but differ in their sentiments about the mode.”62 On May 15, the Virginia Convention instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress to promote independence and voted for a resolution, largely drafted by Edmund Pendleton, that proposed that the American colonies declare themselves “free and independent States.”63 On June 7, Richard Henry Lee introduced a resolution on the floor of the Continental Congress that was based partly on the Convention’s resolution, laying the foundation for the Declaration of Independence. How much Lee influenced the Virginia revolutionaries to declare independence is difficult to measure, but it is very likely that he contributed in part to the rising tide of support for political separation from Britain. Although Lee praised Virginia’s revolutionaries for their leadership on independence, he bristled at their timidity about the Loyalists in their colony. In an attempt to pacify the Loyalists, the Virginia Committee of Safety pardoned any person who had participated in aggression toward the revolutionary cause or had watched silently as Dunmore’s forces were supplied with provisions and information. This approach mirrored that of the New York authorities and did little to quell Loyalist activities.64 At a council of war on April 6, Lee announced that he would favor the forcible removal of all persons and their livestock from Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties, the two areas commonly known for Loyalist activity, as a measure that was necessary “to secure and preserve the Province.” He saw no alternative except to punish all of the inhabitants of these counties for the Loyalist behavior of a few. Lee confessed that if and when it was implemented, this action would “be attended with . . . much distress to Individuals,” who would be forced “at the point of the bayonet from their homes.” But Lee felt that “unless their Removal can be accomplished by some other means,” he had no choice other than to undertake “these harsh methods.”65 [ 160 ]

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On the same day as Lee’s council, the revolutionaries intercepted dispatches from the British secretary of state, Lord George Germain, to the royal governor of Maryland, Robert Eden. Unlike Dunmore in Virginia, Eden was extremely popular in Maryland. He had gained the support of many moderates by publicly taking a conciliatory stance on the AngloAmerican conflict.66 The captured documents, however, revealed that while Eden publicly pursued a conciliatory policy, privately he called for the British to take more aggressive measures against the revolutionaries. Like the former royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, and Tryon in New York, Eden urged Britain to act with great force against the Americans or risk losing them. The dispatches also revealed the first positive intelligence that a fleet from Europe was headed for America to rendezvous with Clinton’s forces for an invasion of either the Carolinas or Virginia.67 This information propelled the independence movement in Virginia forward as moderates lost hope for a negotiated settlement. It also gave Lee another excuse to demand more troops, supplies, artillery, and gunpowder from the Continental Congress and to increase the pace of construction on the defenses around Williamsburg and Yorktown.68 Although Maryland was outside Lee’s jurisdiction, he directed the chair of the Baltimore Committee of Safety, Samuel Purviance Jr., to seize Eden and his papers. “The sin & blame be on my head,” Lee wrote, promising to stand before the Continental Congress to “answer for . . . the justice & necessity of the measure.”69 The Baltimore committee agreed to apprehend Eden, but the Council of Safety in Annapolis, which served as the colony’s revolutionary government, refused to cooperate. Maryland’s civilian authorities were offended by Lee’s preemptory interference. The president of the council of safety, Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, a former member of the Governor’s Council, condemned Lee for his disregard for civil authority, and Thomas Johnson, a delegate to the Continental Congress, called the whole operation “a vile injureous Calumny calculated . . . to spread Suspicion and Distrust of the only executive in our province.”70 Lee defended his actions based on military necessity, informing Washington that he could not believe that the Marylanders were making “a most damnable clamor” over his attempt to arrest Eden. The action was “not only . . . justifiable . . . but absolutely necessary.”71 Lee argued that “when we have received sufficient evidence of traitorous designs, and the immediate seizure of the traitor, may probably lead to the most momentous [ 161 ]

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discovery . . . it is the duty of every good citizen, not to delay a single moment, if a single moment’s delay may prevent the securing such traitor & his Papers when of the utmost consequence to the community.” Lee emphasized to St. Thomas Jenifer that the safety and security of America would always demand swift decisive action by its civilian and military authorities.72 The Continental Congress supported Lee. “By the Letters of Lord Germaine to your Governour . . . it evidently appears, that Mr. Eden has been carrying on a dangerous Correspondence with the Ministry of Great Britain, who seem desperately bent on the Destruction of America,” Hancock informed the Marylanders. “The Congress therefore have come to a Resolution that the Person and Papers of Governour Eden be immediately seized, from which there is Reason to believe, we may not only learn, but probably defeat, the Designs of our Enemies.”73 The Virginia Committee of Safety also supported Eden’s arrest.74 The Maryland Council of Safety eventually paroled Eden, who left the colony for Britain. The Eden affair raised an important alarm about the security risk Loyalists posed to America. The Virginia Committee of Safety was “fully convinced that our enemies are solely encouraged to make their wicked attempts upon such Colonies, wherein they can expect the best assistance from the persons disaffected to the American Cause.” It enacted a policy to remove any inhabitant from areas plagued by Loyalist activities, particularly Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties, who had taken an oath of allegiance to the Crown or had actively assisted Dunmore. The committee also ordered all male slaves over the age of thirteen and livestock belonging to residents accused of Loyalist behavior to be immediately “conveyed to some place off Navigation, & to be returned to the Owners after they shall have settled at some secure place.”75 Lee agreed to enforce the committee’s policy, but he took it one step further. Lee ordered his subordinates to detain all persons in Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties who were active Loyalists or who were suspected of Loyalist behavior; confiscate their livestock, slaves, and firearms; and take their “Wives & Children . . . into a place of security, as hostages” for their “good behaviour.”76 Lee had recommended this tactic against the Loyalists on Staten Island, but it was never carried out. In Virginia, Lee detained several residents of Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties, confiscated their personal property, and removed their families to Continental encampments [ 162 ]

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in the area. Lee argued that these measures were absolutely necessary to ensure Virginia’s security. In late April, Lee became first major general and second-in-command of the Continental Army upon the retirement of General Artemas Ward. His confidence soared. He implemented more aggressive measures against Virginia’s Loyalists: he ordered the arrest of several residents of Portsmouth; instructed his subordinates to send the detainees’ families, slaves, and livestock to encampments further inland; and ordered their homes and businesses burned. “The houses of some of the most notorious Traitors I thought absolutely necessary to demolish in hopes of intimidating the Neighbourhood, from trifling any longer, and flying in the face of your ordinances,” he informed Edmund Pendleton.77 Lee also suggested that Portsmouth be totally destroyed, but he did not wait for the committee to act on his suggestion.78 On April 23, Lee gave the residents of Portsmouth five days to vacate their homes and businesses.79 Lee believed that every resident of Portsmouth should be held accountable for the actions of their Loyalist neighbors and that razing the town would send a message that aiding and abetting the British or standing by silently while others did so would not be tolerated. Although Lee anticipated opposition from the committee of safety, the Virginians declared that his decision was “one of the inevitable consequences of this kind of war, that legal modes of enquiry must yield to necessity, and what the public safety seems to require, should be immediately done, even tho’ some injury may arise to innocent individuals.”80 In early May, however, the committee reversed its decision and ordered Lee not to destroy Portsmouth. Lee was furious with the committee’s backpedaling on the Loyalist issue and asserted that it would have “serious consequences” for Virginia’s security. He argued that “the Inhabitants of the Counties of Norfolk & Princess Ann from their dangerous & exposed situation & notorious disaffection to the common cause of America” would continue to supply Dunmore and eventually assist the British during an invasion.81 Although the Virginia Committee of Safety had reversed Lee’s order, it tried to move ahead with its policy to relocate residents of Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties who were known or suspected Loyalists. But it was too late. Spring planting had begun, and not enough wagons and carts could be procured to relocate those who would be displaced.82 [ 163 ]

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By this time, Lee had received several reports that indicated that Clinton had encamped his forces on Battery Island near the mouth of the Cape Fear River.83 The chair of the North Carolina Committee of Secrecy, Thomas Burke, informed him that the North Carolina militia was spread thinly throughout the colony and that “the great difficulty of drawing them to act together . . . with great scarcity of fire arms, are circumstances . . . [that] induce us to wish for your presence here immediately, and suggest the necessity of your affording us assistance from the Province of Virginia, with all possible expedition.” Burke hoped that Lee’s presence would “have a happy influence upon the whole military arrangement in the Colony.”84 As in Virginia, revolutionaries in North Carolina feared a potential slave rebellion instigated by the British. The North Carolinians believed that Lee would strengthen the colony’s defenses and help prevent a slave insurrection.85 Lee directed General James Moore, the commander of North Carolina’s Continental troops, to closely monitor the British movements. “My perplexity with respect to the Enemies real designs is you may easily conceive very considerable,” he wrote to Moore. “I cannot perswade myself that your Province will be their aim, but rather [Virginia] or South Carolina—I am apt to think that their appearance at Cape Fear is rather a faint; however, I may be mistaken.”86 Lee had to quickly discern Clinton’s objective and move his troops to that location, but the ability of the British to transport their troops by sea gave them a distinct advantage. Lee had to guess correctly, for if he did not, the British could easily attack their intended target before he could recover from his tactical error. Lee spent a whirlwind six weeks in Virginia. On May 13, he turned over command of its defenses to Brigadier General Adam Stephen, a Virginian, and headed toward the North Carolina coastal town of Wilmington. Lee was escorted by the 8th Virginia Regiment and more than 1,000 militia that the Virginia Committee of Safety had provided for its neighbor’s defense.87 Lee urged the Continental Congress to reinforce the Continental regiments around Williamsburg and Yorktown and to pressure the Virginians to form a corps of cavalry and construct more rivercraft. He also recommended that all of the livestock from the eastern shore and from the islands in the Chesapeake Bay be removed to prevent them from falling into the hands of the British.88 In Virginia, as in New York, Lee embodied the saying “the end justifies the means.” That Loyalists came to hate him and some moderates to [ 164 ]

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dislike him was not surprising. His actions provoked heated debate, warnings, declarations, and fears from local civilian authorities and the Continental Congress. Richard Henry Lee informed Lee that many delegates were keeping a close watch for any “instance of deviation (in a military or naval Commander) from the line of instructions, and every undertaking . . . which is not warranted by express order of Congress.” He warned that some delegates had voiced specific concerns about his methods in Virginia and advised him that in the future he should obtain the consent of the civilian authorities before he initiated any new policies. The Virginia delegate wrote: “You know my friend that the spirit of liberty is a jealous spirit, and that Senators are not always wise and candid, but that frequently they are governed by envy, enmity, and a great variety of bad passions. . . . May it not be prudent when it can be done, without danger, to the common cause previously to obtain the Consent of Congress, where much deviation from the usual rotine [routine] of business is requisite?”89 An intense conflict about civil and military authority existed among the revolutionaries. Lee’s actions in New York and Virginia highlighted this conflict and brought to the surface fears of the displacement of civilian rule by military authority.

[ 165 ]

10

Lee’s Southern Glory

As Lee moved into North Carolina, British general Henry Clinton and his troops were at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, waiting for the arrival of a fleet from Europe carrying reinforcements that had been delayed by raging Atlantic storms. In February 1776, North Carolina militiamen had defeated a Loyalist army recruited by royal governor Josiah Martin at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge near the coastal town of Wilmington. The defeat of the Loyalists at Moore’s Creek Bridge convinced Clinton that he needed to make a bold move to solidify royal authority in the South. He set his sights on capturing Charleston, South Carolina. This ill-fated decision would help Charles Lee achieve great laurels by the fall of 1776. On May 20, Lee reached Halifax, North Carolina, where he received news that the fleet from Europe, between sixty and seventy vessels, had arrived at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. The defeat of the Loyalists at Moore’s Creek Bridge had made it less likely that the British would focus their attention on North Carolina, but Lee did not discount the possibility that “Rage and revenge” might lead them to destroy towns along the coast. Lee decided to stay with his original plan and continued with his troops to Wilmington.1 While in Halifax, Lee faced some difficulties with the 8th Virginia Regiment and with regiments from the North Carolina Continental Line. He reported to Edmund Pendleton, the chair of the Virginia Committee of Safety, that “the disorderly, mutinous and dangerous disposition of the soldiers of the 8th Regt have detained me longer in this place than I cou’d have wish’d.” Many men from the North Carolina Line and several from the 8th Virginia Regiment went home after their enlistment bonuses were finally distributed. These troops had been recruited primarily from the Virginia and North Carolina backcountries. “The spirit of desertion in these [ 166 ]

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back Country Troops is so alarmingly great that I must submit . . . whether it is not of the utmost importance to devise some means to put a stop to it before it spreads,” Lee informed Pendleton. Lee warned the Virginia and North Carolina governments that “this affair” could leave “the whole Army . . . one mass of disorder, vice, and confusion.”2 He favored severe punishments for troops who left their posts. “Severity is necessary,” he declared. “Lenient measures and familiar manners . . . only tend to inspire . . . [a] Spirit of stubbornness and mutiny.”3 Lee argued that any soldier caught without authentic discharge papers should be immediately sent to him to face desertion charges. Lee proceeded to Wilmington, cautious about the possibility that the British might double back against Virginia. But he hoped to get close enough to Wilmington to reinforce General James Moore, who was defending it.4 On May 25, Lee received a report from Moore that indicated that Clinton’s main objective was not Virginia or North Carolina but Charleston, South Carolina.5 “I have the greatest reason to believe the King’s Troops . . . do not exceed 3,250 Men, Marines included,” Moore informed Lee. “A number so inconsiderable I conceive, can never be intended to set against a province so populous as Virginia, which confirms me in the opinion that South Carolina is the place of their destination.”6 By the time Lee arrived in Wilmington on June 1, the British had set sail for Charleston. But Lee was still not certain where exactly Clinton intended to attack. “The whole enemy’s fleet have sailed from Cape Fear . . . but it is far from being ascertained whether they have steered their course to the northward or to the southward,” he told Pendleton.7 Although Lee was not totally persuaded that Charleston was Clinton’s objective, he followed the intelligence that he had received from Moore and hurried to the South Carolina seaport. “I shall . . . set out for Charleston . . . but at the same time confess, I know not whether I shall go to or from the enemy,” he declared.8 On June 4, the British fleet, guided by African American pilots, arrived at the entrance to Charleston harbor, causing panic among the residents of the seaport. Many of them fled into the countryside, but those who remained frantically erected earthen fortifications around the town.9 As in Virginia and North Carolina, white South Carolinians feared a slave insurrection aided by British arms. Many South Carolina slaves had heard of Dunmore’s proclamation and hoped to achieve their freedom by joining the British. In South Carolina, where African Americans outnumbered whites [ 167 ]

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and nearly 100 slaves had marched along the Stono River, proclaimed “Liberty!” and killed twenty-five whites in 1739, the potential for a slave insurrection was very much on the minds of many people. The South Carolina government ordered militia companies to patrol Charleston daily, while local committees increased the frequency of slave patrols.10 John Rutledge, the president of South Carolina’s government, had implemented an emergency plan of defense for Charleston that included fortifying Sullivan’s Island and James Island at the entrance to the harbor, mustering approximately 5,000 troops (both Continentals and militia), and gathering about 100 cannon and an ample quantity of gunpowder. He also exhorted Lee to hurry. “I wish you and a powerful reinforcement were now here. For God’s sake lose not a moment.”11 As Lee and his troops approached Charleston, they were overrun with slaves heading toward the city. At the same time, they collided with hordes of refugees fleeing it. The scene must have reminded Lee of his trek through southeastern Poland in 1769, where roads were clogged with civilians fleeing the chaos and carnage of civil war. Lee arrived in Charleston on June 9 with an army of 2,000 men, bringing the total number of American troops in the vicinity of the city to 7,000. He had a two-to-one numerical advantage over Clinton, but the great equalizer was the superior fire power of the British navy. The revolutionaries were woefully low on ammunition for their artillery and Charleston’s fortifications were incomplete.12 Lee believed that Clinton would probably strike Charleston immediately. But unfavorable winds and tides delayed any British assault for three weeks.13 The delay gave Lee and Rutledge time to resolve a chaotic command structure and complete Charleston’s defenses. Lee’s arrival started a dispute over formal command and authority. Several South Carolina militia officers, who were under Rutledge’s authority, refused to obey Lee’s orders. Lee also had to rely on the South Carolina government for supplies and provisions for his Continental troops, which he believed was an inefficient system. This dispute worried some South Carolinians, who hoped it would be resolved before an attack. “Gen. Charles Lee will I hope be made use of as an Instrument in the Hands of Providence of saving Charles Town,” wrote one South Carolina revolutionary. Rutledge understood that good relations between civilian and military authorities were critical to a successful defense of Charleston and placed South Carolina’s militia under Lee’s command.14 [ 168 ]

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John Rutledge, ca. 1791, John Trumbull, oil on mahogany panel. John Rutledge was the chief executive of South Carolina. Although Rutledge was initially on cordial terms with Charles Lee, the two men eventually clashed over who had formal command and authority over South Carolina’s militia. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.

Rutledge, however, did not relinquish all of his authority. He retained the ability to veto any of Lee’s decisions and declared that he could issue military orders of his own as warranted by the situation. Rutledge also insisted on having a significant role in the defensive preparations for Charleston, which made Lee uncomfortable. Yet, Lee amicably toured the city with Rutledge and made several suggestions for its defense. He was greatly concerned about the strength of Fort Johnson on James Island, which was located on the harbor’s southern side, and he voiced his displeasure over the decision to garrison the unfinished Fort Sullivan, which commanded the northern approach to the harbor. Lee argued that it would be a waste of time and manpower to defend Fort Sullivan because British warships could bombard the fortress on its vulnerable southern and western sides or could easily sail past it entirely. “I confess, I never cou’d . . . understand on what principle Sullivans Island was first taken possession of and fortify’d, or on [ 169 ]

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William Moultrie, 1782, Charles Willson Peale, oil on canvas. Colonel William Moultrie’s successful defense of Fort Sullivan in June 1776 earned him praise from Charles Lee after the two had disagreed over the efficacy of defending the garrison. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.

what principle it is to be maintain’d,” Lee wrote to Rutledge.15 Although the garrison was equipped with twenty-six pieces of artillery, Lee warned that it “could not hold out half an hour” against a British naval bombardment. He believed that the fort had the potential to become “a slaughtering stage.”16 Lee was also astonished that the South Carolinians had neglected to properly defend the mainland. He presciently argued that Clinton’s first maneuver would be to land on the barren Long Island, just 100 yards north of Sullivan’s Island, and cross his troops over to the mainland, secure the strategic Haddrell’s Point, and from there either advance on Charleston or attack the isolated garrison on Sullivan’s Island.17 Lee predicted that British warships might attempt to sail through a narrow channel that separated Sullivan’s Island from the mainland and position themselves for a major bombardment of Charleston. His assessment of the situation was correct. Clinton landed his troops on Long Island. Lee directed the commander of the garrison on Sullivan’s Island, Colonel William Moultrie of the 2nd [ 1 70 ]

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South Carolina Regiment, to scout the British positions on Long Island and deploy several hundred riflemen to attack their lines in weak spots. Lee rescinded his orders, however, after he received intelligence that the British were strongly entrenched. Instead, he directed Moultrie to continue to prepare Fort Sullivan’s defenses.18 Lee also drove the South Carolinians hard to finish Charleston’s fortifications and hustled around the city, barking commands, cursing loudly, and “ordering such matters to be done, as the particular crisis demanded.” With Rutledge’s approval, Lee ordered his troops to demolish several structures along the city’s waterfront. They were assisted by civilians, including enslaved South Carolinians. The materials from the demolished buildings were used to strengthen redoubts and construct new fortifications and barricades.19 “Fletches were erected across the streets [and] . . . as lead was scarce, the leadenweights from the windows of houses were offered by their owners to be cast into musket balls.” Lee had the residents of Charleston working “with alacrity.”20 Lee also imposed a 9 p.m. curfew, fearing that Loyalists might try to use the cover of darkness to sabotage the city’s defenses or send information to Clinton. The defenses on Haddrell’s Point, which was to the north of Charleston, concerned Lee greatly. “What damned fool planned this Battery?” he asked. When Lee was informed that South Carolina’s chief justice, William Henry

William Henry Drayton of South Carolina, engraved by Benoit Louis Prévost; artist, Pierre Eugène Du Simitière. Drayton was the chief justice of South Carolina who had planned the defenses on Haddrell’s Point. He later became one of Charles Lee’s fiercest critics in the Continental Congress. Source: Library of Congress. [ 1 71 ]

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Drayton, was the fortification’s designer, he replied tersely, “He may be a very good chief justice, but he is a damned bad engineer, for if the enemy had the planning of it, they could not have fixed it in a better place for the reduction” of the city.21 Lee dispatched 1,500 Continentals under the command of General John Armstrong of Pennsylvania, a talented engineer, to Haddrell’s Point and ordered him to rebuild the fortifications and position several hundred troops to the northeast, where the British were likely to land. Lee’s efforts placed Charleston “into an exceedingly good Posture of Defence.”22 Yet he continued to worry about the safety of Fort Sullivan. Lee positioned about 300 South Carolina riflemen under the command of Colonel William Thomson among the sand dunes and myrtle at the northern end of the island to prevent or at least to slow any British advance on the garrison from that direction. Thomson’s men guarded Breach Inlet, a narrow channel between Sullivan’s Island and Long Island. Lee also assigned 450 men to help complete Fort Sullivan and help operate the garrison’s artillery. Lee ordered Moultrie to build a pontoon bridge to the mainland to facilitate a potential retreat. “I think you ought to have . . . [a] means of retreat,” Lee told him, “for which reason I must beg that you will be expeditious in finishing the bridge.”23 The pontoon bridge could also be used to move men and equipment quickly and more efficiently onto the island.24 Lee’s style of leadership, his aggressiveness, and his abrasiveness grated on some local sensibilities. The opinionated Charles Cotesworth Pinckney bristled at Lee’s hard-driving style and remarked that he was “a strange animal” but “very clever” and concluded that “we must put up with ten thousand oddities in him on account of his abilities and his attachment to the rights of humanity.”25 William Henry Drayton, who had been offended by Lee’s comments regarding the fortifications on Haddrell’s Point, commented, “Every idea of [Lee’s] must be right and, of course, every contrary idea in every other person must be wrong.” Drayton never forgave Lee for the affront and took every opportunity to publicly criticize his military skills and destroy his credibility.26 Lee was especially hard on Moultrie. He constantly harangued and criticized him for “being too easy in command” and “too relaxed in Discipline.” Lee confessed that he was apprehensive about whether Moultrie’s “good nature and easy temper” were conducive to the demands placed upon him as the commander of Fort Sullivan.27 He sharply rebuked him for allowing his men to fire their weapons at random and run “wherever their folly [ 1 72 ]

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directs.” Lee thought this behavior was “an absolute, abomination” that was “not to be tolerated.” He advised Moultrie: “Sir, as you are in a most important Post—a Post where you have an opportunity of acquiring great honor—exert yourself . . . when you issue any orders, suffer ’em not to be trifled with . . . let your orders be as few as possible—but let ’em be punctually obeyed. I . . . expect that you enforce the execution of whatever is necessary for the honor and safety of your Garrison.” Lee warned that “shou’d any misfortune happen which can be attributed to negligence or inertness . . . the weight of censure will scarcely fall less heavily upon you, than should it arise from a deficiency of Courage.”28 Lee continued to argue that Fort Sullivan should be abandoned and its defenders reassigned to Haddrell’s Point, but Moultrie countered that it could be held and that its artillery was capable of inflicting serious damage on the British fleet. John Rutledge agreed, declaring that it would be “humiliating and disheartening to the troops and the people; and so advantageous, to the . . . enemy” to abandon the garrison.29 Lee grudgingly conceded. He personally inspected Fort Sullivan’s defenses and made several last-minute recommendations, which included assigning his chief engineer, Massenbach, to oversee its completion. 30 Meanwhile, Clinton and his second-in-command, General Charles Cornwallis, who had arrived from Europe with the reinforcements, carefully prepared an invasion plan as their troops fought heat exhaustion, aggressive sand flies, and pesky mosquitoes on Long Island. Clinton’s naval commander, Commodore Peter Parker, prodded him to move immediately against Charleston. But Clinton did not act fast enough for the impatient commodore, who decided to order the captains of the British warships to bombard Fort Sullivan. On June 28, the British naval vessels cautiously sailed toward Sullivan’s Island. Tricky tides and high winds hampered their advance. As they moved forward, they made sure to stay beyond the reach of the guns of Fort Johnson on James Island. Once the warships came to within 400 yards of Fort Sullivan, they opened fire. Although Clinton was displeased with Parker’s action, he took advantage of the naval assault, ordering a ground attack against the garrison. The British troops would have to traverse Breach Inlet, the channel separating Long Island and Sullivan’s Island, at low tide in order to assault the fort’s vulnerable southern and western sides. Once Fort Sullivan was captured, Clinton could turn his attention to Charleston. But Clinton’s plan went [ 1 73 ]

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er Riv per Coo

N

MAINLAND

le y Ash

Haddrell’s Point

Breach Inlet

er Riv

Charleston

Fort Johnson

d lan g Is Lon

Fort Sullivan

James Island

Sullivan’s Island

General Henry Clinton’s position (British) Colonel William Thomson’s position (American)

0 0

1 1

2 mi 2

3 km

Map of Charleston Harbor and defenses, 1776.

awry. During normal weather conditions, one could walk across Breach Inlet at low tide, but the high winds whipped the water with such force that crossing it was nearly impossible. Clinton had to prepare landing craft to transport his men across the channel, which delayed the attack. The British eventually landed on the northern end of Sullivan’s Island, where they faced incessant fire from Thomson’s riflemen, forcing them to retreat. Meanwhile, Fort Sullivan’s earthen entrenchments and its walls made of spongy palmetto logs and sand absorbed the cannonade from the British warships. At noon, the British attempted the maneuver that Lee had feared most; they sent three warships to sail past the fort to bombard its unfinished western side. Fortunately for the revolutionaries, the fierce winds caused the vessels to run aground. In the afternoon, the remaining British warships continued to trade volleys with Fort Sullivan’s artillery. Lee watched the battle unfold from Haddrell’s Point. At the start of hostilities, he had advised Moultrie “to spike your guns and retreat with all the order possible . . . [should] you . . . unfortunately expend your ammunition [ 1 74 ]

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without beating off the enemy, or driving them on ground.”31 But Moultrie adroitly ordered his men to pace their fire in order to increase accuracy and to conserve their ammunition. He also requested more gunpowder from the South Carolina government. Later that afternoon, Lee sent one of his aides, Francis Otway Byrd, to check on the condition of the garrison. Byrd reported that the fort had not sustained significant damage and that the men remained in good spirits. Sensing victory, Lee sent more reinforcements and ammunition from Haddrell’s Point to assist Moultrie.32 Lee also decided to visit Fort Sullivan. As he crossed the narrow channel from Haddrell’s Point to Sullivan’s Island, he could feel the heat emanating from the artillery fire.33 The sight of Lee approaching the fort inspired its defenders. Between volleys, vigorous shouts of “No quarter!” could be heard emanating from Fort Sullivan’s battered walls.34 The British warships sustained considerable damage, and after consulting with Clinton, Parker called off the attack. By dusk, the British had lost one of their vessels and nearly 190 casualties, while the casualty figures for the revolutionaries included thirty-seven wounded and seventeen killed.35 After the battle, Lee would not allow the South Carolinians to become complacent. “It is not impossible that the late repulse of the Enemy may be fatal to us,” he advised Rutledge. “We seem now all sunk into a most secure and comfortable sleep—Not a mortal of any kind, black or white at work— much is to be done for the security of the Town and the Island of Sullivan.”36 He called for the fortifications at Haddrell’s Point and in Charleston to be “considerably highten’d and thicken’d” and urged that Fort Sullivan be completed.37 Lee was still not convinced of Fort Sullivan’s viability, but he deployed troops to reinforce its defenses and recommended that “a Corps of Blacks” should be recruited to help with the work. Rutledge, who preferred white troops for the task, overruled him. Lee advised Moultrie to keep his men “more vigilant than ever” and reminded Thomson not to let his riflemen relax, “for it is almost proverbial in War, that we are never in so great danger, as when success makes us confidently secure.”38 Lee was in a state of euphoria in the days and weeks that followed the successful defense of Charleston. He sent letters to Washington, Hancock, Rush, and other revolutionaries that wisely credited the efforts of South Carolina’s civilian authorities and Moultrie, Thomson, and the troops for the victory. Lee felt invincible and suddenly had an urge to take to the offensive against the British. But he never got the chance. By July 20, Clinton had [ 1 75 ]

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decided that to continue the expedition was pointless and directed his battered fleet toward New York, taking with him for the moment the shattered hopes of southern Loyalists.39 The decision to hold Fort Sullivan was crucial to the successful defense of Charleston. Had the revolutionaries abandoned the fort, as Lee had initially recommended, the British would probably have captured the city without much of a fight. Nevertheless, Lee’s assessment of the fort’s strategic weaknesses was valid. The garrison would have probably been destroyed had the three British warships not run aground. Lee realized that cooperation was important for the successful defense of Charleston. Several factors contributed to the Continental victory: British ineptitude and bad luck; the inability of Clinton and Parker to adapt to unforeseen circumstances; the fighting spirit of the South Carolinians, especially Moultrie and his troops; and Lee’s tactical efforts and his willingness to cooperate with local civilian authorities.40 Many South Carolinians acknowledged Lee’s important contributions to the defense of Charleston. Moultrie confessed that although Lee had given them a hard time, “he taught us to think lightly of the enemy, and gave a spur to all our actions.” He praised Lee’s decision to visit the garrison during the heat of the battle and declared that his presence was worth 1,000 men.41 “I really think the continent so much obliged to this gentleman, that they should gratify him in every reasonable requisition,” John Rutledge wrote to Samuel Adams and Rhode Islander Stephen Hopkins, who were serving in the Continental Congress. “This colony, I am sure, is particularly indebted to him, for he has been indefatigable, ever since his arrival here, and you know he is an enthusiast in our cause.”42 South Carolina’s vicepresident, Henry Laurens, asserted that Lee’s “presence in the beginning of the action” was crucial and said that “if we do not altogether owe the honor of the 28 June [to him] we are certainly greatly indebted.”43 The Continental Congress rejoiced at the news of Clinton’s defeat. The delegates formally thanked Lee, Moultrie, Thomson, and all of the troops involved in Charleston’s defense. “It affords me the greatest pleasure to convey to you . . . the most valuable tribute which a free people can ever bestow, or a generous mind wish to receive—the just gratitude for rendering important services to an oppressed country,” John Hancock wrote to Lee. “The same enlarged mind and distinguished ardor in the cause of freedom, that taught you to despise the prejudices which have enslaved the [ 1 76 ]

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bulk of mankind, when you nobly undertook the defence of American liberty, will entitle you to receive from posterity the fame due to such exalted and disinterested conduct.”44 Lee assured Hancock that “the United States of America . . . cannot meet with a servant (whatever may be my abilities) animated with a greater degree of ardor and enthusiasm for their safety, prosperity, and glory.”45 By the end of July, Lee had learned of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson’s document justified the rebellion and formally declared America independent from Britain. It defended the separation with the idea that the people had the right to end their relationship with any government that abused rather than protected them and their “unalienable rights” of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Americans were no longer fighting to protect their rights as Englishmen within the British Empire; now the war’s main objective would be the creation of a separate American state where liberty would thrive and the universal rights of humanity would be respected. “The reveries which have frequently for a while serv’d to tickle my imagination (but which when awaked from my trance as constantly I consider’d as mere golden castles built in the air) at length bid fair for being realiz’d,” Lee wrote to Patrick Henry, who had recently been elected governor of Virginia. “We shall now, most probably, see a mighty empire establish’d of freemen whose honour, property and military glories are not to be at the disposal of a scepter’d knave, thief, fool, or coward; nor their consciences to be fetter’d by a proud domineering hierarchy.” In this new society, merit would be honored in all occupations, learning would be carried “to the highest degree of perfection,” and titles of nobility would be prohibited. “His Excellency and His Honour, the Honourable President of the Honourable Congress, or the Honourable Convention—this fulsome nauseating cant . . . in a great free . . . [and] equal commonwealth . . . is quite abominable,” Lee wrote.46 Although Lee reveled in the news of the Declaration of Independence, he knew that the road ahead would be difficult for the revolutionaries. Although Clinton’s army had been driven from Charleston, the British still posed a serious threat to many southern communities. British-held East Florida served as a base of military operations against Georgia and South Carolina, and Native Americans along the frontier, particularly the Cherokee, the Creek, and the Seminoles, were potential British allies.47 In the summer of 1776, British agents incited the Native Americans against the [ 1 77 ]

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revolutionaries in Georgia and South Carolina.48 On July 1, Native American warriors raided settlements along the southern frontier from Georgia to Virginia. They were joined by British regulars and Loyalists (both blacks and whites) who were based in St. Augustine and Pensacola, Florida, and near present-day Mobile, Alabama. The raids caused panic in the southern backcountry and fed rumors of a pan-Indian alliance with the British.49 By late July, Lee had received several reports that confirmed that the British were inciting Seminoles and Creeks to raid settlements in Georgia and South Carolina from posts in East Florida.50 Lee was informed that along the Georgia-East Florida border, in particular, “are the most numerous tribes of Indians now in North America—to wit the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws and a number of small Tribes, in the whole at least 15,000 Gun-Men.” Georgia’s government reported that “our last accounts from the Indians are rather unfavorable, and when we consider their natural Principle of Infidelity and how much more able our Enemies are to purchase their Friendship by presents &c than we are, there seems to be the greatest Reason to apprehend a Rupture with them—in such a Case the fate of Georgia may be easily conceived.” The Georgians warned Lee that these raids might encourage a slave insurrection, which more than likely would be aided by British and Loyalist troops stationed in St. Augustine, East Florida. “The vast Numbers of Negroes we have, perhaps of themselves Sufficient to subdue us . . . and the ready Channel of Supply and secure retreat which St. Augustine affords render them much to be dreaded.” Lee was asked to give serious consideration to offensive operations against East Florida.51 As soon as Lee was sure that Charleston was safe, he turned his attention to the southern frontier. Lee reached out to the governments of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia for troops. He explained to Edmund Pendleton, the president of the Virginia Convention, that the escalation of violence along the southern frontier was an important component of the British plan “to lay waste the Provinces, burn the habitations and mix men women and children in common carnage by the hands of the Indians.” Lee asked him to convince the convention to send a battalion of riflemen against the Overhill (or mountain) Cherokee who resided in the North Carolina backcountry west of the Appalachians. He also wrote to the government of North Carolina to ask it to deploy “a Body of Riflemen . . . to act in conjunction with the South Carolinas against the lower Nation.”52 In a rare moment of colonial cooperation, 6,000 troops from Virginia, the [ 1 78 ]

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Carolinas, and Georgia undertook a military offensive against the Cherokee. Lee viewed this expedition as an opportunity “to intimidate the numerous tribes of Indians from falling into the measures of the Tyrant, and as these Cherokee are not esteemed the most formidable Warriors we can probably do it without much risk or loss.”53 Lee’s military operation against the Cherokee was a precursor to the 1779 expedition against the Iroquois in New York commanded by General John Sullivan. As would be the case with Sullivan’s expedition, the revolutionaries in 1776 burned numerous Cherokee villages, destroyed crops and orchards, and slaughtered livestock. Cherokee who were captured were either killed or sold into slavery. Thus, the Cherokee paid dearly for their cooperation with the British. They immediately began negotiations with the Americans that eventually led to the signing of several treaties a year later in which they promised to remain neutral in the Anglo-American conflict and ceded large tracts of land to the Continental Congress.54 The Cherokee were thoroughly weakened and their presence in the southeast considerably diminished. Moreover, the timing of the Cherokee raids, which began three days after the British attack on Charleston, provided valuable propaganda for the revolutionaries who alleged that the British instigated the attacks to deflect attention away from their failed attempt to capture the seaport. The defeat of the Cherokee served notice to the Indian tribes of the southeast, particularly the Creek, who abandoned the British. Yet the civilian authorities in South Carolina and Georgia remained wary of the Indians and continued to hope that Lee would press the military initiative against the Creeks, the Seminoles, and other tribes who frequently crossed the Georgia-East Florida border.55 Lee gave the idea of an offensive against East Florida serious consideration and after several councils agreed to the invasion. Lee formulated a plan that had several objectives: the capture of the British military posts at St. Augustine and on St. Mary’s River, punishing the Creek and Seminoles for cooperating with the British, and territorial expansion. He informed the Continental Congress that he would pursue an offensive to weaken the Indians and reduce East Florida “to an American Province.”56 If East Florida became “an American Province” Lee stood a good chance of maintaining control of his lands there. From Charleston, Lee directed the Virginia and North Carolina Continental Lines to prepare for the East Florida expedition, but he met resistance from the officers of a South Carolina militia [ 1 79 ]

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regiment that had been attached to the expedition.57 John Rutledge, who had resumed full authority over South Carolina’s militia, was behind the resistance. Rutledge and the South Carolina Council of Safety believed that Charleston was still a major military target and insisted that troops should be kept in its vicinity to defend it against any future British attacks.58 Lee pressed the issue with the South Carolinians, but their provincialism exasperated him. “I am much concern’d and not a little surprised that the Council shou’d object to sending their Troops, when requir’d for the common defence, to a neighboring Province,” he curtly declared. “Is it reasonable? is it just that the other Colonies shou’d be oblig’d to march to their assistance, and refuse in their turn to assist others?” Lee argued that a military offensive against the British in East Florida was part of his larger strategy to defend the South.59 He admitted that the British might “try Georgia, the weakness of which Colony and the expectation of a powerful co-operation on the part of their Indian Allies may allure them.”60 Lee wrote to Rutledge: “I must now, Sir, request in my capacity as General appointed by Congress to watch over the Safety of the Southern District, that you will order a number of your Troops equal to a compleat Battalion to march immediately to Savanna for the defence of Georgia, if the Council cannot comply with this requisition I should be glad to be inform’d of the reasons that I may lay ’em before Congress, and be able to exculpate myself if any calamities fall upon that, at present, defence-less country.”61 The dispute was finally resolved when the South Carolina government agreed to send a small number of militia to Georgia, but it delayed the start of the expedition for several weeks.62 In early August, Lee left Charleston for Savannah, Georgia, at the head of a 2,000-man army, three-fourths of which were from Virginia and North Carolina. Although Lee had played an important role in the defense of Charleston, many South Carolinians were glad to see him go. “Between you & I, the General [Lee] seems to be an odd fish & I am glad you are about to get rid of him,” confessed congressional delegate Arthur Middleton to William Henry Drayton. “The moment I heard of the Augustine Business, I set it down as a whimsical affair, if not a sacrifice, I pray God it may prove neither.”63 Lee marched to the South Carolina coastal towns of Beaufort and Port Royal, which he thought “prudent to visit and inspect before we left the Province.” After surveying their defenses, Lee advanced to Purrysburg on the South Carolina side of the border with Georgia, where his [ 1 80 ]

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army bivouacked before continuing to Savannah. There he met with several leading Georgia revolutionaries, who told him that while they endorsed his expedition against East Florida, their government could contribute very little to it.64 Lee was shocked by the Georgians’ attitude.65 He concluded that without Georgia’s help, it would be nearly impossible to undertake a full-scale expedition to seize East Florida. Furthermore, Lee received intelligence that indicated that the British had “abandoned their Post on the River St. Mary and [are] withdrawing all their stock and slaves within the River St. John’s.” This information caused him to rethink his original strategy and to forego a major offensive designed to occupy East Florida. Instead, Lee called for “an incursion of insult” against the British post at St. Augustine.66 Lee’s limited expedition against St. Augustine began in late August, but he never made it to East Florida. The Continental Congress ordered him to New York to assist Washington against the British army of General William Howe. Lee immediately left the expedition, which floundered. Logistical problems and the perils of warm-weather campaigning in the South—heat exhaustion, alligator- and mosquito-infested swamps and marshes, and yellow fever and malaria—proved too much for the troops to overcome. According to historian Peter McCandless, at Sunbury, a town along the southern coast of Georgia, the army lost fifteen men a day to disease.67 By that time, however, Lee was on his way to New York. In early July 1776, General Howe landed 9,000 troops on the Loyalist stronghold of Staten Island at the entrance to New York harbor. By mid-August, he had amassed a force of 32,000 troops on the island and 450 warships. This was the largest overseas British military expedition until the Allied invasion of Normandy, France, in June 1944.68 Washington had arrived in New York in April and continued to strengthen the city’s defenses based on Lee’s earlier plan. By late August, Howe had transported most of his troops from Staten Island to the town of Gravesend (now in the borough of Brooklyn) on Long Island. On August 27, the British overwhelmed and outflanked the Continentals on Long Island, pinning them on Brooklyn Heights. Washington and his troops were trapped between the British army in front of them and a portion of the British navy, commanded by General Howe’s brother, Admiral Richard Howe, in the East River. But General Howe delayed his attack on the Continentals for two days, giving Washington enough time to use the cover of a dense evening [ 1 81 ]

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fog to ferry his men across the East River; they slipped quietly past the British warships to lower Manhattan Island. On September 15, the British captured New York and Howe eventually pursued Washington north to Harlem Heights. The next day, the British attacked the Continental lines around Harlem Heights but were repulsed. This Continental victory temporarily stalled Howe’s advance. Four days after the military engagement at Harlem Heights, a mysterious fire consumed almost a third of New York. By the early fall of 1776, the American cause was on the brink of failure, and many Continental officers and soldiers, congressional delegates, and ordinary citizens were looking to Charles Lee for its salvation.

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When Lee arrived in Philadelphia in early October 1776 on his way to New York, he was greeted with great joy and elation. James Smith of Pennsylvania wrote to his wife Eleanor, “About half an hour agoe Genl Lee arrived here. . . . I . . . wished so ardently for it  .  .  .  & I am Confident he will be better than 10,000 men to our Army.”1 Lee kept busy, meeting with John Hancock and several other delegates, writing reports about military affairs in the South, and attending dinner parties. Congress directed Lee to join Washington’s army at Harlem Heights in northern Manhattan Island.2 The delegates hoped that his presence would boost the army’s morale after the neardisaster on Long Island in August and the British capture of New York in mid-September. John Adams informed his wife Abigail that Lee’s “Appearance at Head Quarters on the Heights of Ha’arlem, would give a flow of Spirits to our Army, there. Some Officer of his Spirit and Experience, seems to be wanted.” Another delegate declared that Lee had “long been wished for at the Camp [in New York]” and that he expected that the general’s “arrival there will give our Army such new Spirits as may enable them to give Genl How’s Army a drubbing.”3 The Revolution needed to be saved and it seemed that its savior had finally arrived in the form of Charles Lee. While in Philadelphia, Lee was informed that his offer for the Hite estate, Hopewell, had been accepted. After more than a year of legal wrangling and petty haggling, Lee had finally acquired full ownership of the property, although he had to borrow £3,000 from Robert Morris to close the deal. Lee gave the estate the Portuguese name of Prato Rio, which in English translates to “near the river,” a nod to its proximity to Opequon Creek and to his military heroics against the Spanish at Vila Velha in 1762. Lee also learned that Congress had agreed to advance him “the sum of [ 183 ]

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30000 dollars” on the security of his property in Britain. He used some of this money to reimburse Morris and to make improvements to Prato Rio.4 Lee quietly left Philadelphia on October 8 with his personal finances seemingly in order and with the support of the Continental Congress. As Lee traveled through New Jersey, he took note of its defensive preparations. At Princeton, Lee paused to inform the Continental Congress’s Board of War of his findings. He reported that New Jersey’s defenses were abysmal and recommended that the congress immediately deploy troops from Virginia “at least as far as Brunswick.”5 Lee had heard that the Continental Congress would soon discuss a report from a three-member congressional committee comprised of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Rutledge,6 who had met with British admiral Richard Howe on Staten Island on September 11. The committee indicated that the Howe brothers had the authority to issue pardons and that any further escalation of the conflict could be avoided by renouncing independence.7 Lee admonished the congress for sending the committee to meet with the admiral. He argued that it was ridiculous to believe that the British had “some reasonable terms to offer” other than “unconditional submission.” Lee suspected that the British had initiated the meeting to strengthen the Loyalists and to undermine the American independence movement at home and abroad. He warned that any more meetings between “a committee deputed from the Congress” and representatives of the British government “would convey an idea that [members of Congress] themselves did not consider independency absolutely fixed.”8 By October 12, Lee had reached the New Jersey seaport of Perth Amboy, on the Raritan Bay, where he met with Brigadier General Hugh Mercer of Virginia. Lee was familiar with Mercer, who had commanded the garrison at Fort Pitt during the French and Indian War. Mercer was now in command of roughly 6,500 Continental troops, including the army’s “flying camp.”9 Lee had proposed to the Continental Congress the creation of a flying camp in late 1775 and enthusiastically reviewed these troops at Perth Amboy. He also inspected the Continentals’ fortifications along the Raritan River. Lee reported to the Continental Congress on the seriousness of the military situation around New York and in New Jersey. He believed that General Howe might try to encircle the Continental lines with a flanking maneuver but would more than likely keep his strategic options open. He urged the congress to prepare for the possibility that the British would put [ 1 84 ]

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New York “in a respectable state of defence, which with the command of the waters may be easily done” and make Philadelphia their primary objective. “We must suppose every case,” he declared. Should the British target Philadelphia, “what are we to do? What force have we? What means have we to prevent their possessing themselves of Philadelphia?” Lee warned that the Continentals should be prepared for the possibility that Howe might feign an assault on Washington’s lines while taking his main army against the rebel capital. By the time Washington would be able to figure out Howe’s true intentions, it would be too late; he would “be lodged and strongly fortified on both banks of the Delaware.” Lee exhorted the Continental Congress: “For Heaven’s sake, rouse yourselves; for Heaven’s sake, let ten thousand men be immediately assembled and stationed somewhere about Trenton.”10 Lee also hoped to convince Washington to retreat from Manhattan Island either north to Westchester County or Connecticut or west to New Jersey.11 From Perth Amboy, Lee traveled to Fort Constitution, the Continental garrison on the Hudson Palisades,12 near present-day Edgewater, New Jersey. The fort was situated opposite its sister bastion, Fort Washington, on the northwestern end of Manhattan Island. At Fort Constitution, Lee was informed that the Continental Congress had ordered Washington to prevent the British from sailing their ships with impunity up the Hudson River. On October 12, a fleet of 150 British warships carrying 4,000 troops under the command of General Clinton used the cover of a dense fog to slip into Long Island Sound past Continental lookouts posted at the channel known as Hell Gate. Clinton sought to land his forces on Throg’s Neck, a small marshy peninsula on the shoreline of Westchester County due east of the Continental positions in upper Manhattan Island. The British hoped that Clinton’s troops could sweep around Washington’s left flank, cut off his main avenue of retreat north and cause him to surrender.13 But Throg’s Neck was a poor choice for landing an army. In almost an exact replay of Charleston, where the weather and the area’s topography had stymied Clinton’s offensive against Fort Sullivan, the British found themselves situated on a marshy island that was connected to the mainland only at low tide. Clinton tried to move his troops along a causeway, but their movements were thwarted by Continental riflemen. The British were pinned down on Throg’s Neck for four days. Clinton reembarked his troops after [ 1 85 ]

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the Continentals brought up several pieces of artillery. The British troops remained shipboard in Long Island Sound, waiting for more supplies and a reinforcement of Hessians before attempting another landing. As Lee boarded a ferry to carry him across the Hudson River to Manhattan Island, he was told about Clinton’s attempt to flank the Continental lines. Lee was confident that the British would make another attempt to encircle the Continentals. He believed that Washington’s only option was to retreat from Manhattan Island. Although the Continental Congress had ordered Washington to remain at his present position and guard the Hudson, Lee felt that this strategy placed the Continental Army at risk for capture. Lee vented his frustration with the congress to his friend General Horatio Gates, who was commanding at Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York. “Inter nos the Congress seem to stumble every step,” he wrote. “I do not mean one or two of the Cattle, but the whole Stable.” Lee claimed that the Continental Congress was “unhinging the army” and he charged that Washington had compounded the problem by being too passive in his dealings with the delegates. “In my opinion, General Washington is as much to blame in not menacing ’em with resignation unless they refrain from unhinging the army by their absurd interference.”14 Significantly, from this point forward, Lee seldom agreed with Washington on strategy. Lee landed on Manhattan Island just below Fort Washington and rode to Washington’s headquarters on a palatial estate on the northern end of Harlem Heights that had once belonged to a prominent New York Loyalist.15 The troops cheered as he entered the army’s encampment. “General Lee was hourly expected as if from Heaven, with a legion of flaming swordsmen,” wrote one officer.16 Colonel Henry Knox hoped that Lee’s “Experience would be of service to us in Conquering those Philistines who have Come up against us.”17 Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman of Maryland, one of Washington’s aides, wrote to New York revolutionary William Duer, “You ask if General Lee is in Health and our people feel bold? I answer both in the affirmative. His appearance among us has not contributed a little to the latter.”18 One of the first persons to greet Lee was his former aide-de-camp, Colonel William Palfrey, who was now Washington’s paymaster-general. Palfrey accompanied Lee to Washington’s headquarters, but the commander-in-chief was inspecting the Continental lines near King’s Bridge. Lee immediately joined him. Although Washington was happy to have the benefit of Lee’s expertise and assistance, he may [ 1 86 ]

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have harbored some mixed feelings about his return. The two men had carried on a friendly correspondence, but Lee’s popularity with the troops and with several delegates must have bothered Washington. It seemed that the revolutionaries were starting to place their trust in Lee to win the war. Washington, a man with an enormous ego, might have been more content to have Lee in the South rather than in New York. Yet he exchanged pleasantries and in a gesture of respect and good will and a clever stroke of personal diplomacy renamed Fort Constitution in New Jersey Fort Lee in Lee’s honor.19 The successful effort to counter the British advance at Throg’s Neck had convinced most of Washington’s officers that the army’s position on Harlem Heights was safe. But Lee, who was given command of the army’s left flank at Valentine’s Hill, strongly disagreed.20 He felt that the Continental positions at both Harlem Heights and King’s Bridge were tenuous. Lee argued that Washington should retreat into Westchester County or to the hills of Connecticut, where the British and their allies would have some difficulty in pursuit, especially as winter approached. Washington recognized the danger his army faced and shared Lee’s opinion with his other officers at a council of war on October 16.21 Lee argued for a retreat. His opinion carried the day—at least partially. Although one week earlier British warships had proven that they could effectively sail through the many obstructions the Continentals had sunk into the Hudson and withstand a gauntlet of artillery fire from the twin forts guarding the river, the council decided to maintain the garrison at Fort Washington and to withdraw the rest of the army eighteen miles north to the village of White Plains, located at the hub of a network of roads that formed the Continental Army’s main supply route through Westchester County. The Continental Congress had pressured Washington to maintain the Hudson River forts as a way to strengthen the army’s porous river defenses. This directive may have influenced the council to maintain the garrison at Fort Washington.22 But there might have been another motive for the council’s decision. Historian Terry Golway notes that many Continental officers “saw Fort Washington as a potential second Bunker Hill. If the British attempted to attack this strongpoint built more than two hundred feet above the river, they would be punished as they were punished on that bloody day in June in Charlestown.”23 Washington withdrew the army from Manhattan Island, leaving roughly 1,400 men to hold Fort Washington. The Continentals crossed King’s [ 1 87 ]

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Bridge into Westchester County. Their retreat was slow and arduous. With horses and wagons in short supply, sick and wounded soldiers were forced to limp along or were carried by their comrades. The most severe cases were discharged from the service or were simply left behind. Healthy soldiers carried baggage on their backs or hauled artillery by hand. The lack of blankets, tents, and adequate provisions meant that hungry soldiers had to sleep under piles of dry autumn leaves and steal their sustenance from local farms and fields. “We marched . . . for the White Plains in the night,” remembered Private Joseph Plumb Martin of Connecticut. “I was so beat out before morning with hunger and fatigue that I could hardly move one foot before the other.”24 Although the trek to White Plains was difficult for Washington’s beleaguered troops, they had managed to avoid another British attempt to encircle them, as Lee had predicted. On the morning of October 18, Howe landed 4,000 troops, including 1,000 Hessians, at Pell’s Point in Westchester County.25 Lee, who commanded the Continental Army’s rear guard, had kept a watch for any unusual British maneuvers and had posted two regiments of riflemen near Pell’s Point under the command of the tenacious Colonel John Glover of Massachusetts to harass them.26 Glover climbed to the top of a nearby hill to survey the local terrain and spotted the British and their Hessian allies landing at Pell’s Point. He quickly rallied his 750 troops, which included African American soldiers from Rhode Island, near the town of Pelham, and using stone walls and fallen trees as cover, inflicted heavy casualties on the stunned British and Hessians, temporarily halting their advance. The Continentals suffered only eight dead and thirteen wounded.27 The little-known Battle of Pell’s Point (also known as the Battle of Pelham) was an important military engagement. Glover’s troops had saved Washington’s army from encirclement and salvaged its struggling retreat.28 After the engagement at Pelham, Howe took a more cautious approach against the retreating Continentals, choosing to shadow them. There is no doubt that the British could have crushed Washington’s army if Howe had acted more aggressively and pursued a fight. Lee praised Glover as “an admirable officer” and “greatly commended the Conduct of the Men” at Pelham.29 Although Lee was not directly involved in the engagement, he used it as political capital, immediately informing the Continental Congress that Glover’s troops were attached to his command.30 [ 1 88 ]

0 0

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Map of Upper Manhattan and the Continental retreat into Westchester County in October 1776.

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Washington’s advance corps arrived at White Plains on October 21. The remainder of the army trickled in over the next two days. Only about half of Washington’s roughly 25,000 troops were fit for duty. Many of the men were raw recruits who had suffered miserably on the retreat from Manhattan Island. Washington ordered fortifications built on the high ground north and west of the town for more than three miles. The tired and ragged Continentals did their best to follow his directions. Lee accompanied Washington on an inspection of the fortifications and discovered major gaps in the lines. Washington, who took Lee’s opinion seriously, worked to correct these flaws, ordering the men to build additional fortifications and reinforce those that were already in place. On October 28, Washington, Lee, and several other officers inspected the Continental lines. Lee immediately recognized that a high ridgeline in advance of the army’s right flank just north of the town, known as Chatterton’s Hill, had erroneously been left undefended. “Yonder, is the ground we ought to occupy,” he informed Washington. To which the commander-in-chief replied: “Let us, then, go and view it.”31 Chatterton’s Hill was a thickly wooded plateau that seemed to rise straight out of the Bronx River. It was surrounded by a web of streams and ravines and the terrain at its summit was flat and crisscrossed by stone walls. While Washington and his officers were inspecting the Continental lines, a cavalryman raced up to them: “The British are on the camp, sir!” he exclaimed. “Gentlemen, we have now other business than reconnoitering,” Washington declared, ordering his officers to prepare their positions for battle and hurrying New York militia under the command of Alexander McDougall to Chatterton’s Hill.32 Howe had finally made his move, attacking Washington’s army at White Plains with 13,000 troops. British field guns pounded the Continental lines, and Howe’s forces looked impressive as they marched in two perfect columns toward them. Washington had anticipated a frontal assault and concentrated the bulk of his troops at the center of his lines. But suddenly one of the British columns swung in the direction of Chatterton’s Hill. Washington rushed Continental troops to help McDougall’s New York militia on the precipice. The first wave of the British attack against Chatterton’s Hill was driven back by deadly fire from two fieldpieces that had been positioned on the edge of the bluff by the captain of the New York Provincial Company of Artillery, Alexander Hamilton, whose efficient command of this unit at White Plains and later at Trenton brought him to Washington’s [ 190 ]

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attention.33 Howe regrouped his troops on the other side of the Bronx River and repositioned his artillery closer to the hill. A vicious cannonade ensued as British artillery fire was answered by the Continentals. Howe ordered a ferocious charge, reminiscent of the assault he had led against the Americans at Bunker Hill in June 1775, to drive the Continentals and the New York militia from their positions on Chatterton’s Hill. The attack on the American defenses on Chatterton’s Hill was successful. The British carried the day at White Plains but at the cost of almost 280 casualties, or twice that of the Continentals. After the battle, Lee told Benjamin Rush that although the defenders on Chatterton’s Hill were forced to retreat because of “the superiority of [the British] Artillery,” British casualties were “very considerable.”34 Most of the Continental officers, including Lee, expected Howe to resume the attack the next day by rolling up their right flank and possibly attempting to surround the army. But Howe once again delayed. As the British remained in their positions, Washington strengthened his fortifications. On October 30, Howe informed his staff that he planned to attack the Continental lines the next day. But as was the case on Long Island two months earlier, nature and Howe’s hesitancy came to the rescue of Washington’s army. Heavy rains had left roads impassable and creeks and rivers overflowing their banks. By November 1, Washington had moved his army to the heights of North Castle across the Bronx River about half a mile from the British encampment. Howe showed no intention of pursuing Washington.35 For several days the situation outside White Plains remained a stalemate. On the morning of November 5, Howe finally set his army in motion, but it was moving away from the Continental lines and toward Manhattan Island. “We have by proper positions brought Mr. Howe to his ne plus ultra,” Lee rejoiced in a letter to Benjamin Franklin. “He has . . . apparently given up all hopes of taking us prisoners, as I believe he lately sanguinely promised himself.”36 The Continentals remained at their posts until Howe’s army had left the vicinity of White Plains. Some Continental officers had optimistically believed that Howe was retreating to winter quarters in New York City, while others, including Lee and Washington, thought that he might make a move into New Jersey. Lee, however, warned Washington that the British would “bend their force against Fort Washington” as a preliminary step toward gaining complete control of the Hudson River and an invasion of New Jersey. He advised [ 191 ]

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that the commander of the Hudson River fortifications, General Nathanael Greene, should abandon Fort Washington and withdraw its troops to New Jersey. On November 8, Washington wrote to Greene that it seemed that Howe’s forces would soon be bearing down on Fort Washington. Although three British warships had tried to sail up the Hudson to test American defenses and had sustained considerable damage from the fort’s guns, Washington remarked that he would be inclined to abandon the fort were he in Greene’s position. “If we cannot prevent Vessells passing up, and the Enemy are possessed of the surrounding Country, what valuable purpose can it answer to attempt to hold a Post from which the expected Benefit cannot be had?” he asked Greene. “I am therefore inclined to think it will not be prudent to hazard the men and Stores on Mount Washington, but as you are on the Spot [I] leave it to you to give such Orders as to evacuating Mount Washington as you Judge best.” Washington’s orders seemed vague and discretionary. Washington had placed a great deal of responsibility on Greene, who regarded Fort Washington, a pentagonal earthwork that stood 230 feet above the Hudson, as impregnable. Greene decided not to abandon the garrison.37 Howe halted his retreat at Dobbs Ferry on the Hudson River, less than ten miles from King’s Bridge. Washington was convinced that the British would invade New Jersey and possibly try to take possession of Philadelphia before the end of the campaigning season. On November 10, Washington announced that he would divide his army in anticipation of a British invasion of New Jersey and to guard against the possibility that Howe might double back to invade New England. He would lead an army of 2,000 Continentals across the Hudson into New Jersey, where he expected to be reinforced by militia from that state and from Pennsylvania. Washington ordered Brigadier General William Heath of Massachusetts to take 3,000 troops to the town of Peekskill, New York, to protect the passes through the Hudson Highlands, located about thirty miles north of White Plains, against a British rearguard action and declared that the Hudson River forts would continue to be garrisoned under the command of General Nathanael Greene. The remainder of the army, 7,500 troops, was placed under Lee’s command. Lee would also have the support of militia from New England and New York.38 Washington tasked Lee with guarding against any British movements against New England. “A little time now must manifest the enemy’s designs, and point out to you measures proper to be pursued by [ 192 ]

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that part of the Army under your command,” Washington wrote to him. “I shall give no directions, therefore, on this head, having the most entire confidence in your judgment and military exertions.” Yet he advised Lee to stay alert to the possibility that the British might feint an attack against Fort Washington and “pay the army under your command a visit.” Should Howe push into New Jersey, however, Lee was to join Washington “with all possible despatch, leaving the Militia and invalids” to protect the approaches to New England.39 On November 13, Washington arrived with his 2,000 troops at Fort Lee in New Jersey and met with Greene. He was surprised to discover that Greene had not evacuated Fort Washington or removed its rich store of supplies. Greene was confident that the British would have great difficulty taking the fort, especially since he had doubled the number of troops defending it from 1,400 to 2,800. Greene naïvely believed that if the fort’s defenses broke down, he could easily transfer the garrison’s troops across the Hudson to Fort Lee.40 From North Castle, in Westchester County, Lee wrote to Colonel Joseph Reed of Pennsylvania, Washington’s trusted aide-de-camp, that defending Fort Washington would be a major mistake. “Whether it is owing to my ignorance of certain circumstances, or what reason I can’t pretend to say, but from . . . the impossibility of preventing the Enemy from passing up and down the River . . . I confess I cannot conceive what circumstances give to Fort Washington so great a degree of value and importance as to counterbalance the probability or almost certainty of losing 1400 of our best Troops.” Lee confided, “I shou’d have been rather pleas’d had [Greene] called off a considerable part of the Garrison—in my opinion the Enemy will not besiege it so much from an Idea of its intrinsic value as with a view of saving their honour.”41 But Lee had written to Greene on November 11 that “Howe has lost the campaign” and that the British government would have to seriously reconsider its strategy. He never mentioned to Greene, who was one of his favorite subordinates when the Continental Army was outside Boston in 1775, that he had his doubts about the safety of the garrison at Fort Washington, nor had he given him any advice. Instead, Lee asked Greene to return the horse and sulky that he had once borrowed from him.42 On the morning of November 16, British artillery pounded Fort Washington’s outer defenses as almost 8,000 British and Hessian troops quickly descended on the garrison, forcing its immediate commander, Colonel [ 193 ]

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Robert Magaw of Pennsylvania, to capitulate. The revolutionaries had made a strategic blunder by attempting to hold Fort Washington. Its surrender was a devastating defeat for the Continental Army. The British captured more than 2,000 defenders of the fort along with a large quantity of weapons and ammunition.43 Lee went into a wild rage upon hearing of the Fort Washington debacle. One Continental officer remarked that Lee was “in a towering passion” and cursed those who were responsible for the defeat.44 Another Continental officer recalled that Lee “was so excited, that he tore the Hair out of his Head.”45 Lee described the capture of Fort Washington as “a cursed affair.”46 Although Lee believed that the loss of Fort Washington was a major setback for the American war effort, he tried to remain optimistic. He told a Continental officer not to dwell on the defeat, “for we must expect greater rubs before an empire can be established.” The revolutionaries should remain focused on the goal of winning their independence. “Ad astra per aspera ought to be the motto for a people engaged in so arduous a task; and I heartily pray, rather than renounce that child of our hopes, that darling Independence, that we may suffer the extremes of war and desolation in all their horrors, and, after being driven from one post to another . . . gloriously launch into the immensity of space, firm in our opposition to tyranny.”47 Lee tried to remain positive as he faced the potential loss of almost 3,000 Massachusetts Continentals from his division; their enlistments were about to expire at the end of November. He tried to encourage the Massachusetts troops to “continue in their present Posts” and reenlist. Lee also pleaded with the president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s executive council, James Bowdoin, to persuade his government to develop a new recruiting strategy for their Continental line, for he believed that “the cursed job of Fort Washington” had hurt morale and damaged the army’s recruitment efforts.48 Lee’s concern for the American war effort intensified after he heard about the British invasion of New Jersey. On November 20, 6,000 British and Hessian troops commanded by General Charles Cornwallis crossed the Hudson from Manhattan Island and landed a few miles north of Fort Lee. In a cold rain, they scaled the steep heights of the Palisades and marched toward the Continental garrison. Washington frantically ordered Nathanael Greene to withdraw the fort’s roughly 3,000 defenders. In the hustle to evacuate Fort Lee, Greene’s Continentals left behind [ 194 ]

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a large stockpile of weapons, ammunition, artillery, and provisions, including several head of cattle, which the British captured. Greene and his men joined Washington’s army as it crossed the Hackensack River. Cornwallis sent small detachments to pursue the retreating Continentals and settled the remainder of his troops in the captured fort.49 For Washington it was another in a series of setbacks that came to characterize the New York campaign. But for Lee and some of the other revolutionaries it proved that Washington was not the effective military leader they needed to win the war.50 As confidence in Washington’s abilities waned, Lee’s prestige and reputation were never greater. Some revolutionaries, in and out of the army, felt that the former British officer was more capable of leading them to victory than Washington. There is no doubt that Lee would have accepted the position of commander-in-chief had the Continental Congress offered it to him after the disastrous New York campaign. By late November 1776, he had grown frustrated with the congress and Washington’s management of the war. In a letter to Benjamin Rush, Lee condemned Washington’s tactical skills and accused the Continental Congress of mishandling the war effort. “You say I ought to desire the General [Washington] to press the Congress for the necessary articles. I have done it a thousand times, and the men are now starving for the want of blankets. I confess your apathy amazes me. You make me mad—You have numbers—your soldiers do not want courage— but such a total want of sense pervades all your counsels that Heaven alone can save you.”51 Washington continued to retreat across New Jersey. On November 21, his army traversed the swollen Passaic River, which had overflowed its banks from heavy overnight rains, and marched slowly along its west bank for nearly twenty miles. The men had no tents, no entrenching tools, and very few provisions. They reached the town of Newark cold, tired, hungry, and “very much broken & dispirited.” By now, Cornwallis had secured Fort Lee and led 10,000 British and Hessian troops in pursuit of Washington, who tried to avoid any direct engagements. “Washington’s strategic defensive had succeeded in limiting British conquests and kept the flame of independence alight,” writes military historian Dave R. Palmer, “but repeated reverses and withdrawals had irresistibly eroded spirit and will.”52 Washington’s retreat had left “a very fine country open to [British] ravages or a plentiful store house from which they will draw voluntary supplies.”53 As the [ 195 ]

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British cut a swath through New Jersey, their advance emboldened Loyalists and created widespread panic among the state’s revolutionaries, who had expected the Continental Army to protect them. Fearing for their lives and for the safety and security of their families and their property, many New Jersey revolutionaries, including Richard Stockton, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, renounced the Revolution and pledged their allegiance to the Crown. Thus Washington confronted another major dilemma. He knew that popular support was an important component of the Revolution, but he also believed that the Continental Army was the Revolution and that without it the fight for independence and the creation of a new society based on the ideals promulgated by the Declaration of Independence would end. Washington had to choose between protecting civilians and their property or preserving the army and the Revolution. He chose the latter. General Clinton had proposed a plan to encircle Washington’s lines and pressed Howe for permission to carry out this maneuver. But Howe had already decided to send Clinton to command an expedition to capture Newport, Rhode Island, which he felt could be used as a second port for the British navy. Although Clinton would succeed in capturing Newport later in the year, Howe’s decision not to try to flank Washington in New Jersey gave the Continental Army and the Revolution a stay of execution.54 To remedy his dire situation, Washington felt he had to reunite the Continental Army and perhaps strike an unexpected blow against his pursuer, Cornwallis. The repeated reverses in New York and his hasty retreat through New Jersey had diminished the public reputation of Washington and the Continental Army. Washington believed that the only way to restore the public’s confidence in him, in the Continental Army, and in the Revolution, was to inflict a defeat on the enemy. Thus he ordered Lee, whose 7,500-man army was at North Castle, where it was guarding the approaches to New England and attempting to clear Westchester County of Loyalist partisans, to join him in New Jersey.55 “Upon the whole . . . I am of [the] opinion . . . that the public interest requires your coming over to this side with the Continental Troops.”56 Lee did not respond, however, treating Washington’s missive as merely a suggestion rather than an order. Lee kept his army at North Castle and directed General William Heath to detach 2,000 men from his forces at Peekskill, New York, to reinforce Washington.57 But Heath balked at Lee’s order, informing him that his [ 196 ]

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original instructions, which had come from Washington, explicitly stated that he was “not to admit of moving any part of the troops from the posts assigned . . . unless it be by express orders from his Excellency or to support you in case you are attacked.” He explained that “to collect anything near the number [of troops] you mention would occasion a great delay.”58 Lee was livid with Heath. “By your mode of reasoning, the General’s [Washington’s] injunctions are so binding that not a tittle must be broke through for the salvation of the General and the Army,” he scolded him.59 The mildmannered Heath replied curtly, “I conceive it to be my duty to obey my instructions; especially those which are positive and poignant; and that to deviate from them, even in extreme cases, would be an errour; though perhaps an errour on the right side.” He assured Lee that he had “the salvation of the General and Army so much at heart that the least recommendation from him [Washington], to march my division, or any part of them, over the river, should have been instantly obeyed, without waiting for a positive order.”60 Lee responded condescendingly. “Sir, I perceive that you have formed an opinion . . . that shou’d General Washington remove to the streights of Magellan, the instructions he left with you upon a particular occasion, have to all intents and purposes invested you with a command separate from and independent of any other superior. That General Heath and General Lee are merely two Major Generals, who perhaps ought to hold a friendly intercourse with each other, and when this humour or fancied Interests prompts, may afford mutual assistance; but that General Heath is by no means to consider himself obliged to obey any orders of the Second-inCommand—this Idea of yours, sir, may not only be prejudicial to yourself but to the Public.”61 Lee reminded Heath that “I . . . command on this side the Water . . . [and] I must & will be obey’d.”62 As Washington retreated just ahead of Cornwallis through New Jersey, he expected to hear that Lee’s army had crossed the Hudson. Lee delayed, however, using several excuses, some legitimate and others not so legitimate, to explain his inertia. In order to join Washington, Lee argued that his army would have to take a very circuitous route into New Jersey, which would leave it vulnerable to attack and capture. He also noted that his dispute with Heath had kept him in New York longer than he had anticipated. Furthermore, the enlistments of several of his troops were about to expire and, unlike Washington’s forces, many of his men would be marching farther [ 197 ]

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away from their homes in New York and in New England, which could potentially affect troop morale. Lee explained that he needed more time to negotiate with the governments of the New England states to send him provisions, particularly blankets and shoes, for his men.63 He also added that he was in the process of obtaining assurances from the governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts that they would help recruit for his regiments and that they would deploy some of their militia to replace his Continentals when they eventually departed.64 We must not dismiss, however, Lee’s desire for an independent command or his aspirations for the position of commander-in-chief.65 To James Bowdoin, he referred to two separate armies, “that on the east and that on the west side of North River [Hudson River],” operating independently—one commanded by Washington and the other by him. Lee argued that to unite these two armies would be “chimerical.”66 On November 27, Lee finally moved his army, but not across the Hudson. He marched to Peekskill, where he exchanged harsh words with Heath, who informed him that he had received orders from Washington to continue to protect the important passes through the vulnerable Hudson Highlands.67 From the town of New Brunswick, on the Raritan River, where he had arrived on November 29, Washington urged Lee to move his troops immediately into New Jersey. Nathanael Greene advised Washington to be more direct with Lee about linking up their two armies. “I think General Lee must be confined within the Lines of some General Plan, or else his operations will be independent of yours,” Greene warned him.68 Historian Arthur S. Lefkowitz writes “Washington felt compelled to downplay his anger at the sensitive Lee to preserve harmony and keep the Continental Congress from finding new reasons to meddle in army affairs.”69 Washington informed Lee that “the enemy are advancing, the force I have with me is infinitely inferior in number, and such as cannot give or promise the least successful opposition.” He pleaded for Lee to “hasten your march as much as possible, or your arrival may be too late to answer any valuable purpose.”70 Only the Raritan River separated Washington’s army and the life of the Revolution from Cornwallis’s forces and possibly defeat.

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O n N ov e m be r 30 , 1 7 7 6 , a pr ivat e l e t t e r f r om L e e addressed to Colonel Joseph Reed, Washington’s aide-de-camp arrived at the Continentals’ headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Lee thanked Reed for his “most obliging flattering letter” of November 21, in which he had admitted that the events of the New York campaign had shaken his confidence in Washington’s abilities. “I do not mean to flatter nor praise you at the Expence of any other,” Reed told Lee, “but I confess I do think that it is entirely owing to you that this Army & the Liberties of America so far as they are depending on it are not totally cut off. . . . The Officers & soldiers generally have a Confidence in you—the Enemy constantly inquire where you are, & seem to me to be less confident when you are present.” Reed portrayed Washington as an indecisive leader. “Oh! General—an indecisive Mind is one of the greatest Misfortunes that can befall an Army—how often have I lamented it this Campaign.” Lee responded that “fatal indecision of mind . . . in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even want of personal courage—accident may put a decisive Blunderer in the right—but eternal defeat and miscarriage must attend the man of the best parts if curs’d with indecision.”1 The correspondence confirmed that by late 1776, some revolutionaries believed Lee was better suited to lead the army than Washington. Washington had accidently opened the sealed envelope containing Lee’s letter and was stunned by its contents. Reed, one of his most trusted confidants, and Lee, his second-in-command, wanted to see him replaced. It was a harsh reality check for Washington, but rather than make a public spectacle of this private exchange, he chose to let it pass, in the interest of maintaining unity in the army.2 In an act of great self-restraint and character, Washington resealed the envelope and forwarded the letter to Reed [ 199 ]

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Colonel Joseph Reed of Pennsylvania, ca. 1781, engraving by Benoit Louis Prévost; Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, artist. Reed was one of General George Washington’s most trusted staff officers until Washington had accidently read his private correspondence with Charles Lee in which he questioned Washington’s skills as a leader and tactician. He eventually reconciled with Washington and became a staunch critic of Lee. Source: Library of Congress.

with a note apologizing for mistakenly opening his private correspondence. Reed did not immediately respond. The commander-in-chief never told any of his other subordinates about the letter and never informed Lee that he knew about it.3 Although Washington kept his thoughts private, Lee could not keep from publicly criticizing him, especially for the disastrous New York campaign. Lee tried to distance himself from the failed campaign and at the same time use it to advance his career at Washington’s expense. In a letter to Benjamin Rush, he condemned Washington’s failure to override Greene’s decision to reinforce Fort Washington. “The affair at Fort Washington cannot surprise you in Philadelphia more than it amazed and stunned me,” Lee wrote. He instructed Rush, one of his key allies in the Continental Congress, to “keep what I say to yourself.” Yet he must have known that the talkative physician would not be able to contain his words; he exhorted him to “acquit me of any share of the misfortune” in “your conversations” with other delegates. “I foresaw, predicted, all that has happened; and urged the necessity of abandoning [Fort Washington]; for could we have kept it, it [ 200 ]

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was of little or no use.” Lee alleged that he had explicitly warned Washington to “draw off the garrison [at Fort Washington], or they will be lost.”4 As Lee remained with his army in Peekskill, Washington retreated from New Brunswick toward Princeton, narrowly escaping Cornwallis’s forces as they advanced on the town. Cornwallis made no effort to chase Washington, choosing instead to occupy New Brunswick, reconnoiter the surrounding area, and keep his troops in defensive positions, ready for a potential attack, particularly from Lee. Historian Arthur S. Lefkowitz writes, “The specter of Lee, if not the person, was proving an effective deterrent.”5 Cornwallis had to be sure that he would not get caught between Washington at his front and Lee to his flank and rear. From Princeton, Washington withdrew to the Delaware River, where one of his subordinates had procured a large number of vessels near Trenton to carry his troops across to Pennsylvania.6 Although Washington rapidly retreated through New Jersey, he continued to believe that an open-field battle against the British would boost American morale and erode the enemy’s increasing confidence. But his men were exhausted and largely inexperienced; he needed more veteran troops, like those under Lee’s command, to confront the British in an openfield engagement. The Continental Congress was also concerned about the military situation in New Jersey and about Lee’s position in Peekskill. On December 2, the delegates ordered Washington to strongly demand that Lee join him.7 The next day, Washington received a message from Lee informing him that he was still at Peekskill and would soon cross the Hudson into New Jersey.8 By December 5, Lee’s army had crossed the Hudson. The crossing was not easy, as ice impeded the scows and flatboats that carried the troops. Many of Lee’s men were thinly clad and wore rags or beat-up cowhide on their feet. In almost a month’s time, Lee had lost more than 4,000 troops because of expired enlistments, desertions, and deaths from malnutrition, the sub-zero temperatures and the spread of camp diseases. Yet Lee expressed great confidence in the 2,700 soldiers who remained in his ranks. “This desultory war is hard upon the poor soldiers, but . . . they have noble spirits and will, I have no doubt, render great service to their country,” Lee declared.9 Once across the Hudson, Lee’s troops braved ferocious sleet and an icy reception from many local residents who held Loyalist sympathies. In Ramapo, New York, one soldier noted: “the inhabitants Abused us Caling us Damd Rebels,” while another remarked that Bergen County, New [ 201 ]

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Jersey, was “full of them Cursed Creaters Called Torys.”10 In retaliation, Lee announced that he would “clothe my people at the expense of the Tories which has a double good effect—it puts them in spirits and comfort, and is a correction of the iniquity of the foes of liberty.”11 He ordered his subordinates to apprehend all Loyalists and seize their personal property, especially items that could be used to help improve the army’s physical condition. Lee gave his men carte blanche to plunder arms and ammunition, horses, livestock, blankets, shoes, clothes, and food from civilians who were Loyalists or who were suspected of Loyalist behavior. Lee’s army moved at a snail’s pace. He blamed the slow advance on the weather, the hostile reception his troops had received from the Loyalist-leaning residents of northern New Jersey, and Washington, who had “quitted Brunswick,” thereby making it “impossible to know” where to join him.12 On December 8, Lee’s army arrived in the town of Pompton as Washington was crossing the Delaware into Pennsylvania. Lee and his bodyguard rode ahead to Morristown, where 1,000 New Jersey militiamen greeted them. He also received a message from Washington urging him to move to the ferry crossing at Tinicum, about twenty-five miles north of the British lines at Trenton, where transports would be waiting to carry his men across the Delaware. But Lee no longer trusted Washington’s military judgment and hoped to establish a separate command. He wrote to Washington, “Bind me as little as possible, not from any opinion, I do assure you, of my own parts, but from a persuasion that detached Generals cannot have too great latitude, unless they are very incompetent indeed.”13 While Lee’s army had been reinforced by New Jersey militia, it would be further strengthened by the arrival of roughly 600 troops under General Horatio Gates from Albany, New York. Lee believed that it made better strategic sense for him to remain to the rear of the British instead of attempting to join Washington in Pennsylvania. “It will be difficult, I am afraid, to join you,” he insisted, “but cannot I do you more service by attacking [the British] rear?”14 Lee thought that it would be advantageous to remain in the hills of northern New Jersey, where his troops could be supplied from the broad valleys that ran from the Hudson River to Philadelphia and, most important, where they would be impervious to attack. Lee argued that from this position he could harass Howe’s dispersed forces and threaten his lines of communication across New Jersey. He concluded that Howe would not think of advancing on Philadelphia “with so formidable a [ 202 ]

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body hanging on . . . [his] flanks or rear”; instead, he would have to withdraw his troops from most, if not all, of the state.15 Lee was determined to prove that he was a better soldier and commander than Washington. According to historian John Shy, “From the time [Lee] received Reed’s letter . . . Lee was no longer the subordinate ready to give unquestioning obedience to his commander.”16 Instead, Lee gave serious thought to an independent action, drawing inspiration from his experience in Eastern Europe. He planned to divide his troops into smaller units and disperse them among the civilian population. Lee felt that the presence of Continental troops among the people would send a message that they had not been forgotten. It would also help revive popular enthusiasm for the war and build confidence in the Revolution. Lee believed that the rugged terrain of northern New Jersey was conducive to irregular warfare and hoped to coordinate guerrilla operations with the New Jersey militia and roving bands of partisans that could attack British outposts, foraging and scout parties, supply depots, and local Loyalist units.17 Realizing the potential of the Americans as irregulars demanded a different kind of war than the one Washington envisioned. It meant accepting a contest that blurred the line between civilian and soldier and invited the kinds of excesses that Lee had witnessed in Eastern Europe. John Shy notes that Lee’s strategy would have changed “the war for independence into a genuine civil war with all its grisly attendants—ambush, reprisal, counter-reprisal.”18 Washington believed that irregular forces and an army of short-term enlistments were incapable of delivering a major strike against the British. The militia’s lackluster performance during the New York campaign and the lack of commitment among many of the army’s short-term enlistees convinced him that the Americans needed a European-style disciplined professional army of long-term volunteers to win the war. Washington did not want to depend on short-term recruits and on undisciplined and unreliable militia against the British. Washington’s commitment to military professionalism reflected a fear among many leading revolutionaries that the conflict would turn into a localized war and unleash a torrent of popular violence. According to Don Higginbotham, the brutality that inevitably would have been a major consequence of Lee’s strategy “had no appeal for the Americans.” The revolutionaries sought to preserve their society— a society that had achieved one of the highest standards of living in the world—not to destroy it. They hoped to win their independence without [ 203 ]

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risking “the destruction of their social and institutional fabric.” Many of them, including Washington, believed that this goal could be accomplished only by turning the Continental Army into a disciplined, professional army under the control of the Continental Congress.19 Lee seems to have been the only revolutionary who was willing to consciously risk societal upheaval by waging a guerrilla war for independence.20 Nathanael Greene, who would become the commander of the Continental Army in the South, assumed the role of guerrilla fighter in 1780 by circumstance, not by design. The actions of General Cornwallis in the final southern campaign of the war and the small size of the Continental Army in that region forced Greene to adopt a guerrilla strategy in which he coordinated his operations with those of local partisans and militia. In 1776, Lee doubted that the Americans would be able to raise an army of regulars capable of confronting the British in a conventional war and warned that history showed that ambitious officers often used armies composed of longterm volunteers to seize political power and establish dictatorships. “Volunteers being composed in general of the most idle, vicious, and dissolute part of every society, the usual catastrophe is, that they become the tools of some General, more artful than the rest, and finally turn the arms put into their hands for the defence of their country, against their country’s bosom.” Lee argued that an alternative to developing a long-term professional military establishment would be laws governing the Continental Army that were similar to those that governed militias, which “oblige every citizen to serve in his turn as a soldier.” It would also mean drafting men from the colonial militias to fill the ranks of the Continental Army. This way, the Continental Congress “will have an Army immediately, excellent in all respects, formidable against the external enemy, and less dangerous to their fellowcitizens.”21 Lee believed that the militia was a valuable asset for keeping the Revolution alive and charged that Washington and the congress had not been doing enough to utilize its potential to win the hearts and minds of the American public or as a guerrilla force to disrupt the enemy’s military operations and enforce the Revolution’s ideals on the local level.22 By early December, Lee was convinced that Howe planned not to capture Philadelphia but to occupy New Jersey as a source of supplies and provisions during the winter. He would establish posts at strategic locations throughout New Jersey and go into winter quarters, Lee believed. “I cannot persuade myself that Philadelphia is their object at present,” Lee [ 204 ]

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told Washington, who believed “beyond all question” that Philadelphia “is the object of the enemy’s movements, and that nothing less than our utmost exertions will be sufficient to prevent . . . [them] from possessing it.”23 Washington insisted that Lee immediately lead his army to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, insisting that “were it not for the weak and feeble state of the force I have, I should highly approve of your hanging on the rear of the enemy, but when . . . General Howe is pressing forward . . . to possess himself of Philadelphia, I cannot but request and entreat you . . . to march and join me with your whole force with all possible expedition.” He cajoled Lee, telling him, “Your arrival . . . if it can be effected without delay, may be the means of preserving a city whose loss must prove of the most fatal consequences to the cause of America.”24 John Shy writes, “We know now that Lee was right in his estimate, Washington wrong.”25 Howe advanced his forces only as far as Princeton and Trenton.26 “Howe’s major failing in 1776 had probably been his excess of caution,” notes historian Dave R. Palmer. “He had insufficient strength to . . . hold all of New Jersey.”27 Lee saw an opportunity to take advantage of Howe’s extensive chain of posts to transform the war into a guerrilla conflict. He moved his troops to the town of Chatham, nestled on the west bank of the Passaic River and protected by the hills of Morris County. From Chatham, Lee intended to use small units of Continentals in conjunction with New Jersey militia and local partisans for quick, guerrilla-style ambushes against unsuspecting enemy detachments and Loyalist patrols. He also sought to coordinate raids against British supply depots and sabotage British lines of communication.28 Lee surmised that the town of Chatham would make the best post for “beating up and harassing [the British] detached parties in their rear.”29 Lee believed that a strategy of guerrilla warfare would reenergize the local population’s support for the Revolution and “annoy, distract, and consequently weaken” the British and their allies to the point where they would withdraw from New Jersey. “I am in hopes to reconquer . . . the Jerseys,” Lee wrote.30 In early December, Lee launched a series of raids known as the “mud rounds” because of the muddy conditions of the area’s roads. Irregular forces working in conjunction with small units of Continentals ambushed British forging parties, harassed isolated detachments of regulars and Loyalists, sniped at scouts, and raided Loyalist farms, carrying off livestock, horses, [ 205 ]

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and other provisions for use by Lee’s army. These raids were nominally successful. They did not force the British to retreat from New Jersey as Lee had hoped, but they did succeed in disrupting their supply lines and communications.31 Thus, the military merits of Lee’s strategy are debatable. Washington viewed the “mud rounds” as a colossal waste of time. The British advance had stalled and Howe had scattered his troops across New Jersey. Washington believed that this was the opportune moment to consolidate the Continental Army for a major strike against one of these scattered British detachments, arguing that it would raise the public’s confidence in the American military, in the Revolution, and in him as a leader. “I have so frequently mentioned our situation and the necessity of your aid, that it is painful to me to add a word on the subject,” Washington wrote to Lee. “Let me once more request and entreat you to march immediately for Pitt’s Town . . . [which] is about eleven miles from Tinnicum Ferry. That is more on the flank of the enemy than where you are.”32 Lee notified Washington that he had recently sent a reconnaissance party to examine the road to Burlington, located along the Delaware River just south of Trenton.33 Lee had decided to move his army south across the line of British posts in central New Jersey toward Burlington, which was on the enemy’s left flank. Washington believed that undertaking this maneuver would be risky and totally absurd; it would leave the bulk of the British army on Lee’s right flank and to his rear and the wide Delaware River in front of him. But Lee saw it as a risk well worth taking if it meant the chance to prove that his abilities as a leader were superior to Washington’s. His army would cross the British lines near Princeton, where a successful surprise attack against the enemy’s advance corps in the area would disrupt their supply lines, damage their morale, and showcase his skills as a tactician, improving his chances of replacing Washington as commander-in-chief. On the morning of December 11, Lee prepared for his bold maneuver. He sent Minghini with Spado and his other dogs to Prato Rio and ordered his subordinate officers to inform their men that they would soon be on the march. But heavy snows delayed the army’s departure. Lee waited until the skies cleared the next morning and led his troops through the snow-covered terrain toward Burlington, leaving his sick and wounded behind. As the day grew warmer, the snows melted, leaving roads a muddy quagmire that swallowed wagons, carts, and horses. Lee’s troops dragged themselves through deep ruts, their clothes and shoes (at least those who had shoes) [ 206 ]

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grown heavy with mud. By evening, they had reached Vealtown (presentday Bernardsville) on the north branch of the Raritan River roughly ten miles from Morristown, where Lee realized that his exhausted army was in no condition to carry out the bold maneuver he had planned. He decided to bivouac his troops near Vealtown for the evening and move in the morning to Pittstown, as Washington had originally suggested. In a grave error of judgment, Lee left his army under the command of his immediate subordinate, Brigadier General John Sullivan, and sought quarters at the Widow White’s Tavern, a popular yet relatively isolated inn located near the town of Basking Ridge, three miles from Vealtown in the Somerset Hills. Lee’s motivation for lodging at the Widow White’s remains a mystery, but his decision to do so was fateful.34 Lee was accompanied to the Widow White’s by one of his aides, Major William Bradford Jr. of Rhode Island; two French volunteer officers; and fifteen members of his personal bodyguard. Lee was physically tired from the day’s hard march and might have been suffering from a depressive episode. When he arrived at the inn, he ate a meal and went to sleep early. Bradford slept in a cot next to the general and many of Lee’s bodyguards stayed in an outbuilding near the premises. Lee’s sleep was interrupted several times throughout the evening by messengers who brought him news about the conditions at the army’s encampment at Vealtown, the health of his troops, the location of isolated British detachments in the area, and the arrival of Gates and 600 men from Albany, New York. Lee woke up early the next morning, Friday, December 13, and wrote a message to Sullivan instructing him to prepare to put the army in motion for Pittstown. He ate breakfast and went to his room on the inn’s second floor to write a letter to Gates. “The ingenious maneuver of Fort Washington has unhing’d the goodly fabrick We had been building—there never was so damn’d a stroke,” he vented to him. Lee bemoaned the predicament that he believed Washington had placed him: “Entre nous, a certain great man is most damnably deficient—He has thrown me into a situation where I have my choice of difficulties—if I stay in this Province [New Jersey] I risk myself and Army and if I do not stay the Province is lost for ever—I have neither guides Cavalry Medicines Money Shoes or Stockings—I must act with the greatest circumspection—Tories are in my front rear and on my flanks.” Lee’s letter dripped with pessimism. “The Mass of the People is strangely contaminated—in short unless something which I do not expect [ 207 ]

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The Widow White’s Tavern, Basking Ridge, New Jersey. This popular inn was the site of Charles Lee’s capture by the 16th Regiment of British Light Dragoons in December 1776. Source: Library of Congress.

turns up We are lost.” Lee sealed the letter and was preparing to join his army at Vealtown when thirty members of the 16th Regiment of British Light Dragoons, which, ironically, he had commanded in Portugal in 1762, appeared from the woods nearby.35 Cornwallis was commanding the British advance corps at Penny Town (present-day Pennington), near Princeton. He knew less about the whereabouts of Lee’s army than either Washington or Congress and was nervous that Lee could potentially be on his flank or his rear with a sizable force. On December 12, Cornwallis ordered the dragoons, who were his “eyes and ears” in New Jersey, to find Lee’s army. They rode from Pennington, led by their commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Harcourt, for eighteen miles through windswept snow to the town of Hillsborough without obtaining any information that would lead them to Lee. At dawn on December 13, the dragoons left Hillsborough and came upon a Loyalist near Bound Brook who informed them that Lee’s army was at [ 208 ]

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Vealtown but that the general was staying at the Widow White’s. Harcourt confirmed this information with several Continental deserters, including an officer, and with an elder of the Presbyterian church in the town of Mendham who had met with Lee the previous night.36 He ordered 22-yearold Coronet Banastre Tarleton to take some of the dragoons to investigate whether Lee was still at the inn.37 Tarleton and his men hastened to the Widow White’s, where they surprised Lee’s bodyguards, who did not put up much resistance. Lee heard the gunfire and peered out of his secondfloor window, where he saw the British cavalrymen surrounding the inn.38 The volatile Tarleton, who would gain a reputation as one of the most ruthless and aggressive cavalry commanders of the war, fired two shots through the front door. He then ordered his men to fire their weapons “thro’ every Window and Door “of the building. After a few minutes, Tarleton ordered his men to cease their fire and declared, “If the general does not surrender in five minutes, I will set fire to the house . . . [and] every person, without exception would be put to the sword.”39 As Tarleton waited for Lee’s response, the widow White begged the volatile cavalry officer to spare her inn. Some of Lee’s guards tried to escape through a back door and were shot dead. Harcourt and the remainder of the dragoons eventually arrived, while on the second floor of the inn, Lee contemplated his options, concluding that to resist would be useless. Lee directed his aide, Major Bradford, to notify Harcourt that he had decided to surrender. Bradford slowly opened the front door; Harcourt told his men to hold their fire. The nervous young aide “spoke loud . . . & delivered his Orders.” A few minutes later, Lee appeared in the doorway without a cloak or hat, he was in slippers and his shirt was disheveled and exhibited several days’ wear. He asked to see Harcourt, who complied. Lee surrendered his sword to the British officer and expressed his desire to be treated as a gentleman. Harcourt promised him that he would be well treated. A great cheer went up among the jubilant dragoons and a bugle sounded their success. Bradford brought Lee’s cloak and hat and the general was unceremoniously placed on a horse with his legs bound to the stirrup leathers. With great enthusiasm, the dragoons carried him twenty-five miles through the snow-covered countryside to Penny Town. “This is a most miraculous Event, it appears like a Dream,” exclaimed Tarleton.40 The dragoons stopped at the home of a local Dutch physician in the town of Somerset Court House near the Raritan River, where two British officers, Lieutenant [ 209 ]

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Charles Lee taken prisoner by Lieutenant Colonel William Harcourt of the 16th Regiment of British Light Dragoons, in Basking Ridge, Morris County, New Jersey, 1776, originally published in Edward Barnard’s The New, Comprehensive, and Complete History of England (London, 1783). Source: Library of Congress.

Colonel Charles Mawhood and Major Moyney, were staying. That evening, Lee dined with the two British officers, as well as Harcourt, Tarleton, and the physician who owned the house. After the meal, Lee was introduced to one of the deserters who had betrayed him. Lee “abused him as a villain worthy the punishment of the most base and inhuman traitor.”41 The next morning at Penny Town, Lee was presented to Cornwallis, who ordered him taken to the British garrison at New Brunswick.42 Harcourt and his men celebrated with drink and song. “This coup de Main has put an end to the campaign,” an excited Tarleton wrote to his mother. Tarleton’s aggressiveness in capturing Lee sealed his relationship with Cornwallis, with whom he would later serve in Virginia and the Carolinas. Harcourt naïvely declared that Lee’s capture would be such a severe setback for the revolutionaries that “it seems to be the universal opinion” that they would sue for peace.43 General Sullivan, who was in Vealtown with Lee’s army, sent a rescue party for Lee, but it was too late. “It gives me the most pungent pain to [ 210 ]

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inform your Excellency of the sad Stroke America must feel in the loss of General Lee, who was this morning taken by the Enemy near Veal Town,” he informed Washington. “I have taken every step to regain him, but almost despair of it.” He concluded, “I most heartily sympathize with you and my Country in this affecting Loss.”44 Sullivan was now in command of Lee’s army, which he marched in great haste to the Delaware. Although Sullivan knew that transports would be available to him at Tinicum, he feared that the British might cut off his northwest line of advance. Thus he thought it would be faster and safer to take his troops due west and cross the Delaware at the town of Philipsburg, which they did on December 16.45 Lee’s capture sent shockwaves through the Continental Army. For many officers, Lee had become so important to the ultimate success of the Revolution that his capture was the worst news at the worst time for the army. Like Sullivan, they viewed Lee’s loss as a crippling blow to the cause. “One dire stroke the loss of General Lee who was taken prisoner a few days since,” wrote Colonel Henry Knox to his wife Lucy. “This is a severe blow.”46 General John Cadwalader of Pennsylvania noted that Lee’s capture was “a misfortune that cannot be remedied, as we have no officer in the army of equal experience and merit.”47 Although Nathanael Greene was stung by Lee’s criticism of his handling of Fort Washington, he lamented that his capture was “a great loss to the American states.”48 Washington, on first hearing what had happened to his immediate subordinate, publicly proclaimed, “I sincerely regret Genl. Lee’s unhappy fate, and feel much for the loss of my Country in his Captivity.”49 But privately he must have felt a small sense of relief as Lee’s constant delays and maddening temperament had caused him nothing but aggravation. To his cousin Lund, who was at Mount Vernon, Washington wrote more candidly about Lee’s predicament: “Our cause has . . . received a severe blow in the Captivity of General Lee— Unhappy Man! taken by his own Imprudence.”50 Members of the Continental Congress also viewed Lee’s capture as a major setback for the Revolution. “I sincerely pity Lee & I feel for the loss my Country sustains,” declared Robert Morris. “His abilities had frequently been immensely useful—the want of them will be severely felt.”51 Benjamin Rush informed Richard Henry Lee of the immediate impact that Lee’s absence had made on the army. “Since the captivity of Gen Lee . . . distrust has crept in among the troops of the abilities of some of our general officers high in command. They expect nothing now from heaven taught & book [ 211 ]

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taught Generals.”52 John Hancock feared that Lee’s absence might raise questions about the Continental Army’s command structure, its morale, and its overall effectiveness. “The Intelligence of Genl. Lee’s being taken Prisoner is really alarming in the present State of our Army; and I am afraid his Loss will be severely felt, as he was, in a great Measure, the Idol of the Officers, and possessed still more the Confidence of the Soldiery,” he wrote.53 Many ordinary Americans who supported the rebellion believed that without Lee, their cause might be in jeopardy. “The capture of General Lee was felt as a public calamity; it cast a gloom over the country, and excited general sorrow,” wrote Major James Wilkinson, one of Gates’ staff officers. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, a Lutheran bishop whose son Peter commanded the 8th Virginia Regiment, noted in his journal that Lee was “held in high respect in all the united provinces” and that his “experience and bravery” would be missed.54 Socialite Hannah Winthrop of Cambridge, Massachusetts, lamented to Mercy Otis Warren that “a Skillful General has been meanly kidnapped” and that she hated to think that “the Fate of America hangs on the Prowess of a single person.”55 African American poetess Phillis Wheatley wrote a patriotic poem in Lee’s honor, “On the Capture of General Lee,” which was intended to inspire the revolutionaries at a time when some inspiration was desperately needed to keep the rebellion alive. In Wheatley’s poem, Lee was presented as having been betrayed into British hands “by the treachery of a pretended Friend.” She imagined a dialogue in which Lee replies with valor and heroic dignity to the taunts of his British captors: “Oh arrogance of tongue! / And wild ambition, ever prone to wrong!” He boldly asserts, For plunder you, and we for freedom fight. Her cause divine with generous ardor fires, And every bosom glows as she inspires! Already, thousands of your troops are fled To the drear mansions of the silent dead: Columbia too, beholds with streaming eyes Her heroes fall—’tis freedom’s sacrifice!56

Lee’s capture dispirited the revolutionaries only briefly, however. On Christmas Day, two weeks after Lee was taken prisoner, Washington led the recently consolidated Continental Army back across the Delaware into [ 212 ]

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Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, ca. 1773, Scipio Moorhead, engraver. Poet Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave, wrote patriotic poems in honor of George Washington and Charles Lee. Her poems also expressed the political ideals of the American revolutionaries. Source: Library of Congress.

New Jersey to conduct a successful attack against British-allied Hessian troops at Trenton. Unlike the artist Emmanuel Leutze’s famous 1857 depiction of the Delaware crossing in which a heroic Washington is standing tall in a whaleboat, leading his men as the sun’s rays shone brightly down on him from Providence, the army crossed the river in the evening in the middle of a blinding snowstorm. After Washington’s successful attack at Trenton, he scored a surprise victory against Cornwallis’s army at Princeton on January 3, 1777. Throughout America, toasts were made to celebrate these victories. Although the revolutionaries were initially upset by the news of Lee’s capture, some of them were now optimistic that the Continental Army and the Revolution could overcome his loss. “Genl. Lee I suppose you have heard is taken,” William Whipple wrote to his fellow New Hampshire congressional delegate Josiah Bartlett. “This is a loss to us but I hope not so great a loss as People in general immagine.”57 Samuel Adams hoped that Washington’s military success at Trenton has “convincd [the British] that great as [Lee’s] Abilities are we can beat them without him.”58 [ 213 ]

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The British received the news of Lee’s capture with great jubilation. They viewed Lee, the highest-ranking Continental officer in their custody, as the indispensable man of the Revolution. One British officer described Lee’s capture as “Glorious,” while Lieutenant Stephen Kemble, General Howe’s aide, called it “Extraordinary.”59 Major Mungo Campbell of the 52nd Regiment of Foot praised “the Gallantry of Colonel Harecourt in Seizing the Traytor Lee.”60 Captain Friedrich Ernst von Muenchhausen, an adjutant on Howe’s staff, said of the event, “We have captured General Lee the only rebel general whom we had cause to fear.”61 Confirmation of Lee’s capture and imprisonment was met with public adulation and celebrations throughout Britain. Many British officials and civilians believed that it meant the war would soon come to an end—a prediction that Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton had demonstrated were premature.62

[ 214 ]

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At New Brunswick, Lee sat in a small jail cell for more than a month. British officers gawked at him, one of them noting in his journal, “I could hardly refrain from tears when I first saw him, and thought of the miserable fate in which his obstinancy had involved him.”1 Others were not as sympathetic. “I wish he was shot or hanged,” admitted Lieutenant Loftus Cliffe of the 46th Regiment of Foot.2 Major Mungo Campbell, who thought that Lee was a “Traytor,” believed that he should be “tried as a Deserter.”3 And a British officer in Nova Scotia expressed joy “that Mr. Lee is in custody” but said he would be “still happier to hear . . . that he has been tried as a deserter condemned & hang’d.”4 Lee’s fate, however, rested with General Howe. He was confident that he would be exchanged, as was the customary practice in eighteenth-century warfare. But he also prepared for the worst. “The fortune of war . . . [has] made me your prisoner. I submit to my fate, and I hope that whatever may be my destiny, I shall meet it with becoming fortitude; but I have the consolation of thinking, amidst all my distresses, that I was engaged in the noblest cause that ever interested mankind,” Lee wrote to Captain Primrose Kennedy of his old regiment, the 44th. “Imagine not . . . that I lament my fortune. . . . If any sorrow can at present affect me, it is that of a great continent apparently destined for empire, frustrated in the honest ambition of being free.”5 Yet with Howe contemplating a military trial for desertion, where punishment was death, Lee indeed faced an uncertain future. Howe was in a legal quandary. Lee’s half-pay status did not clearly define whether he could be tried in a military court. Furthermore, Lee had resigned from the British military when he accepted his commission in the Continental Army. With no legal precedent to follow, a military tribunal [ 215 ]

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would more than likely acquit him of desertion. And if Lee were acquitted, he could legally sue Howe in civil court for slander and libel.6 The Continental Congress directed Washington to discover whether Lee was treated “agreeable to his rank and character.”7 The delegates were concerned that he had been denied the civilities of an officer and a gentleman. “As Genl. Lee by the Fortune of War, has become a Prisoner in the Hands of our Enemies,” John Hancock wrote to Washington, “the Congress are anxious to afford him all the Relief in their Power during his Confinement. They have therefore resolved that a Flag be immediately sent to Genl. Howe to know in what Manner Genl. Lee is treated.” He added, “The United States from every Principle of Justice and Generosity, are bound to render the situation of that Gentleman as easy as possible during his Captivity.”8 The congress was determined to protect Lee and sent him a large sum of money to use while he was in British custody.9 Concern for Lee’s safety led to a dispute between the Continental Congress and Washington. Although Washington was interested in Lee’s condition, he was more interested in a comprehensive agreement for the fair and humane treatment and regular exchange of all prisoners. Washington had corresponded regularly with Gage and then with Howe over this issue. The consensus among the British was that any captured American, whether he was an officer or an enlisted man, would be treated as a common criminal, not as a prisoner of war. To do otherwise would grant the Continental Congress de facto diplomatic recognition as the government of an independent belligerent power. Thus Howe refused to deal directly with the congress or with the state governments. Instead, all communications involving prisoners went through Washington.10 On January 2, 1777, the Continental Congress authorized Washington to offer Howe a formal prisoner exchange: five Hessian field officers and the highly respected British officer and politician Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell for Lee.11 Should Howe reject this proposal, the congress would accept granting Lee parole, during which time he would not actively engage in the war. But if Howe ignored the offer altogether, Washington was to place Campbell and the five Hessians in solitary confinement until he responded.12 Washington and Howe had previously negotiated limited prisoner exchanges, but always for specific individuals and always rank for rank. Historian Edwin G. Burrows writes that the Continental Congress’s offer was “the kind of deal that customarily required delicate negotiations [ 216 ]

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beforehand to establish a comprehensive table of equivalents between all ranks.”13 Howe had asked the British ministry for advice on Lee’s legal status and declared that he would not act on the Continental Congress’s offer until he received clarification from London.14 Two weeks later, Lee was transferred from New Brunswick to Britishheld New York, where he was confined in the second-floor council chamber in City Hall. He was closely guarded by an officer and fifty soldiers. General William Heath was told by an informant that the British had set aside “Three Rooms in the Old City Hall . . . for General Lee with Locks & Barrs, etc.”15 Although there were reports that Lee had suffered severe mistreatment, in actuality he was provided with firewood, books, newspapers, candles, furniture, fine foods, wine, and any kind of liquor that he wanted. Lee had the luxury of a large bed “into which he tumbled jovially mellow every night” and was allowed up to six visitors for dinner. The British also relented when he begged that he needed his personal servant Minghini and his dogs, especially Spado, to keep him company. Other than his strict confinement to the council chamber and the anxiety of waiting to find out his fate, Lee was treated fairly by the British authorities.16 Lee’s experience as a prisoner was much different from that of an ordinary soldier. Thousands of Americans held by the British suffered and died from malnutrition or from diseases such as dysentery, typhus, and yellow fever. Perhaps no American prisoners suffered more cruelty than those held aboard overcrowded prison ships. The most notorious was the rotting former British warship, the Jersey, in New York’s Wallabout Bay. But Lee was an officer and a member of the gentry. Historian Judith L. Van Buskirk writes that “even as prisoners, the officers of both armies belonged to an international cofraternity of gentlemen, whose members extended certain courtesies even to those they deemed politically misguided or who appeared at the head of an opposing army.”17 The eighteenth-century gentleman’s code of military civility held that captured officers did not give up their privileges.18 Yet some British officials denied Lee’s rank as an officer because his commission had come from the Continental Congress, which they refused to recognize as a legitimate authority. By rejecting his king and his country, Lee had reneged on the principles of honor and loyalty and therefore was no longer worthy of treatment as a gentleman. One British officer reflected this view when he described Lee as a “Rogue” and “an unprincipled man.”19 [ 217 ]

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Lee was a popular prisoner, however. He was visited daily by friends who were still serving in the British army, well-wishers who wanted to greet him, and curiosity seekers who wanted to be able to say that they had met the king’s famous prisoner. Lee was more than happy to entertain them. He invited some to dinner, engaging them in small talk and tales of his European adventures.20 Lee also had serious political conversations with well-placed British officials such as the Howe brothers’ civilian secretary, Sir Henry Strachey. By early February, Lee had engaged Strachey in a series of political discussions in which he revealed a desire to broker peace negotiations that would result in an Anglo-American reconciliation. Strachey informed the Howes, who had unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a peace settlement in September 1776, of Lee’s offer. Washington’s stunning victories at Trenton and Princeton in the winter of 1776–1777 and the widespread rumors of British depredations had undermined the Howes’ ability to reopen negotiations with the Continental Congress. They concluded that Lee might be able to convince the congress to send envoys to discuss the parameters of a peace settlement.21 On February 10, Lee asked the Continental Congress to appoint a committee to meet with him. “As it is of the greatest consequence to me, & I think of no less to the public, I am persuaded that the Congress . . . will permit two or three gentlemen to repair to New York to whom I may communicate what so deeply interests myself & in my opinion the community,” he wrote.22 The Continental Congress gave the request prompt and careful consideration before rejecting it. Many delegates believed, and rightly so, that Lee was being used as a pawn.23 Arthur Middleton of South Carolina argued that “Lord Howe has made use of Genl. Lee as a decoy duck to take in the colonies.” The congress saw this latest attempt by the Howes to open peace negotiations as a ploy to undermine the American war effort by halting military operations, dividing the public, and hindering the revolutionaries’ attempts to obtain foreign assistance, particularly from France.24 Washington, however, disagreed with the Continental Congress’s rejection of Lee’s offer. He argued that allowing such a meeting would protect the congress from accusations by Lee and his allies that his safety was neglected. Moreover, ignoring Lee, who was still popular among the troops, could potentially affect morale within the army’s ranks. “Why is he denied his request of haveing some Persons appointed to confer with him?” Nathanael Greene asked John Adams. “Suppose any misfortune [ 218 ]

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should attend him immediately, will not all his friends say, he was made a sacrifice of. That you had it in your power to save him, but refusd your Aid.” Greene contended that by refusing to meet with Lee, “our Enemies the disaffected . . . will naturally say that General How had a mind to offer some terms of Peace and that you refusd to lend an ear or give him a hearing and that you were obstinately bent in pursueing the War altho evidently to the ruin of the People.”25 For several weeks, Washington, Greene, and others tried in vain to persuade the Continental Congress to reconsider Lee’s request. Meanwhile, the delegates had directed Washington “to proceed in the Exchange of Prisoners . . . provided the Enemy will . . . acknowledge [Lee] to be a Prisoner of War, and as such entitled to be exchanged.”26 Essentially, the Continental Congress ordered the cessation of all prisoner exchanges in an effort to maneuver Howe into recognizing its authority as a legal entity. Howe did not take the bait. He explained that any arrangements for the exchange of prisoners were informal, personal decisions made by individual British officers and were not based on formal negotiations between belligerents. As the Continental Congress played its game of political chess with Howe, Lee waited patiently in New York for any news about his offer to broker a reconciliation. On March 19, Lee wrote to the congress demanding immediate action on his offer.27 He felt forgotten, unappreciated, and betrayed. On April 1, Washington officially informed Lee that the Continental Congress had refused to send a committee to meet with him but that “every means will be pursued to provide for your safety, and the attainment of your liberty.”28 The question must be asked: Why did Lee offer to broker a reconciliation when two years earlier he had admonished the Continental Congress for sending an official committee to meet with Admiral Howe? Perhaps it was Virginia delegate Benjamin Harrison who correctly identified Lee’s motive. He suspected that “Lord & General Howe have offered Genl Lee his life on condition of his bringing About this conference which is designed to betray us into a negociaton.” With many friends on the British side, perhaps Lee figured that his best option under the circumstances was to try to ingratiate himself with the Howes. Other participants in the war, either from concerns for self-preservation or to achieve a certain goal, played each side against the other. Ethan Allen fought hard for independence and was instrumental (along with Benedict Arnold) in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May [ 219 ]

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1775, yet he frequently corresponded with Loyalists and British officials to find out whether they might offer him what he really wanted, independence for Vermont from New York grandees who themselves were fighting for their independence from Britain. Furthermore, Lee’s offer to mediate a peace settlement was not out of character. He wanted to be at the center of the action. What better way for a man who was a British Whig at heart and who wanted to cast his star as brightly as possible to become relevant again than to offer to mediate the conflict?29 At some point during Lee’s confinement, he learned of the British plans for 1777. In the eighteenth century, it was not unusual for military options to be discussed widely either in the press or in political debates. In addition, it was normal for captured officers to converse freely with their captors on personal and professional matters and to discuss potential solutions to strategic problems. Lee would have received information about British military plans either through the press or through his conversations with officers who had visited him. Thus, he was aware that the British planned to march an army commanded by General John Burgoyne southward from Canada toward Albany, where it would join with another army proceeding northward along the Hudson River from New York. These armies would eventually combine and drive eastward to subdue New England. Lee had also discovered that Howe and the British ministry believed that Washington’s surprise victories at Trenton and Princeton made capturing Philadelphia more urgent than had been previously thought. The capture of Philadelphia, the seat of the Continental Congress, would be a major setback for the revolutionaries. It would also close another major American port, add to the Continental Army’s logistical woes, and compel Washington to fight to defend it.30 In late March, Lee used his knowledge of the British military plans for 1777 to draft a proposal that he claimed would help Howe capture Philadelphia and crush the rebellion. On March 29, three days before he learned from Washington that the Continental Congress was going to try to protect him, Lee handed his proposal to Strachey, who brought it to General Howe’s attention.31 In “Scheme for Putting an End to the War (or Mr. Lee’s Plan),” Lee asserted that the conflict could potentially become a long protracted war that would bring much suffering “in blood and Money.” Britain risked sacrificing “evry life lost and evry guinea spent” and wasting “her own property, shedding her own blood and destroying her own strength” in [ 220 ]

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a prolonged military struggle in America. Lee argued that controlling the Lake Champlain–Hudson River corridor and advancing an army against Philadelphia was Howe’s best chance to end the war.32 Lee also suggested that Howe attack Alexandria, Virginia, and Annapolis, Maryland, from which he could easily “take possession of Baltimore or post . . . [troops] on some spot on the Westward bank of the Susquehanna,” thereby cutting off communication between the revolutionaries in the southern and the middle states. The war would end “in less than two months from the date” that the first British troops arrived in the Chesapeake—unless France and Spain entered the conflict and hostilities broke out in Europe.33 There is no evidence to suggest that Howe took Lee’s proposal seriously. It may have convinced him to move against Philadelphia by way of the Chesapeake, which eventually occurred, instead of through New Jersey as he had originally intended, but no proof exists that this was the case. Howe was an experienced and astute military officer who had realized that the collapse of British control in much of New Jersey had made undertaking an invasion of Philadelphia through that state nearly impossible. Furthermore, he might have found Lee’s assertions simply unrealistic. Adding to the mystery, “Mr. Lee’s Plan” was quickly forgotten, buried in a morass of official documents and not discovered until the mid-nineteenth century in a group of items belonging to Howe.34 Lee’s advice to Howe was evidence of a man who felt betrayed. Should Lee’s plan succeed in bringing the war to a favorable conclusion for Britain, it might place him in the good graces of George III. Perhaps it could help him gain his elusive preferment. Or perhaps he was trying to present Howe with misinformation in an attempt to divert him from supporting Burgoyne’s potentially damaging offensive, which he was aware would have difficulty succeeding in the New York wilderness. There is another possibility, however. Lee had often hinted that the Americans would lose the war without proper leadership. Lee might have reasoned that the best path to an eventual American victory was through a temporary reconciliation, thereby giving the revolutionaries the time to regroup, define a new strategy, and fight again with better leaders, which, of course would include him. Whatever its purpose and motivation, Lee’s plan was unknown to the revolutionaries and remained out of sight for more than seventy years. On June 4, the British and their Loyalist allies in New York celebrated King George III’s birthday with great fanfare as Lee was being transferred [ 221 ]

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to the warship Centurion in New York harbor “for greater Security.”35 Captain John Bowater of the Royal Marines wrote to his friend the Earl of Denbigh, “Yesterday when all this World was Rejoicing I was Order’d to take Mr. Genl. Lee under my charge who came on board the Centurion.”36 Lee’s transfer to the Centurion sparked rumors that he would be sent to Britain to be tried as a deserter.37 In an effort to prevent Lee from being sent to Britain, as was the case in 1775 with Ethan Allen, the Continental Congress adopted a resolution that threatened retaliation against British prisoners held by the Continental Army should Howe send any persons in the service of the United States to Britain for imprisonment and trial.38 The anxiety of not knowing his status weighed heavily on Lee, making him more cantankerous and obstinate. After spending some time with Lee, Captain Bowater declared, “It Requires a pen of a Littleton, & the pencil of Hogarth, to delineate the person & Character of this atrocious Monster, who . . . is not only my Prisoner, but my Companion.”39 Diarist Nicholas Cresswell arrived in New York from Virginia and sought an audience with Lee, who enthusiastically invited him to tea. The two men had a lively discussion about Lee’s estate Prato Rio and the current military situation. Lee was impressed by his young visitor, but Cresswell described his host as a “tall, thin, ill-looking man” who was “very sensible, but rash and violent in his sentiments as well as actions.”40 As Lee was confined aboard the Centurion in New York harbor, Washington was in Morristown, New Jersey. He had deployed some of his 8,000 troops to the Continental garrisons in the Hudson Highlands and others to forward bases in the heights of New Jersey’s Watchung Mountains above the towns of Bound Brook and Middlebrook. Thus, Washington had not entirely disregarded Lee’s advice about the strategic merits of posting troops in the hills of northern New Jersey. He believed that his men could be easily supplied from the rich valleys farther north and that from these positions they could effectively cut off any British movements toward Philadelphia. On June 9, Howe moved a sizable army from New York to the British outpost at New Brunswick and sent detachments west to the towns of Middlebush and Hillsborough. Howe’s intentions were not clear. Perhaps he hoped to threaten the Continentals’ lines of communication as a preliminary step to an invasion of Philadelphia or he was trying to lure them into a direct confrontation. The Continental troops, however, [ 222 ]

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remained in their positions.41 By June 19, Howe had decided that it was time to abandon New Jersey in favor of a southern seaborne attack against Philadelphia. He retreated to Perth Amboy on the Raritan Bay, where transports evacuated his troops to British-held Staten Island.42 The withdrawal from New Jersey was a major blow to the morale of the British troops. In the scorching heat of July, Howe’s 14,000 troops were crowded onto the 260 warships that would carry them to Philadelphia. The British commander delayed the fleet’s departure until he had heard news of Burgoyne’s progress from Canada. On July 23, Howe finally ordered the fleet to sail, but it was not destined for the Delaware Bay, the entrance to the port of Philadelphia; instead, the ships were headed to the Chesapeake, almost 360 miles to the south.43 On July 10, Rhode Island militia raided the British military headquarters in Newport, capturing General Richard Prescott, who was taken to East Windsor, Connecticut, where he was held in the local jail. Washington immediately tried to arrange an exchange of Prescott for Lee.44 In early August, the Continental Congress approved of the exchange and announced that should Lee be sent to Britain for trial and perhaps his execution, the congress was prepared “to imprison closely and . . . to hang” Prescott in retaliation.45 Howe’s response to the Continental Congress’s offer was delayed, however, by the Philadelphia campaign. In early October, he received instructions from the British government to treat Lee as an ordinary prisoner, eligible for exchange. Although Howe could accept Washington’s offer, he hesitated. During the Philadelphia campaign, Howe had marched his troops north from the Chesapeake, defeated Washington’s Continentals at Brandywine (September 11) and at Paoli (September 21) and had captured Philadelphia (September 26). He had also driven back an American counterattack at Germantown. The Continental Congress fled to the town of York, roughly eighty miles from Philadelphia, and Washington retreated to Valley Forge. Howe was encouraged by these victories and decided to keep Lee confined aboard the Centurion.46 But British success in the Philadelphia campaign did not bring the rebellion to an end. The impact of the capture of Philadelphia was mitigated by news from Saratoga, New York, where, on October 17, Burgoyne had surrendered the remnants of his army, roughly 6,000 men, to General Horatio Gates. The nature and scope of the Revolution had significantly changed. The overall failure of the British military campaign of 1777 played a significant [ 223 ]

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role in France’s entry into the war the following year and in Howe’s eventual decision to resign his command. By late December, Howe realized that the British government would not be able to replace the thousands of men who had surrendered with Burgoyne at Saratoga. Thus he agreed to reopen negotiations with Washington regarding a complete exchange of prisoners. “Our friend, general Lee, has suffered a long . . . imprisonment; but the hour is at hand that forces general Howe to do what he must forever blush for not having done before,” Gates wrote to Lee’s old acquaintance Lord Thanet.47 As a gesture of goodwill, on December 27, Howe put Lee on local parole, giving him freedom of movement in New York only. Congress responded by extending the same privilege to Prescott in East Windsor, Connecticut.48 Lee was relieved to come ashore after six months aboard the Centurion. Lee resided in a house that fronted the East River north of Wall Street with two old friends from his days in the British military, Colonel William Butler and Major Daniel Disney, who were assigned to guard him. Three years had passed since Lee had exchanged a letter with his sister Sidney. He immediately wrote to her that his “health & spirits are much better.” Lee was happy to hear from Butler that Sidney was “tolerably well” and encouraged her to “keep your spirits, for mine are good.”49 New York had changed greatly since the last time Lee walked its streets in the spring of 1776. The city’s population, which had stood at roughly 18,000 was now only 5,000 and those were mostly Loyalists. Its buildings had nearly all been consumed by the fire of September 1776. Lee visited neighbors, ate meals with his keepers, and attended banquets, balls, and the theater. His former antagonist General Clinton often stopped by to talk to him, and the British commandant for New York, General James Robertson, supplied him with horses whenever he asked. Lee strolled freely down the city’s streets, his dogs in tow, stopping from time to time to chat with British soldiers, civilians, or fellow captives from the Continental officer corps who were also on parole. He sometimes amused them with a trick that he had taught one of his canines. “I think it my duty to inform you that my condition is much better’d,” he told Washington. “I am on parole, have the full liberty of the City and its limits . . . [and] am lodg’d with two of the oldest and warmest Friends I have in the world. . . . In short my situation is rendered as easy, comfortable and pleasant as possible for a man who is in any sort a Prisoner.”50 Washington was pleased to hear that Lee was no longer in his “confined situation, and permitted so many indulgences” and [ 224 ]

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assured him that he was “very much interested in . . . [his] . . . welfare, and that every exertion has been used on my part to effect your exchange.”51 In early January 1778, Washington sent the Continental Army’s commissary of prisoners, Colonel Elias Boudinot of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, to New York under a flag of truce to inspect the conditions of American prisoners, instructing him “to pay particular attention to Genl Lee.” Boudinot met with his British counterpart, Joshua Loring, who gave him unlimited access to several prisoners, including Lee. Lee complained about the Continental Congress’s refusal to send a committee to meet with him, explaining that he had “discovered the whole plan of the Summer’s Campaign on the part of the British, and would have disclosed the whole to the Committee, by which Congress might have obviated all their Measures.” Boudinot replied that his orders were to only discuss issues regarding the treatment of prisoners.52 By late January, Washington and Howe had agreed on a partial exchange of officers who were already on parole, rank for rank. The prisoners had to sign a pledge that they would not take an active part in the war. “From the letters, which have lately passed between Sir William Howe and myself upon the subject of prisoners,” Washington notified Lee, “I am authorized to expect, that you will return in a few days to your friends . . . as Major-General Prescott will be sent in on the same terms for that purpose.”53 Washington accepted Prescott’s pledge and released him, but Howe refused to release Lee, temporarily extending his parole to occupied Philadelphia.54 Why did Howe renege on the agreement? Washington surmised that it was because of the Continental Congress’s constant interference in the negotiations over prisoner exchanges. The real cause was the egotistical Lee, who wanted to interject himself into the events of the day. To General Robertson, Lee revealed that he hoped the Howe brothers would allow him to try again to convince the Americans to discuss peace terms. Lee’s new proposal stipulated that the British should offer to withdraw their military forces from America, grant pardons to the revolutionaries, and renounce Parliament’s right to tax the Americans for revenue. In return, the revolutionaries would renounce independence, accept Parliament’s right to regulate their trade, and agree to work closely with British officials to modify the aspects of Britain’s imperial policy that they found commercially burdensome.55 Robertson forwarded Lee’s proposal to Howe, who was interested in the offer. He extended Lee’s parole to Philadelphia and [ 225 ]

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had him transferred there immediately. The night before Lee was scheduled to leave, Colonel Butler, General Robertson, and several other British officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Harcourt, threw him an elegant farewell dinner.56 The next morning, Lee set out for Philadelphia escorted by Joshua Loring, who had obtained a safe conduct pass from Boudinot through the Continental lines in New Jersey.57 Lee met with Howe in Philadelphia on April 3. The British commander informed Lee of an impending British peace initiative, the Carlisle Commission, and recommended that he continue to promote reconciliation. The meeting ended cordially; Howe agreed to place Lee on parole under the same conditions that Washington had paroled Prescott. Two days later, Lee returned to Howe’s headquarters and signed his parole.58 The conditions of Lee’s parole prohibited him from taking the field. In order to actively participate in combat activities, Lee would have to be officially released from his parole agreement. Lee and his entourage, which now included the young wife of a British sergeant, were escorted by one of Washington’s aides, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Kidder Meade, and a small troop of cavalrymen the twenty-five miles from Philadelphia to the Continental camp at Valley Forge. Lee was given a warm welcome by Washington and several of his staff officers. Washington “received Gen Lee as if he had been his brother,” Boudinot recalled. Lee was led to Washington’s headquarters, a small two-story stone house on the western edge of the camp and was ushered into a crowded room on the first floor where Washington’s aides were studying maps and poring over correspondence.59 That evening, Washington hosted a lavish dinner. Several toasts were raised in Lee’s honor, and music entertained the guests. After this elegant affair, Lee retired to his room, where his mistress, whom Boudinot described as “a miserable dirty hussy,” was waiting for him. The next morning, Lee was scheduled to eat breakfast with his hosts, but he overslept, causing the meal to be delayed. Lee finally appeared and “looked as dirty as if he had been in the Street all night.” Washington remarkably kept his composure during this very awkward moment. Those who were at the table had certainly overheard the noisy pair all night.60 After breakfast, Lee was debriefed by Boudinot. Lee insisted that the Continental Army needed a new comprehensive military strategy that relied heavily on the use of local militia and partisans, light infantry tactics, [ 226 ]

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and cavalry. By this time, Lee’s thoughts on military organization and strategy had matured. He argued that any attempt to adapt what he called the European Plan to the freedom-loving Americans would fail miserably and called on Washington and the Continental Congress to rethink the structure of the Continental Army and to revise its tactics to conform to the needs and capabilities of the American people as he saw them. Lee reiterated that the Americans were better suited for irregular warfare. To fight an “Offensive War” based on open-field battles against a British army that was superior “in Discipline, Officers, and even Ardor and Numbers” was foolhardy. Instead, Lee supported “a plan of Defense, harassing and impeding” the enemy and argued that a guerrilla war was the only reasonable course of action for the revolutionaries. The Americans had to take the war into the rugged country west of the Susquehanna River, where the terrain would hamper their British counterparts. The British depended on their navy for supplies and support; shifting the focus of the war to America’s hinterland would stretch out their supply lines and isolate their interior centers of communication, leaving them vulnerable to sabotage and to raids by local partisans. Lee wanted to transform the Revolution from a conventional war with dramatic campaigns and general battles into an exhausting war of attrition waged along guerrilla lines.61 Washington favored a very different strategy. He aspired to lead a national army based on the European model. Washington was supported by several Continental officers who, like him, preferred to use partisans as auxiliaries to supplement the regular army. One of those officers was Washington’s trusted aide, Colonel Alexander Hamilton, who believed that Lee’s vision would be counterproductive to the stability of American society and the Continental Army. It would unleash a torrent of vicious acts of brutality and terror against civilians and push the Revolution in the direction of localism and provincialism, promoting an attachment to the states instead of to the nation, leading to a balkanized society.62 According to historian Don Higginbotham, an approach that emphasized localism and provincialism would have caused each state to devise its own military strategy against the British. It is important to remember, he writes, that “Washington’s army—appropriately called the Continental army—was a nationalizing factor in American life.”63 In February 1778, Prussian drillmaster Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben had joined Washington’s staff as inspector general. He quickly [ 227 ]

Alexander Hamilton, 1792, by John Trumbull. Alexander Hamilton commanded the New York Provincial Company of Artillery before joining George Washington’s staff in the Continental Army. He became one of Washington’s most trusted officers and confidants and one of Charles Lee’s most vocal critics. Source: Library of Congress.

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superseded Lee as the army’s resident military expert. It was Steuben who had encouraged Washington’s belief that the Continentals could be shaped into a professional fighting force equal to the armies of Europe.64 Throughout the winter and spring of 1778, Washington put Steuben to work implementing his vision for the army. Steuben’s training program was eventually codified into a military training manual called Steuben’s Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States (or the Blue Book). He succeeded in shaping Washington’s troops into something closely approximating a professional European army. Under Steuben’s guidance, the Continental Army perfected its ability to carry out a conventional war, contradicting Lee’s notion that the Americans would never respond to conventional methods of training and warfare.65 Lee’s enormous ego prevented him from admitting that the Continental Army had changed during his captivity. Instead, he attacked Steuben’s program, complaining that the troops were “in a worse situation than he [had] expected.” He ruminated that Washington “was not fit to command a Sergeant’s Guard.”66 Lee’s low opinion of Washington as a strategist was echoed by a few of the delegates in the Continental Congress. This sentiment gave life to a rumor that a conspiracy existed to replace Washington with the “hero” of Saratoga, Horatio Gates. The so-called Conway Cabal, named for the army’s former inspector general, Thomas Conway, supposedly included many prominent delegates and high-ranking officers in the Continental Army. Meanwhile, another unsubstantiated rumor circulated that a group of delegates hoped to replace Washington with Lee. The constant criticism from people like Lee made Washington’s situation uncomfortable.67 He continued to tolerate Lee, but why? Washington valued and respected Lee’s military abilities and advice and believed that he could be an asset in the upcoming military campaign of 1778. He also recognized that he was dealing with someone who was still a congressional favorite, particularly with delegates who were fond of the Whig critique of standing armies. Moreover, Lee’s mystique as a military genius seemed to still hold weight with some of the officers and enlisted men. Thus Washington decided not to demonstrate any outward signs of hostility toward Lee unless the latter initiated it. He tolerated Lee’s behavior, but he kept him on a short leash. On April 7, the thin-framed Lee made quite an impression in the Continental camp as he mounted a bare-boned old nag for a trip to York, Pennsylvania, where he hoped to present his ideas regarding the Continental [ 229 ]

Baron von Steuben, date unknown, oil on board by Ralph Earl. Prussian Baron Frederick Wilhelm von Steuben joined George Washington’s staff as inspector general during the Valley Forge encampment of 1777–1778. He introduced a new professionalism and discipline to the Continental troops at Valley Forge. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Army and its tactics to the Continental Congress.68 Lee’s musings on military strategy and the army’s organization aroused only slight interest from the congress. The impending entry of France into the war and the success of Steuben’s program of military professionalism had cooled some of the delegates to Lee’s way of thinking. Lee also pressed them on another issue: his final exchange.69 He arrogantly asserted that Washington’s subordinate officers were incompetent and that the commander-in-chief “could not do without me.”70 He was informed that on several occasions Washington had unsuccessfully offered to exchange British general Samuel Prescott for him and that the Continental Congress could do nothing else at this point. Lee’s disappointing visit with the Continental Congress triggered a depressive episode during which he struggled to get out of bed on most mornings. Lee eventually departed York for his estate Prato Rio, where he hoped to recuperate his mental health. On April 21, Lee was formally exchanged for Prescott and released from his parole agreement. “I . . . most cordially and sincerely congratulate you on your restoration to your country and to the army,” Washington informed him. He encouraged Lee to return to Valley Forge “as soon as you can possibly make it convenient to yourself. . . . You are perfectly at liberty to take an active part with us.” Washington teased that he hoped Lee would not return riding “quite so limping a jade, as the one on which you set out for York.”71 The formal exchange of Lee for Prescott was the result of a series of discussions on the prisoner-of-war issue between American representatives selected by Washington, including Alexander Hamilton and Elias Boudinot, and a delegation of British officers. These discussions resulted in a signed agreement coauthored by Hamilton and Boudinot that became a model for future prisoner exchanges during the war. Lee was among the first to be exchanged under its authority. Lee reacted to the news of his official release and his reinstatement to the Continental Army with great excitement. The idea that he would be rejoining the army on an active basis helped bring him out of his emotional depression. “You may better imagine than I can express the happiness which your letter gave me,” he told Washington. Lee promised that he would “not defer my departure [for Valley Forge] a single moment.”72 Lee’s long wait to return to the action had finally ended. After almost a year and a half as a prisoner, Lee would discover the difficulty of rejoining an army and a war that had moved well beyond him. [ 231 ]

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Lee immediately started for Valley Forge, stopping at York, where he unsuccessfully lobbied the Continental Congress for a promotion to lieutenant general, which would have given him equal rank with Washington.1 Although Washington was well aware of Lee’s disregard for him as a commander and as a strategist, he still respected his advice. Unfortunately for Lee, the Continental Army had changed considerably during his sixteen months in captivity, as had the politics of the Continental Congress and of Washington’s headquarters. Lee would play an important role in the upcoming military campaign of 1778, but his acerbic nature and mercurial personality would lead to a confrontation with Washington that would ultimately end his career. As Lee prepared to return to the Continental Army, the Continental Congress approved treaties of commerce and alliance between the United States and France that bound together the two nations until American independence was won. The Franco-American alliance altered the military landscape, transforming the Revolution into a world war. British officials were now confronted with the reality of a global struggle. The disastrous defeat at Saratoga, General Howe’s inability to crush the rebellion, and France’s entry into the conflict convinced London that it was time for a different strategy, and British strategists ordered a cessation of offensive operations and a retreat from Philadelphia. On May 18, the Marquis de Lafayette, the young French officer who had joined Washington’s staff the previous August, led a party of 2,200 men across the Schuylkill River to Barren Hill, a few miles northwest of Germantown. From this post, he scouted the British positions around Philadelphia and harassed foraging parties. In Philadelphia, Howe attended a flamboyant farewell banquet, the meschianza,2 in his honor. The next morning, he launched an attack to destroy Lafayette’s detachment. However, Lafayette [ 235 ]

Marquis de Lafayette, 1790, by Philibert-Louis Debucourt, color mezzotint on paper. Marie-Joseph Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, was born in Chavaniac, France. He migrated to America in April 1777 and was commissioned as a major general in the Continental Army three months later. Lafayette quickly became a favorite of General George Washington and joined his staff. Washington became Lafayette’s mentor and a kind of surrogate father to him. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.

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had retreated back across the Schuylkill, forcing the British, embarrassed, to return to Philadelphia. Howe, weary of a war that he had failed to end as he had promised, departed for Britain on May 24.3 Lee had arrived at Valley Forge on May 21. Back in active service, he could assert his authority as the senior major general. Many Continental officers, including Washington, still respected Lee’s military knowledge, but there were growing signs that his mystique had substantially eroded. Lee’s contrarian nature, his churlish behavior, his inflated ego, and the time he had spent away from the army had created doubts about his abilities and motives. His presence on Washington’s staff was viewed with skepticism. Shortly before Lee arrived in camp, the Continental Congress ordered Washington to administer an oath of loyalty to his officers. Any officer unwilling to take the oath would have his commission revoked and be denied a pension. The officers at Valley Forge took the oath, except for Lee and Lafayette, who were absent from camp. Washington made arrangements for them to take the oath on June 9. Lafayette took it without incident, but Lee declared that he was offended by having to swear to “support, maintain and defend the said United States against the said King George the third, and his heirs, and successors.” Lee told a visibly perplexed Washington that he had no qualms about giving up his allegiance to George III, but “I have my scruples about the Prince of Wales.” He completed the oath amid the laughter of several officers, who excused his behavior as eccentricity.4 Historian Thomas Fleming suggests that perhaps Lee intended a personal affront to Washington, for “it was common in English politics for ambitious politicians to form a party around the Prince of Wales and oppose the incumbent king.”5 Lee’s action may have been a subtle message that he opposed Washington as commander-in-chief. Lee now tried to spread dissatisfaction with Steuben’s training regimen. “You have no doubt heard . . . of the obstacles thrown in [Steuben’s] way by many of the general officers, excited to it by Lee,” wrote Alexander Hamilton to Elias Boudinot.6 Lee was also troubled by Washington’s insistence that major generals should be able to command troops during battle that they did not command in camp. He claimed that this practice was “repugnant to the rules of war,” “productive of the worst consequences,” and could potentially cause confusion and a lack of cooperation in combat.7 Lee explained that his critique was not motivated by “presumption impertinence or a spirit of criticism, but to my zeal for the public service.” Lee [ 237 ]

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argued that the British would soon go on the offensive and that he did not believe the Continental Army was ready to engage them in an open-field confrontation. He urged Washington to maintain the defensive.8 Washington thanked Lee for his “opinion and advice . . . especially when they proceed from the fountain of candor, and not from a captious spirit, or an itch for criticism,” but indicated that he wanted to use his newly trained army for offensive operations. He also acknowledged Lee’s objections to his policy regarding major generals, agreeing with him in principle on “the advantage of having the commander and commanded of every corps well known to each other, and the army properly organized.” The current practice was “not perfect,” Washington confessed, but “there is no majorgeneral in this army, that is not pretty well known, and who may not, if he chooses, soon become acquainted with such officers as may be serviceable to him.” In the future, he wanted Lee to communicate his “sentiments upon any important subject relative to the service” directly to him. “The custom, which many officers have of speaking freely of things and reprobating measures . . . is never productive of good, but often of very mischievous consequences,” Washington declared.9 By the middle of June 1778, the British had decided to abandon Philadelphia and attempt to crush the rebellion in the South and defeat the French in the Caribbean. The British ministry directed General Clinton, Howe’s successor, to transport his army to New York by sea. But there was limited space on the evacuation ships for the troops and the numerous Loyalists who were scurrying to leave Philadelphia. This was the same problem the British had faced during the evacuation of Boston in 1776. Clinton was also concerned that his transports would be blockaded in the Delaware Bay or destroyed by a French fleet that was approaching the area. He decided to march his army to New York through New Jersey, eliminating any threat from the French warships and creating more room on the transports for the Loyalist refugees. This decision would require the British to employ a large baggage train to haul everything that could not be shipped. The baggage train would be slow and difficult to defend in territory dominated by the New Jersey militia. Yet Clinton was confident that with enough of a head start it could be accomplished. To Clinton’s dismay, the appearance of the Carlisle Commission in Philadelphia postponed the final evacuation of the city. Washington used this interval to make final preparations for the upcoming campaign. Steuben continued to train the troops on the European [ 238 ]

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model, producing a sense of cohesion and esprit de corps among them. Nathanael Greene did a herculean job as quartermaster general to obtain fresh provisions and clear bottlenecks in the supply system. Washington instructed General Philemon Dickinson of the New Jersey militia to harass Clinton’s flanks, obstruct roads, and destroy bridges ahead of his retreating army. He also ordered General William “Scotch Willie” Maxwell and his New Jersey Continental brigade to coordinate operations with Dickinson’s militia. On June 17, Clinton’s troops left Philadelphia, while British transports, filled with some of the army’s heaviest equipment, a few Hessian troops, and 3,000 Loyalist refugees, sailed for New York.10 Later that day, Washington informed a council of war that he had received solid information that Clinton was headed for New York by way of Sandy Hook. The question was whether to shadow Clinton’s forces, hit his rearguard and hope for a minor victory, or instigate a decisive open-field battle.11 Lee strongly argued for a cautious approach; he felt that attempting a full-scale engagement or advocating a stand-up fight against the British would not be wise. In the past, Washington had gained numerous advantages over the British by not fighting. Furthermore, the British retreat from Philadelphia was an American victory that would be jeopardized in a fullscale engagement. The British were essentially doing what the Continental Congress and Washington had hoped they would do—abandon Philadelphia. Most of the council—with the exception of the aggressive Pennsylvanian Anthony Wayne, who advocated “Burgoyning Clinton”—advised Washington to shadow the British forces.12 Clinton’s army of 10,000 British and Hessian troops, advanced at a measured pace, slowed by a baggage train that stretched for twelve miles and temperatures that reached above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, Washington ordered the Continental Army’s six divisions to prepare to evacuate Valley Forge. Two divisions would march on the first day, two more the next day, and the last two—with the army’s baggage and artillery—on the third day. They would proceed northeast on a route that was intended to intersect with the British and take advantage of a line of supply posts. Washington hoped that the two-day interval between departures would help alleviate overcrowding on the roads and chose Lee’s division to take the lead. At 3 a.m. on June 19, 46-year-old Charles Lee led the Continental Army’s first division out of Valley Forge. By leaving so early, his troops [ 239 ]

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could complete a full march before the hottest part of the day.13 Washington had given Lee detailed instructions covering the rate of speed and the route to be followed and required him to provide daily progress reports. Lee was instructed to cross the Delaware into New Jersey at Coryell’s Ferry (present-day Lambertville) just north of Trenton and to “halt on the first strong ground.”14 Lee’s armies were known for plundering civilians and Washington wanted to prevent this problem. He ordered Lee to be “strict in your discipline, suffer no rambling, keep the men in their ranks and the officers with their divisions, avoid pressing horses as much as possible, and punish severely every officer or soldier, who shall presume to press without proper authority.” Furthermore, Lee was “to protect the persons and property of the inhabitants from every kind of insult and abuse.” Washington’s decision to have Lee’s division lead the army revealed that he still respected his position in the hierarchy of officers, but his detailed orders indicated that he was going to keep him under control.15 Lee, with Spado sharing the saddle, led his troops to Coryell’s Ferry. On June 20, his division crossed the Delaware and marched three miles to a location that he determined to be “the first strong ground” and made camp. Lee was joined later that day by Wayne’s division. The two commanders waited patiently for Washington and the remainder of the army, which began crossing the Delaware on June 21. The summer season had fully descended on the mid-Atlantic region with its heat, high humidity, and violent afternoon thunderstorms. Soldiers in both armies suffered. The roughly 12,000-man Continental Army had marched forty miles in three hot, humid, rainy days, and although they groused, the men maintained discipline and remained in decent physical shape. Clinton’s army, however, made less than forty miles in six days, hampered by their immense baggage train and by troops who wore standard-issue woolen uniforms, carried packs that weighed close to sixty pounds, and succumbed to heat stroke and dehydration as they grappled with thick briers, marshlands, and swollen rivers and streams. Poisoned or clogged wells led to a scarcity of fresh drinking water, and constant sniping and ambushes by local militia caused much anxiety in the ranks.16 On June 22, Washington arrived at Lee’s camp and learned that there was “a most admirable position for the whole Army” near the Stony Brook, a tributary of the Millstone River. Lee described the location as “high and commanding—the ground dry and good—it is well watered having besides [ 240 ]

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Stoney Brook on the left—a large Rivulet in the front . . . [and] commands likewise . . . the roads to Princeton[,] that by Pennyton [Pennington] and that inclining to Hopewell meeting house.”17 Washington directed the army to Hopewell, which was roughly fourteen miles north of Trenton and five miles northeast of Princeton.18 Clinton’s army had turned east toward Sandy Hook and his advance corps was at Crosswicks, seventeen miles south-southeast of Hopewell. Washington contemplated the possibility that his British adversary was setting him up for a flanking maneuver, but he also recognized that Clinton’s sluggish army was within striking distance. He again turned to his senior officers for advice.19 At 9 a.m. on June 24, as a council of war met to discuss the latest intelligence about Clinton’s army, the room suddenly darkened for a moment from a solar eclipse. Perhaps some of the officers interpreted this natural phenomenon as a providential sign of victory over the British. Washington proposed forcing Clinton into a general engagement. The officers responded, led off as usual by Lee, who again advised caution. He argued that even with Steuben’s training, the Continental troops would be no match for Clinton’s regulars in an open-field engagement. To try to bait him into a general action would be disastrous. Lee maintained that the French alliance would do more to hasten American independence than anything the Continentals could achieve in a single battle, which might not end well for them. He counseled Washington to provide the British “a golden bridge” to New York and to march the Continental Army to the Hudson River, where it could rendezvous with the approaching French expeditionary force. Lee emphasized that a defeat in a general engagement would do much harm to the American cause, while a victory, unless decisive, would accomplish nothing.20 Lee’s cautious approach was supported by the majority of the officers present at the council; in a narrow 6–5 vote, they favored a limited operation in which 1,500 “picked men,” the best soldiers from different regiments, commanded by General Charles Scott of Virginia, would assist the troops harassing Clinton’s flanks.21 Alexander Hamilton sarcastically described the council as an “honorable society of midwives.”22 Hamilton and a handful of other officers, Greene, Lafayette, Steuben, and Wayne among them, supported immediate and forceful action against Clinton’s struggling army. Greene noted that should the Continentals get “near the Enemy” and not try “to do the . . . least injury,” the public will assume that “our courage [ 241 ]

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General Anthony Wayne, print ca. 1878. Wayne was a native of Pennsylvania and served in the Pennsylvania provincial assembly before joining the Continental Army. He was involved in the Continental Army’s unsuccessful invasion of Canada and later commanded the Pennsylvania Continental line at Brandywine, Paoli, and Germantown during the Philadelphia campaign of 1777. He was one of Lee’s chief subordinates at the Battle of Monmouth. Source: Library of Congress.

failed us.”23 Lafayette argued that it would be “disgraceful and humiliating” to allow the British to retreat to New York unmolested and assured Washington that a sizable detachment could strike Clinton’s column with “some good effect.”24 Wayne, whose fiery temperament and aggressive combat style had earned him the nickname “Mad Anthony,” refused to sign the council’s decision and pleaded with Washington to consider other options.25 Their arguments had their intended effect. Washington decided to increase the pressure on the British, who were headed toward Monmouth Court House, a village of forty houses whose most prominent structure was its courthouse.26 He also sent Daniel Morgan and 600 riflemen to assist the [ 242 ]

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troops operating against Clinton’s right flank and rear and ordered Scott and his 1,500 hand-picked men to do the same against Clinton’s left flank. On June 25, Washington sent Wayne with another select group of men and two large artillery pieces to join Maxwell, Morgan, and Scott to form an advanced corps of roughly 4,500 troops, a clear message that he was ready to initiate a major engagement against Clinton.27 Who would command this advance corps? As the senior officer on Washington’s staff, Lee was the obvious choice, but he had been the most vocal opponent of an aggressive action. After some hesitation, Washington offered the command to him, but Lee dismissed the assignment as more fit for “a young, volunteering general,” referring to Lafayette, than for “the second in command in the army.”28 Washington chose Lafayette to command the advance corps and appointed Wayne as his chief subordinate. He instructed Lafayette to initiate a general engagement by striking Clinton’s rearguard if he found an advantage, and he promised to support him with the remainder of the army. Lafayette might not have been the most experienced field tactician, but he was an energetic officer who supported aggressive action against the British. Lafayette was proud and excited to be at the head of Washington’s advance corps and, potentially, to distinguish himself in battle. However, after Lee had rejected the command, he rethought his decision. He met with Washington at headquarters and informed him that he had originally misunderstood the importance and size of the advance corps and that he would like the opportunity to lead it. Washington replied that he expected the commander of the advance corps to provoke a general engagement against Clinton’s army, which caused Lee to balk at the assignment again. But he soon returned and demanded the right, as the army’s senior major general, to command the advance corps. Hamilton recalled that Lee behaved “truly childish” and had become “very importunate.” Washington remained remarkably calm for most of the ordeal, until he finally “grew tired of such fickle behavior, and ordered the Marquis [Lafayette] to proceed.”29 Lafayette marched the advance corps rapidly eastward, arriving in Cranbury by nightfall. At dawn, he moved his troops to Heightstown, which was roughly six miles from Englishtown. Meanwhile, the British were at Monmouth Court House. Washington arrived in Cranbury where he received a note from Lee. “When I first assented to the Marquis de Lafayette’s taking the command of the present detachment, I confess I viewed it in a very different light from that in which I view it at present,” Lee wrote, [ 243 ]

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declaring that his refusal to accept the command, which was “undoubtedly the most honorable command next to the Commander-in-chief,” would “have an odd appearance.” He offered “a thousand apologies” for his rash behavior but explained that as Washington’s chief subordinate officer, he should have been given command of the advance corps “until the enemy leave the Jerseys.”30 Washington did not want to offend Lee, who still had several supporters in the army and in the Continental Congress. Yet he did not want to disappoint Lafayette, who was one of his most loyal subordinates. The next day, Lafayette wrote to Washington that he had heard about Lee’s complaint and offered to step aside: “If you believe it, or if it is believed necessary or useful to the good of the service and honour of General Lee, to send him down . . . I will cheerfully obey and serve him.”31 Washington responded that while he “felt for General Lee’s distress of mind, I have had an eye to your wishes and the delicacy of your situation.” He tactfully sent Lee with another 1,000 hand-picked men to “reinforce, or at least cover” the advance corps and stipulated that Lafayette would remain in command until Lee arrived, at which time Lee would assume command of the detachment against Clinton’s left flank. However, if Lafayette had already committed troops to a general action, then Lee was to refrain from interfering with his battle plans. Washington hoped that this arrangement, “though not quite equal to the views” of either officer, would uphold Lafayette’s honor and placate Lee.32 Clinton had arranged his troops in a defensive line five miles long at Monmouth Court House. Lafayette moved the advance corps to Englishtown, where Lee joined him and, according to Washington’s directive, took command of the troops. Lee realized that he did not know most of the officers under his command and that his subordinates were also unfamiliar with many of the troops in their detachments. This was probably the result of Washington’s practice of shifting commands between camp and the field, a practice Lee had criticized.33 Meanwhile, Washington and the main army were at Manalapan Bridge, about three miles southwest of Englishtown. On June 27, Washington summoned Lee, Lafayette, Wayne, Maxwell, and Scott to his headquarters to discuss strategy. He informed them that an attack against Clinton’s army had to occur immediately but did not offer a battle plan. Washington never specified whether Lee was to simply probe Clinton’s column, slow his retreat, or initiate a major engagement. Was [ 244 ]

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Lee supposed to try to capture Clinton’s baggage train? How far was he to pursue an attack before breaking it off ? Should he march his troops to Monmouth Court House? Washington’s intentions were unclear. Historian Edward G. Lengel believes that while fatigue or carelessness were possible reasons for the open-ended nature of Washington’s instructions, he “left his subordinates uncertain of what he expected of them, and abdicated much of his responsibility as commander-in-chief.” This had the potential to cause major confusion on the battlefield.34 Lee and his subordinates discussed Washington’s suggestions later that day at Englishtown. In a meeting that lasted less than thirty minutes, Lee informed them that he had no reliable information on the location and strength of Clinton’s forces, on the terrain around Monmouth Court House, or on the route the British were taking to New York. Lee felt that there were too many unknown variables for him to devise a detailed battle plan. As Washington had not provided him with specific instructions, Lee decided to harass Clinton’s rearguard.35 Wayne argued that Washington’s orders were clear: Lee was to forcefully strike Clinton’s army in a full-scale engagement. Lee replied that Washington’s orders gave him some freedom to assess the conditions at the scene before making any tactical decisions.36 Lee received a message from Washington instructing him to keep Dickinson and Morgan informed of his plans. Lee replied that he had already told Dickinson to stay alert for any British movements but that he did not know Morgan’s location. Washington sent Lee another note shortly after midnight on June 28 warning him that Clinton might leave by dawn to beat the midday heat.37 He directed Lee to advance a 600-man detachment under the command of Colonel William Grayson of Virginia to Monmouth Court House and informed him that Morgan was south of the British lines and should be brought closer to their position.38 Lee complied with Washington’s orders. At 3 a.m., he ordered Grayson to march to Englishtown and directed Morgan to move his troops forward, giving him full discretion to initiate harassing operations against the British rearguard as soon as they resumed their retreat. The British began to move from Monmouth Court House between 3 and 4 a.m. Clinton’s advance corps, commanded by the Hessian general Baron Wilhelm von Knyphausen, was the first to depart. As Knyphausen’s division moved out, Clinton positioned more than 4,000 of his best troops under General Cornwallis near the village’s courthouse to cover the retreat.39 [ 245 ]

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At 5 a.m., Lee learned that the British were on the move. Washington had received the same information and promptly ordered Lee to “attack them unless there should be very powerful reasons to the contrary.”40 Grayson’s detachment finally arrived at Lee’s headquarters in Englishtown around 6 a.m. and proceeded to Monmouth Court House. Lee directed the remainder of his forces, except for 500 convalescents, to march toward the British positions. But it took almost two hours for Lee’s first units to begin to leave Englishtown.41 Lee still had no accurate information about the local terrain, which consisted of bogs, sandy pine barrens, and numerous streams and creeks, or of Clinton’s location. “Three imperatives drive successful battlefield commanders,” writes historian Alan C. Cate. “See the terrain, see the enemy, and see friendly forces. Lee was largely blind to the first two and would experience much difficulty with this last during the ensuing battle of Monmouth.”42 Knyphausen’s division had moved only five miles in four hours when they were surprised by Grayson’s detachment. By this time, the main body of Lee’s troops were moving toward Monmouth Court House. To reach the village, they would have to traverse three large ravines. Lee’s troops crossed the bridge that spanned the first of the ravines—the West Ravine—between Englishtown and Monmouth Court House and entered country that was surrounded by thick briers, swampy woodlands, bogs, and marshes. At this point, Lee suddenly received reports that indicated that Clinton’s troops had not begun their retreat. He was also informed by Philemon Dickinson of the New Jersey militia that should he continue his march, the British would be in a position to pin his Continentals against the West Ravine.43 Shortly thereafter, Lee received another report that confirmed that Clinton had begun to move his army from Monmouth Court House. The conflicting intelligence bewildered Lee, who decided to slow his advance to give himself more time to evaluate the situation. He concluded that Clinton was indeed moving his forces along the Middletown Road and immediately ordered his troops across the Middle and East Ravines, which historians Joseph G. Bilby and Katherine Bilby Jenkins write were “more accurately described as the division ditch between the Ker and Rhea farms and the headwaters of Spotswood Middle Brook.”44 Lee hoped to find and encircle Clinton’s rearguard. By midmorning, Cornwallis had formed his troops to the north and the east of the village’s courthouse and of the East Ravine (or the Rhea farm division ditch) in an effort to cover the British retreat.45 [ 246 ]

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The temperature exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit and would continue to soar throughout the day. Private Joseph Plumb Martin of Connecticut recalled years later that the heat was so intense on the field that “the mouth of a heated oven seemed to me to be but a trifle hotter” and the air “almost impossible to breathe.”46 In the intense morning heat, Lee arranged his forces haphazardly in a line running north-south; he was unaware of the close proximity of Cornwallis’s troops to the British rearguard.47 Lee’s unfamiliarity with the local terrain and with many of his subordinates, and the contradictory nature of the intelligence that he had received all made it difficult for him to decide on a plan of action. He was also missing Morgan’s riflemen, who had been operating along Clinton’s southern flank. Unfortunately, Morgan had misread Lee’s message and thought that an attack on Clinton’s rearguard would occur on the morning of June 29 rather than on the 28th. He had stopped his advance three miles to the south of Lee’s position, where he waited for further instructions. Without Morgan, Lee’s right flank would be exposed should a major action occur.48 Lee pieced together an ad hoc battle plan that called for Wayne’s troops to probe the center of the enemy’s lines while the remainder of the Continentals swung north in a complicated effort to flank Clinton’s right and envelop his rearguard. Lee must have known that he would have to overtake Clinton’s rearguard and simultaneously apply pressure to his flanks. Yet he was confident that his plan would work and notified Washington that he expected to capture Clinton’s rearguard very soon. However, for Lee’s plan to succeed, his troops would have to act with speed and precision and Clinton and Cornwallis would have to respond poorly.49 At 10 a.m. Wayne’s troops advanced and immediately fell upon a Loyalist unit, the Queen’s Rangers. After a brief skirmish, Wayne positioned his Continentals in a nearby orchard. Clinton heard the gunfire and sent reinforcements from Knyphausen’s division to support Cornwallis. By this time, Lafayette, Scott, and Maxwell had arrived with their troops at the developing front. Lee thought about anchoring his right flank near the courthouse but instead ordered Lafayette to march to the plain northeast of the village to flank Clinton’s right. Lee also directed Maxwell to post his New Jersey Continentals to the left of Wayne’s position. Unfortunately, Lafayette’s troops were too exhausted and too disoriented from the day’s brutal heat to effectively carry out Lee’s desired maneuver. They also came under heavy artillery fire. Lee tried to encourage Lafayette to move more quickly, but [ 247 ]

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Lafayette had already aborted the mission.50 Clinton had a clear view of the developing battle from his post at the intersection of the Middletown and Shrewsbury Roads and immediately decided to turn Lee’s vulnerable right flank by directing Cornwallis to attack both Wayne’s troops in the orchard and Lafayette’s detachment.51 Cornwallis formed his men into two columns, with the artillery in the middle and the cavalry covering the front. One column advanced against Wayne’s detachment and the other moved against Lafayette.52 Lee surveyed the battlefield from the vicinity of Forman’s Mill Pond and realized that his troops were in danger of being surrounded and annihilated. As Lee rode toward the front, he came upon Lieutenant Colonel Eleazar Oswald of the 2nd Continental Artillery, who was removing his two fieldpieces to the rear. Lee asked him to explain his actions. The artillery commander replied that his battery had been supporting Wayne’s troops and had subsequently become engaged in a vicious duel with British artillery. One of his guns had been disabled in the firefight, two of his men had been killed, and his ammunition was depleted. Lee allowed Oswald to continue to the rear and sent two of his aides to inform Scott, who was commanding on the left flank, to hold his ground. But Scott had noticed Cornwallis’s columns forming about a mile from his position and withdrew to the orchard, posting his troops on Wayne’s right flank.53 Maxwell had also retreated and posted his New Jersey Continentals on Scott’s left. Lafayette, whose detachment was spread out along the Middletown Road, realized that his troops could be encircled and withdrew to the rear. Wayne’s detachment was now without flank support and retreated from the orchard. As Wayne’s troops pulled back across the East Ravine, Scott and Maxwell decided to withdraw as well. Lee’s lines quickly dissolved as regiments withdrew from the field. As the situation rapidly deteriorated, Lee saw no alternative but to call for a general retreat.54 Lee’s Continentals retreated to the west side of the East Ravine. Clinton did not pursue them, however. Lee’s subordinates were furious with him.55 Wayne received a message from Morgan, who asked for information about Lee’s movements. Wayne responded that the entire division was falling back. He did not give Morgan advice and did not report the exchange to Lee, who remained unaware of Morgan’s location. Had Lee known of Morgan’s position, he could have ordered him to attack Clinton’s vulnerable left rear and taken some of the pressure off the remainder of the division.56 [ 248 ]

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Lee had to quickly find a defensive position for his troops and asked one of his engineers, French officer Louis Lebègue Duportail, to scout the area to their immediate rear. Duportail spotted a series of hills to the west of the Middle Ravine near a small farm (the Ker Farm). Lee urged his troops to move swiftly to this location but realized that it was not suitable for defense, especially if the British occupied a ridge that lay to the east of it near the Ker farm.57 Lee asked a local militia officer, Captain Peter Wikoff, to locate a better defensible high ground. Wikoff advised that there were two potential options, but they were far from perfect—Comb’s Hill to the southwest or Perrine Ridge, situated between the Spotswood Middle Brook and the Tennent Meetinghouse, a Presbyterian Church. Comb’s Hill dominated the battlefield, but Lee believed that his artillery could not traverse the swampy marshland near it. He directed Wikoff to guide the Continentals toward Perrine Ridge and to inform them that they were not to withdraw beyond that point.58 At 11 a.m., Washington, whose army was passing through Englishtown, sent Captain Thomas Massie of the 6th Virginia Regiment to deliver an order to Lee to “annoy the enemy.”59 As Washington approached the battlefield, he could hear the roar of artillery and see the white smoke from musket fire wafting into the sky. He assumed that Lee was pursuing an attack against the British, but a local farmer informed him that he had heard from a fifer that the Continentals were on the retreat. Infuriated, Washington interviewed the young musician and warned him that if the report was false he would have him whipped. The frightened boy assured the commander-in-chief that Lee’s troops had withdrawn from the field. Washington put the young man under guard to prevent him from spreading the story and causing a panic and rode to the front, where he witnessed individuals, then small groups, and finally entire units in a backward movement.60 He directed two of his aides to find Lee. As they neared the front, several officers told them that they had not seen or heard from Lee for quite some time.61 Clinton had deployed his best troops to pursue the retreating Continentals, and a minor military engagement was about to become a full-scale battle. Wikoff was guiding Continental units to Perrine Ridge, which turned out to be an excellent defensive position, when Washington approached him. He asked Wikoff about the area’s topography and the deployment of Lee’s troops. Washington also met with Grayson, who confirmed that Lee’s [ 249 ]

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Washington at Monmouth, print ca. 1858. Felix O. C. Darley, artist; George R. Hall, engraver. This nineteenth-century print depicts George Washington halting Charles Lee’s retreat during the Battle of Monmouth. Source: Library of Congress.

entire division was in retreat. Washington then noticed Lee at the head of a fast-approaching column of troops, kicking up large clouds of dust in their wake. Washington rode forward to confront him.62 The famous confrontation between Washington and Lee took place on a hill near the West Ravine. There are many exaggerated accounts of this event by officers and soldiers who were not on the scene or who recalled it years later. General Scott alleged that Washington swore at Lee “till the leaves shook on the trees,” and Lafayette claimed that he heard the commander-in-chief call Lee a “damned poltroon.”63 Private Joseph Plumb Martin, who was three-quarters of a mile away with Scott’s detachment, said that he saw the confrontation but was “too far off ” to hear the exchange. Martin asserted that some of the soldiers who were closer to the confrontation had told him that they distinctly heard Washington say “d---n him.” He conceded that he was not sure whether Washington had expressed those words since “it was certainly very unlike him, but he seemed at the instant to be in a great passion; his looks if not his words seemed to indicate as much.”64 Years later, Emanuel Leutze’s famous depiction of the Washington-Lee confrontation. Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth (1854), embellished the facts and helped influence the historical debate on Lee’s performance at Monmouth. As in Leutze’s earlier and more famous painting, Washington [ 250 ]

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Crossing the Delaware (1851), the artist portrayed Washington in heroic fashion at Monmouth, rallying the Continentals while a clearly embarrassed Lee sulks on his horse. For Leutze, Washington represented valor and righteousness while Lee was the epitome of sullenness and cowardice.65 According to the most trustworthy eyewitness accounts at Lee’s subsequent court-martial, Washington rode up to him and angrily demanded to know the reason for the retreat. “What is it you have been about this day?” Washington asked, to which Lee answered in a stammering voice, “Sir, Sir.” Perhaps the noise of battle had impeded his ability to hear Washington’s question clearly. Washington repeated the question and expressed disbelief at the “unaccountable retreat.” Lee’s response was initially confused and hesitant, but he recovered his composure, explaining that conflicting intelligence, superior British troops, and the fact that his orders had been ignored by his subordinates had led to the retreat. Lee argued that he had saved the advance corps from a trap and reminded Washington that he had always opposed a major attack against the British. Washington became angry and brusquely declared that Lee should not have asked to command the advance corps if he had not intended to attack the enemy. Lee replied that he had intended to envelop the British rearguard when he realized that he was facing the best soldiers in Clinton’s army. He had chosen not

Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth, 1853–1854, by Emanuel Leutze, oil on canvas, 156 x 261 inches (396.2 x 662.9 cm), University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Gift of Mrs. Mark Hopkins. [ 251 ]

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to risk entanglement in a major action that was not in the best interest of the Americans. Washington abruptly turned his horse and rode toward the front to assume command of the troops. He did not, as has been the popular depiction, formally relieve Lee of command on the spot.66 Washington had, for the most part, kept his composure when it came to dealing with Lee. Perhaps the combination of the stress of battle, the extreme heat and his own fatigue, and Lee’s previous criticisms caused him to finally lose his temper. After the confrontation, Lee tried to prevent Maxwell’s New Jersey Continentals from crossing the West Ravine, but he had to be reminded by his aide, Major John Francis Mercer, that he was no longer in charge of the division, as Washington was on the battlefield. The commander-in-chief directed Lee to assume command of Wayne’s detachment, which now comprised the Continentals’ rearguard, and to try to hold the British advance at bay on the eastern side of the West Ravine. Washington hoped that Lee could delay the British long enough for him to reposition the main body of the army on Perrine Ridge. To Lee’s credit, he rallied Wayne’s detachment in the face of a swarm of British grenadiers. Hamilton waved his sword and enthusiastically exclaimed that he would join Lee and fight until death. “That’s right, my dear General and I will stay, and we will all die here on this spot,” he exclaimed. Lee snapped, “You must allow me to be a proper judge of what I ought to do” and off-handedly admonished Washington’s young aide by observing that the ground upon which they stood was not worth any great sacrifice. Lee declared that he would rather spend his time trying to find a better position for his troops than join Hamilton in defending their present location until death. “When I have taken proper measures to get the main body of [the Continental troops] in a good position, I will die with you on this spot, if you please,” Lee responded. Hamilton never forgot this scene, and he never forgave Lee for it.67 Lee formed his men along a rail fence in front of a hedgerow just east of the West Ravine and positioned artillery on a nearby hill. It would take great skill, bravery, and luck for Lee’s thin line to hold against the fastadvancing British troops who were composed mainly of the 16th Light Dragoons, the regiment that had captured him at the Widow White’s in December 1776.68 The bayonet-wielding British were soon upon Lee’s Continentals, sending them scurrying backward. Lee regrouped his men and [ 252 ]

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ordered the artillery to open fire, halting the British advance temporarily. Clinton personally commanded the assault against Lee’s line and was almost killed in the bombardment. Lee’s troops stood their ground for an hour before the British overran them. Although Lee’s hedgerow line broke, his Continentals had managed to face Clinton’s best troops, including a large number of cavalry, without substantial casualties. Lee withdrew his forces across the bridge that spanned the West Ravine. The Continentals, remembering their training under Steuben, conducted a disciplined retreat as Lee brought up fresh units to slow the British advance. The heavy pressure from British grenadiers and cavalry eventually forced these units to withdraw as well. Lee followed close behind; he was the last Continental to cross the bridge.69 Lee’s delaying action proved crucial to the outcome of the battle; it allowed Washington the time to complete a very strong second line of defense and position artillery along Perrine Ridge and on Comb’s Hill that poured grapeshot and canister on the British, forcing them to retreat.70 Lee met Washington on the other side of the bridge and expected to be praised for his courage and thanked for his performance. Instead, Washington ordered him to take his troops to Englishtown, where he was to form a defensive perimeter. Lee hesitated about carrying out Washington’s order. He wanted the commander-in-chief to publicly acknowledge his role in delaying the British advance and apologize for the confrontation earlier in the day. Washington abruptly replied that there was a battle still to be fought and that he did not believe an apology was necessary.71 The Battle of Monmouth raged late into the afternoon as Continental artillery on Perrine Ridge and on Comb’s Hill pounded Clinton’s forces along the Englishtown Road, while British artillery returned fire. This artillery duel lasted for two hours, the longest engagement of its kind during the war, and provided America with the legend of Mary Ludwig Hayes, better known as “Molly Pitcher,” the tobacco-chewing wife of a Pennsylvania artilleryman who carried pitchers of water from a nearby brook to help cool the cannons and quench the gunners’ thirst and allegedly took her husband’s place loading cannons after he had been mortally wounded. Clinton eventually attacked Perrine Ridge in a desperate attempt to dislodge the Continentals, advancing his troops through heavy artillery fire and suffering many casualties. The British eventually crossed the West Ravine and occupied an orchard near the Continental position, where brutal close-range [ 253 ]

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This contemporary map of the Battle of Monmouth shows the placement of Continental and British troops. Source: Library of Congress.

combat ensued. Washington meanwhile rode back and forth along the Continental lines, rallying his troops. He ordered three regiments to attack Clinton’s right flank, a task they accomplished with great precision. The British eventually retreated back across the West Ravine as Continentals commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Aaron Burr pursued them in a futile attempt at a counterattack.72 As the battle raged, Lee made his way to Englishtown, where he formed his men into a defensive line outside the village. After several hours, Steuben appeared with instructions from Washington; Lee was to abdicate his command to the baron. Lee begrudgingly followed Washington’s orders. Tired and dejected, Lee went to a local tavern, the Village Inn, where he stood silently in front of one of its windows staring out at the battle in the distance. Lee would never again command troops in the field.73 By 6 p.m., Clinton had withdrawn his forces safely out of the range of the Continental artillery. Washington thought about pursuing him but abandoned the idea. The Continentals spent the night bivouacked on the battlefield. Washington sat down on his cloak under a tree next to Lafayette. They discussed Lee’s behavior and made plans to advance against the [ 254 ]

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British in the morning. Meanwhile, Clinton had decided to take a page out of Washington’s playbook. Between 10 p.m. and midnight, he withdrew his troops from the area. The Continentals did not detect Clinton’s movements until dawn, by which time his army was well on its way to Middletown and Sandy Hook.74 Washington’s hope of inflicting a major defeat on the British was not realized at Monmouth. On June 29, he conferred with all of his officers except Lee about the viability of pursuing Clinton. They agreed that further pursuit was pointless. Washington instructed Maxwell and Morgan’s detachments to search for deserters and harass British foraging parties. He also issued general orders praising the performance of the officers and soldiers during the battle. Lee’s name was conspicuously absent from these orders. By July 1, Washington had moved his troops to New Brunswick, where they remained until July 4.75 The British had reached Sandy Hook and the Atlantic Highlands, where transports took them to garrisons on Staten Island, Long Island, and Manhattan Island. On July 5, the last of Clinton’s forces sailed from New Jersey.76 The Battle of Monmouth essentially ended in a draw. Both the Americans and the British safely claimed victory in what historian Wayne Bodle calls an “unusually complex and confusing engagement” that “rapidly became one of the most heatedly politicized military episodes of the war.”77 The Americans could claim victory because their troops had demonstrated that they had learned from Steuben’s training at Valley Forge and had stood their ground against the best the British had to offer. In turn, Clinton could honestly assert that he had repulsed an American attack and successfully reached New York. The Battle of Monmouth has been mainly remembered as the longest one-day battle of the Revolution, one that featured the largest artillery exchange between the belligerents. It has also been remembered as the last major battle of the war’s northern theater. But it became best known for two incidents: the heroics of “Molly Pitcher,” Mary Ludwig Hayes of Pennsylvania, who took up a rammer and helped fire the field gun previously manned by her mortally wounded husband, and for the confrontation between Washington and Lee.

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15

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July 4, 1 7 7 8, was a hot, st eamy summer day. Lee sat behind the defendant’s table in a makeshift courtroom in a popular New Brunswick inn, waiting to hear the charges read against him. Outside, Continental soldiers celebrated the second anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by imbibing a double allowance of rum and cheering for “the perpetual and undisturbed Independence of the United States of America.”1 Inside the courtroom, Judge Advocate General John Lawrence read the three distinct charges: “disobedience of orders in not attacking the enemy on the 28th of June agreeable to repeated instructions”; “misbehavior before the enemy on the same day, by making an unnecessary, disorderly, and shameful retreat”; and finally “disrespect to the commander-in-chief in two letters dated June 30, 1778.” Lee pled not guilty. The last time Lee had been in New Brunswick, he was a prisoner of war confined to a small jail cell; now he was in a cramped American military courtroom where he faced the possibility of a dishonorable end to his military career. On June 28, Lee had moved the Continental Army’s advance corps forward to strike what he and others believed was a weak British rearguard at Monmouth Court House. Lee tried to encircle the rearguard in a complicated maneuver that collapsed, causing confusion. His chief subordinates— Wayne, Maxwell, Scott, and Lafayette—withdrew from the field without orders. Moreover, Lee’s orders that day (and they were few) were either ignored or overridden by his chief subordinates. With British troops in a position to overrun his lines, Lee had no choice but to call for a general retreat to regroup his troops at some optimal defensive position. Lee acted properly in all aspects of command except for one. In the heat of battle, he became distracted and failed to keep Washington informed of developments. The last communication that Washington had received from [ 256 ]

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Lee indicated that he was going to envelop and destroy the British rearguard. Instead, soldiers scurrying to the rear and local civilians informed Washington that Lee’s entire division was in a panicked flight. After the battle, Washington and Lee remained cool toward each other. Washington chose to remain silent, but Lee complained about the confrontation and about the way that he had been treated to anyone who would listen.2 “The troops . . . showed the greatest valour; the artillery did wonders,” he informed Richard Henry Lee, “but we were outnumbered; particularly in cavalry, which was, at twenty different times, on the point of turning completely our flanks. This consideration naturally obliged us to retreat.” Although the soldiers “performed with all the order and coolness which can be seen on a common field day,” he assured the Virginian, “had I not acted as I did, this army, and perhaps America, would have been ruined.”3 To Robert Morris, Lee declared that because of faulty intelligence he was forced to attack “the whole flower of the British Army, Grenadiers, L. Infantry Cavalry and Artillery amounting in the whole to Seven thousand men” on the “most extensive plain in America.” He explained that the general retreat occurred after many of his subordinates withdrew their troops from the field. The maneuver ultimately saved the army and the day for the revolutionaries. Yet Washington refused to acknowledge the importance of this decision. “Such is my recompense . . . for having . . . extricated . . . [the] whole army out of perdition,” Lee wrote.4 Lee also claimed that “a most hellish plan has been formed (and I may say at least not discourag’d by Head Quarters)” to destroy his “honour and reputation.”5 He accused Hamilton, Lafayette, and one of Washington’s other aides, South Carolinian John Laurens, of being the ringleaders of this plot. All three officers were part of Washington’s growing military family and viewed him as their patron. Washington was a father figure for Hamilton and Lafayette, in particular, who never knew their biological fathers.6 Lafayette claimed that Washington’s “nobility, grace, and presence of mind” on June 28 had saved the Continental Army from ruin.7 Laurens argued that “the merit of restoring the day, is due to the General [Washington]; and his conduct was such throughout the affair as has greatly increased my Love & esteem for him.”8 Hamilton disparaged Lee’s conduct as “monstrous and unpardonable” and gushed that “America owes a great deal to General Washington for this day’s work.”9 The first sign that Washington did not intend to apologize to Lee came on June 30 when he failed to mention him in the general orders [ 257 ]

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John Laurens, 1780, watercolor on ivory by Charles Willson Peale. South Carolinian John Laurens was the son of Henry Laurens, who had served as president of the Continental Congress. The younger Laurens was idealistic and steadfast in his support of General George Washington, for whom he served as an aide-de-camp. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY.

congratulating the officers and troops for their conduct at Monmouth. Lee voiced his displeasure at this omission, sending Washington a letter in which he complained about the battlefield confrontation and asserted that the commander-in-chief had been led astray regarding the events of that day. “From the knowledge I have of your Excellency’s character, I must conclude, that nothing but the misinformation of some very stupid, or misrepresentation of some very wicked person, could have occasioned your making use of such very singular expressions as you did, on my coming up to the ground where you had taken post,” he wrote. Lee argued that neither Washington nor any of his subordinates were in a position “to be in the least judges of the merits or demerits of our manoeuvres,” adding that it was because of his actions that “the success of the day was entirely owing,” for had his troops “remained on the first ground, or had we advanc’d, or [ 258 ]

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had the retreat been conducted in a manner different from what it was, this whole army, and the interest of America, would have risk’d being sacrificed.” Lee disparaged Washington for allowing “dirty earwigs who will ever insinuate themselves near persons in high office” to mislead him into “an act of cruel injustice.” Lee demanded an opportunity to justify his actions “to the Army, to the Congress, to America, and to the World in general.”10 Although Washington projected a sense of poise and reserve, he had a ferocious temper when pushed too far. He had always tolerated Lee’s criticisms and for the most part had exhibited patience with his fickle behavior. But after Monmouth, Washington’s patience had run out. He brusquely responded that Lee’s letter was “highly improper” and defended his battlefield reprimand as “dictated by duty, and warranted by the occasion.” Washington accused Lee of “a breach of orders, and of misbehaviour before the enemy . . . in not attacking them as you had been directed, and in making an unnecessary, disorderly, and shameful retreat.”11 The rebuke shocked Lee, who was not accustomed to such a response from Washington. “I was more than confounded. I was thrown into a stupor,” he declared. “My whole faculties were, for a time, benumbed.”12 Lee added, “You cannot afford me greater pleasure than in giving me the opportunity of shewing to America, the sufficiency of her respective servants. I trust, that the temporary power of office, and the tinsel dignity attending it, will not be able, by all the mists they can raise, to offiscate the bright rays of truth.”13 Lee demanded a court-martial rather than a court of inquiry, a procedure that seeks to determine the right and wrong of a dispute. In such an inquiry there is no penalty attached to the judgment. In a court-martial, a guilty verdict would come with a punishment.14 “I have reflected on both your situation and mine; and beg leave to observe, that it will be for our mutual convenience, that a Court of Enquiry should be immediately ordered; but I could wish it might be a Court Martial,” he told Washington, warning him that a court of inquiry “might bring on a paper war betwixt the adherents to both parties, which may occasion some disagreeable feuds on the Continent; for all are not my friends, nor all your admirers.”15 Lee implied that a court of inquiry would result in a public relations nightmare for the revolutionaries because it would lead many Americans to believe that there was dissension within the army’s high command. Lee perhaps believed that Washington would not pursue the issue further, but the commander-inchief called his bluff. [ 259 ]

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Washington did not appreciate Lee’s accusations, yet he did not immediately bring charges against him, indicating that he was willing to forget about the issue. Lee might have remained silent and accepted the criticism as a temporary setback with the expectation that time would vindicate him. Or better yet, he could have apologized to Washington and tried to meet privately with him to discuss the matter. Lee thus would have probably avoided a court-martial and the storm of criticism that followed.16 A parallel case suggests itself: the commander of the Continental Army’s Northern Department, Philip Schuyler, was widely blamed for the failure of the Canada invasion in 1775 and for the British recapture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1777. He was accused by many New England revolutionaries and by some of his subordinate officers, especially General Horatio Gates, of being incompetent, self-interested, and a Loyalist. The Continental Congress eventually replaced him as commander of the Northern Department with Gates. Schuyler patiently weathered the storm of criticism to become a prominent politician in postwar New York. Lee could have survived the criticism against him and thrived if he had acted differently, but his lack of political savvy and his volatile temper prevented him from realizing that he had other options than threatening to make the whole affair a public spectacle. On July 3, Lee wrote two letters to Isaac Collins, the editor of the New Jersey Gazette, in response to an anonymous article about the Battle of Monmouth that was coauthored, it was later revealed, by the governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, and Washington’s former aide, Joseph Reed. Lee fumed that the authors gave Washington full credit for the “complete victory.” He informed Collins that to describe the battle as “a complete victory” that could be “wholly ascribed to the good disposition made by his Excellency [Washington]” was dishonest and a major exaggeration. Lee demanded that Collins print a retraction and publish his response, which provoked a reply from Reed.17 “I cannot but feel myself exceedingly hurt by the Manner in which you have treated this Matter,” he wrote. “The Terms of your Letter to say nothing of the Publication seem to me to be such a Deviation . . . from the line of Friendship . . . I might have expected from you.” Reed regretted the situation but could not “discover the Prudence or Wisdom of diminishing the Number of your Friends at such a time,—& especially those who have Seats in Congress where alone you can expect to have those ‘enormous Injuries’ redress’d of which you complain.” He [ 260 ]

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admitted that he had always “entertained a very high Opinion” of Lee’s “Talents and Abilities” but was “totally at a Loss” regarding his behavior.18 Lee replied that despite Reed’s “regard and friendship . . . the fact is—at a moment when a most atrocious attack was made on my fame and fortunes, a printed letter was put into my hands, containing (what I still assert to be) an invidious, false, and dishonest relation of the affair of the 28th.” He was surprised to find that Reed was one of its authors and admitted that “nothing equally shocks my nature” than to learn that “those of whom I have once form’d a high opinion, whose friendship I have courted and flatter’d myself to have obtain’d, whose talents I respect, and whose qualities I love, shou’d turn out the reverse of what I thought ’em—and I think you have no reason to doubt that you stood in this state of relation to me.” As for Reed’s advice that he should remain quiet or risk endangering many of his friendships, Lee wrote, “As a Man of society I wish, and ever shall wish, for a number of Friends; the greater the number, the more honour and pleasure—but if you mean Friends to support my cause on the present occasion—I despise the thought—I ask only for common justice.” He asserted: “No attack it seems can be made of Gen. Washington, but it must recoil on the assailant—I never entertained the most distant wish or intention of attacking Gen. Washington, I have ever honour’d and respected him as a Man and as a Citizen—but if the Circle which surrounds him chuse to erect him into an infallible Divinity, I shall certainly prove a Heretick, and if great as He is, he can be perswaded to attempt wounding evry thing I . . . hold dear, He must thank his Priests, if his Deityship gets scratch’d in the scuffle.” Lee concluded, “No power on earth shall prevent me from exposing the wickedness of my Persecutors. I wish not to attack, but must, it is my duty, to defend—and if this is thought dangerous I must observe, that the blood and treasure expended in this war has been expended in vain as . . . [the ministry] cou’d not possibly have established a more odious Despotism.”19 In towns across America, in the Continental Army, in the newspapers, and in congress, the Battle of Monmouth was talked about as a major victory for the revolutionaries because of Washington’s leadership. The Continental Congress sent Washington congratulations and published his report on the battle—one in which Lee was described as retreating without attempting to oppose the enemy—as the official account of the engagement.20 One North Carolinian observed that Lee “is under an arrest, what the sentence will be [ 261 ]

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is not known, however he has made it a quarrel with Genl Washington & of course . . . he must fail.”21 Washington appointed a twelve-member panel for the court-martial, which convened on July 4. The trial was presided over by the court’s president, General William Alexander, and was comprised of four brigadier generals22 and eight colonels,23 none of whom had served under Lee at Monmouth.24 Instead, the officers who would sit in judgment of Lee or who would be called to testify against him had served directly under Washington and in many cases viewed the defendant as repugnant. They could not be relied upon to provide impartiality. Their testimonies would perhaps be driven in part by their desire to flatter or to impress Washington. “I demand nothing . . . but justice,” Lee declared. “Nothing but cabal artifice, power, and iniquity can tarnish my name for a moment—but if They are to prevail, woe on the community as to myself.”25 Lee’s court-martial opened with the prosecution focused on the charge that he had disobeyed orders in not attacking the enemy on June 28. The prosecution’s star witnesses were generals Scott, Wayne, and Lafayette, who demonstrated their loyalty to Washington. Scott and Wayne testified that Washington had ordered Lee to attack the British “at all events.” They also indicated that they had never received a battle plan from him. Lafayette depicted Lee as unprepared and overly cautious. He testified that Lee felt no need for a battle plan because “he thought it would be better for the service to act according to circumstances.” Questioned whether the troops under Lee’s command had attacked the British, Lafayette replied that he “saw them setting out for that purpose, and I heard some noise of cannon; but cannot tell from which party they were fired.” All three officers testified that Lee had openly disobeyed Washington’s orders and thus had nearly cost the Americans dearly.26 Scott, Wayne, and Lafayette were not the only officers who testified that Lee had disobeyed Washington. Lieutenant Colonel John Fitzgerald, one of Washington’s staff officers, recalled that he was ordered to locate Lee and tell him to attack the British rearguard. Hamilton stated on the witness stand that it was Washington’s intention “fully to have the enemy attacked on their march, and that the circumstances must be very extraordinary and unforeseen, which, consistent with his wish, could justify the not doing it.”27 During cross-examination, Lee pressed him, asking, “Did you, either by letter to me, or in conversation with me, communicate this idea of General [ 262 ]

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Washington’s intention as fully and clearly as you have done it to the Court?” Hamilton answered that he could not remember. Lee continued: “Was your idea of General Washington’s intention that I should attack the enemy, had I found them . . . arranged in order of battle, at or near [the] Court-house?” Hamilton replied, “Were the enemy’s whole army drawn up in order of battle near the Court-house, I do not conceive it was General Washington’s intention to have them attacked by our detachment.”28 Hamilton’s testimony appeared to have acquitted Lee of the first charge. The young aide seemed to have admitted that Washington’s orders were discretionary and that the commander-in-chief did not expect Lee to attack a vastly superior British force.29 But throughout the cross-examination, the other officers kept to their version of the events—that Lee never intended to engage the enemy and when he eventually did, it was with great caution.30 The court adjourned and reconvened on July 11 in Paramus, New Jersey, where Washington had moved the army. The prosecution concentrated on the second charge against Lee: misbehavior before the enemy by making an unnecessary, disorderly, and shameful retreat. Witnesses claimed that the British rearguard had been small, and Lee, who seemed overmatched and confused, called for a retreat too hastily. On the stand, another of Washington’s most trusted young aides, John Laurens, concurred. In his testimony, Laurens claimed that Lee was clueless during the battle. He also reported that to his understanding Lee had ordered the troops to retreat instead of pursuing the attack. When asked whether Lee’s orders to retreat were “distinct and clear,” Laurens thought they were “indistinct” and accused him of giving “no precise direction” to the troops.31 Lee challenged him, asking whether he believed his order for a general retreat was caused by “having been counteracted by some officers under my command, to the contradictory intelligence I received, or to my want of a personal tranquillity of mind.” Laurens responded that he had “imputed it to want of presence of mind,” to which Lee retorted: “Were you ever in an action before?”32 Hamilton followed Laurens to the stand and concurred that Lee appeared to be confused, and that this had resulted in a chaotic retreat. He asserted that the troops withdrew “without system or design, as chance should direct; in short, I saw nothing like a general plan or combined disposition for a retreat.” Lee had called for the withdrawal in such a panic that “the hurry of the occasion made it very difficult to have a distinct conception.” Hamilton noted that he was told by several officers and soldiers [ 263 ]

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that Lee’s orders “seemed to be under a hurry of mind.”33 But Lee reminded him of their battlefield conversation, during which the young officer had been amazed at his calm countenance. Lee also jogged Hamilton’s memory about his immaturity, recounting how he had brandished his sword on the field and sworn that he would die defending the very spot on which they stood. Lee relished embarrassing him in front of the court.34 The trial was reconvened on July 18 in Peekskill, New York. For two days, witnesses for the prosecution told a story of insubordination and confusion. The Continental Army then advanced to the town of North Castle, near White Plains, where on July 21, the trial continued. It was now Lee’s turn to defend himself. Testimony from his rebuttal witnesses revealed a breakdown in army intelligence and in command structure. Faulty or otherwise contrary intelligence received from General Philemon Dickinson of the New Jersey militia and others had led to confusion on the battlefield and to the cautiousness and piecemeal retreat that Lee’s subordinates derided. Lee’s witnesses admitted that his orders and his ad hoc battle plan were not always clearly communicated to his subordinates, yet they were not always followed when they were clearly communicated.35 Lee’s key witnesses were his aides, Captains John Francis Mercer and Evan Edwards. Their account of the events of June 28 described conflicting intelligence reports and officers who misinterpreted Lee’s orders or who ignored them and acted independently.36 Several artillery officers supported Mercer and Edwards’s testimonies, among them Lieutenant Colonel Eleazer Oswald, who asserted that the “vague and uncertain” intelligence had caused “several false alarms, that the enemy were advancing; and then that they were not advancing.” He added that by the afternoon, so many officers were freelancing that he “received various orders to retreat from sundry persons.” Oswald also stated that Lee had exposed his person to hostile fire as the British cavalry rolled up the army’s right flank and that he had remained on the field until all of the Continental troops had withdrawn to safety.37 Washington’s chief artillery officer, the well-respected and much-liked Henry Knox, testified that the terrain favored the British but that Lee had effectively made the best of it. He also suggested that some of Lee’s tactical decisions were credible and that he did not seem to him to have been confused.38 Lee questioned Adjutant General John Brooks regarding the initial withdrawal of Scott’s and Maxwell’s detachments without orders. He asked [ 264 ]

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Brooks, “Did you hear me express great indignation at General Scott’s quitting his ground?” To which Brooks replied, “I did repeatedly.” Lee pursued this line of questioning further: “Did I not give you every reason, from what I said and from what I did, to think that the first retreat was against my inclination and without my orders?” The adjutant answered that “several battalions had retired” without Lee’s knowledge and against his orders. Although Brooks admitted that initially the retreat was “extremely unsoldierly,” he “believed it to be a very happy thing for the army, as the enemy were so much superior both in infantry and cavalry . . . for had that not been the case, that whole detachment at least must have been sacrificed.”39 Lee could not have been happier with Brooks’ testimony. As cross-examination continued, a clearer picture emerged of the events at Monmouth. Lee was confident that he would be vindicated and that his accusers would be exposed as hypocrites, especially Washington.40 Once cross-examination had ended, Judge Advocate General Lawrence quickly moved to the final charge against Lee, that of disrespecting Washington. He read aloud the two letters that Lee had written to let their words make the argument for him. Lawrence then rested his case.41 On August 9, Lee gave his closing statement, but before doing so, he produced a sworn deposition from Peter Wikoff, who noted that Lee had immediately realized that he was facing the British army’s best soldiers and asked him “to conduct . . . [the] troops under cover of some wood, for he could not make them stand in a plain or open field so well as in the woods.” While this sounded like Lee had low expectations of the American soldiers’ ability to stand up to British regulars in an open-field engagement, Wikoff begged to differ. Lee had told him “that he thought our men were equally brave with any men in the world.”42 In Lee’s closing remarks, he argued that “the nature and spirit of the orders I received from His Excellency [Washington]” were “by no means precise and positive.” On the contrary, they were “in a great measure discretionary.” Lee launched into a narrative of the battle and repeated his belief that a conspiracy “has been thrown out, and almost positively asserted, God knows for what purposes . . . that I had received the General’s orders positively to attack the enemy at all events, in whatever situation and in whatever force I found them.” He claimed that the only order he had received from Washington indicated that he should “find means of engaging the enemy, if no powerful consideration prevent you.” Lee believed this [ 265 ]

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order implied “a degree of discretionary power.” Lee stated that his troops engaged “the flower of the British army” and, outnumbered and facing the prospect of being overrun, he ordered them to defensive positions, eventually saving the army and by extension the Revolution.43 Yet instead of praise, he received criticism and humiliation from Washington and his supporters, who charged him with “the blackest military crimes.” Lee believed it was a “misfortune to the community and . . . to humanity” that personal animosities had come to dominate the decisions of men who were “engaged in the most righteous cause that ever mortals were engaged in.”44 The weight of the testimony seemed to be in Lee’s favor. After three days of deliberations, the court reached a verdict. On August 12, Lee, a senior major general and second-in-command in the Continental Army, arrived in the courtroom to hear his fate. Guilty on all charges! Lee stood in stunned silence. The verdict shocked many observers who were confident that he had made his case. The overwhelming evidence that Lee had presented to the court demonstrated that Washington’s orders were discretionary and that the retreat was justified.45 As historian Alan C. Cate points out, “Pure justice may have been on Lee’s side, but by this time considerable animus toward him existed throughout the army.”46 Furthermore, an acquittal would have been a major censure of Washington’s authority as commander-in-chief and perhaps would have led to his resignation. Thus, the court ignored the prosecution’s weak case and supported Washington out of military necessity. Yet in recognition of Lee’s strong arguments, the court gave him a relatively light sentence, suspending him from military service for one year.47 Lee called the verdict “absurd” and “shameful.”48 He wrote to Benjamin Rush that he feared “the force of party cabal and official power” had “already grown to so dangerous a heighth . . . in the infancy of your states” that it reminded him of “the tyrannical administration of Cardinal Richelieu and Mazarine [sic]” in France.49 Lee described the court-martial as “a Court of inquisition.”50 He exclaimed to Richard Henry Lee: “Great God grant me patience, for what sort of people have I sacrificed every consideration—what a composition of falsehood wickedness and folly! to be ruined for giving a victory to a man whose head was never intended for a sprig of laurels!”51 There is no written record of the court’s deliberations. However, James J. Schaefer writes that the judges “probably realized that the trial was a [ 266 ]

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power struggle between George Washington and Charles Lee.”52 Many contemporaries came to the same conclusion. One former British officer wrote that Lee’s conduct during the battle was “worthy of applause and admiration,” adding that “had he, in expectation of support, maintained his ground on the plain, until the British had attacked him, he must have been overpowered, and would not have had any retreat.”53 After the war, Benedict Arnold, who would become even more infamous than Lee in the annals of the American Revolution, revealed to British general Henry Clinton that “all the officers . . . have said . . . that Washington’s popularity and Lee’s unpopularity determined them to back [Washington].”54 Another American who would be no stranger to scandal and controversy, Aaron Burr, also supported Lee. Although not present during the court-martial, Burr wrote a letter of support to Lee. (Unfortunately, this letter no longer exists.) He also kept his notes on the battle close at hand just in case he was called to testify. In a letter dated October 1778, Lee thanked Burr for his support, stating that the judges had put “equity . . . out of the question” and based their decision “entirely on the strength of party.”55 Lee’s top aide, Captain Evan Edwards, was “shock’d, confounded, and exceedingly chagrin’d” by the verdict. Edwards went to Philadelphia to rally support for Lee’s case but quickly found that public opinion was largely in line with the court. “Matters have been so cursedly represented against you in this place that I have been almost mob’d in defending you,” he wrote to Lee. Making matters worse were the “ten thousand infamous lies” being spread to turn “the Minds of the People against you.” Edwards exclaimed: “In the name of God, what are we come to?—So much for our republicanism.”56 Lee hoped that the Continental Congress, which had recently reconvened in Philadelphia, would reverse the court’s decision. His hopes were pinned to section 14, article 8, of the Articles of War, which stated that any sentence of a court-martial related to a general officer had to be approved by the congress.57 Lee asked the president of the Continental Congress, Henry Laurens, to bring the issue before the delegates, “who, I make no doubt, only wish to investigate the truth and impartially decide.” Lee sent Laurens a deposition from Major John Clark of Pennsylvania, whose testimony was taken too late to enter into the trial record, in which Clark testified that he had delivered an order from Washington during the battle which, in his opinion, was “discretionary.” Clark also stated that Lee had told him to inform Washington that he was retreating out of necessity.58 [ 267 ]

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But because the court-martial had concluded, Laurens refused to accept any evidence that had not been submitted into the trial and returned the deposition to Lee.59 Lee then traveled to Philadelphia to personally lobby the Continental Congress. He had the support of several prominent delegates, among them Samuel Adams and James Lovell of Massachusetts, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, and Thomas Burke of North Carolina. Lee “has found means to league himself with the old faction, and to gain a great many partisans,” John Laurens informed Hamilton.60 By 1778, however, the “old faction” had lost some of its influence. Lee’s criticism of Washington and, at times, of the congress, along with his wagging tongue and biting wit had made him several enemies. South Carolina delegate William Henry Drayton, who had been involved in the planning of the fortifications around Charleston harbor in the summer of 1776 and whom Lee had insulted at that time, heaped praise on Washington “for the important Victory at Monmouth” and promised to do all that he could to promote his “glory.”61 John Laurens informed his father Henry that Lee’s conduct at Monmouth had been suspicious. Lee’s chances of receiving an impartial hearing and a reversal of the verdict from the Continental Congress appeared slim.62 The Continental Congress initially addressed Lee’s appeal on October 23, but debate was postponed at least once every month until December. “The Congress I believe disapprove of the sentence, but are so afraid of the workmanship of their own hands, that they are afraid to reverse it,” Benjamin Rush informed John Adams.63 New Yorker Gouverneur Morris told Washington that “General Lee’s Affair hangs by the Eye Lids,” as the congress was divided over “a Decission.”64 Several delegates recommended that each charge be dealt with separately, but Drayton aggressively argued that the Continental Congress should review the three charges as a group. He claimed that addressing each of the charges separately was a ploy to save those delegates too afraid of expressing their opinion against Washington. According to James J. Schaefer, “by voting on separate charges, delegates could vote only on the charges on which they thought Lee was guilty,” allowing them “to protect Lee’s military reputation while condemning Lee’s breach in social etiquette.”65 The delegates ultimately accepted Drayton’s recommendation.66 On December 3, two articles written by Lee appeared in the Pennsylvania Packet, causing a stir in Philadelphia and throughout America. [ 268 ]

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In “Vindication to the Public,” Lee questioned the public attacks on his “character and conduct on the 28th of June.” He argued that Washington’s orders that day were substantially flawed. His instructions were “to annoy the enemy . . . without risking any thing of great importance; or in other terms to act in a great measure discretionally.” Lee defended his call for a general retreat, arguing that his troops would have been overwhelmed by the best soldiers in Clinton’s army. Either the British would have reached Perrine Ridge first or they would have used one of the three ravines as a defensive position. Lee blamed his subordinates for “a most glorious opportunity lost” and admitted that there was some miscommunication on the battlefield. He also addressed the accusation that he did not think highly of the American soldiers: “There never was a more important falsehood,” Lee wrote. “I have the highest opinion of the courage and other good qualities of the Americans as soldiers.” However, Lee did not deny that he had a “very great opinion of the British troops” as well.67 In the second article, Lee used the way that the congress and the military treated General Thomas Conway, the former inspector general of the Continental Army, to demonstrate that any criticism of Washington would not be tolerated. He claimed that many delegates and members of the military were unwilling to risk their careers and their reputations by publicly repudiating or challenging Washington. Lee argued that Washington wielded too much power and influence, and that this was ultimately dangerous for the life of the Revolution.68 Washington was astounded by the articles.69 In a private letter to Joseph Reed, he declared that Lee had “most barefacedly misrepresented facts . . . and [had] thrown out insinuations . . . that have not the smallest foundation in truth.” He argued that Lee wanted “to have the world believe that he was a persecuted man, and that party was at the bottom of it.”70 Elias Boudinot anonymously answered Lee’s accusations in an article published in the New Jersey Gazette. Boudinot compared Washington and Lee to good and evil: virtue and vice.71 Perhaps no revolutionary was more livid with Lee than John Laurens, who wanted to write a rebuttal to “Vindication” but felt that his literary talents were not up to the task. Instead, he challenged Lee to a duel.72 On December 5, the Continental Congress upheld the court-martial.73 Lee was understandably disappointed with this decision, allegedly pointing to Spado and declaring, “Oh, that I was that animal! that I might not [ 269 ]

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call man my brother.”74 Loyalist James Rivington editorialized in the NewYork Royal Gazette that every Continental officer knew that Lee had saved the army at Monmouth, but they were afraid to admit it in public for fear of Washington’s wrath. Rivington argued that the court’s verdict and the congress’s decision to uphold it were partisan maneuvers designed to save Washington from embarrassment.75 Rivington’s perspective was perhaps skewed by his political views, but the radical Benjamin Rush declared that Lee was “innocent of the charges brought against him, he saved our Army, & country on the 28th of June.” Yet the Philadelphia physician admitted that a vote in Lee’s favor would have been a severe setback to “our commander-in-chief.” The surgeon of the Continental Army, Dr. James Thatcher, described the decision as a “mortal wound,” and “Light Horse” Harry Lee of Virginia noted that the Continental Congress had made a grave “error.”76 In October 1781, shortly after British general Charles Cornwallis had surrendered his forces at Yorktown, Virginia, one of the Continental Army’s chief engineers, the French officer Francois Louis de Fleury, wrote that it was “every where known in France” that Lee “had been ill treated, and that every person lamented . . . [his] misfortune.”77 While Lee dealt with the disappointment over the congress’s decision, he also had to contend with Lauren’s challenge to a duel. Although Lee had not impugned Laurens’s reputation, the young South Carolinian insisted that as one of Washington’s aides, he had an obligation to defend the honor of the commander-in-chief.78 Lee was recuperating from a severe case of gout and from a fall from his horse when he accepted Laurens’s challenge. “I will do myself the Honour of meeting you attended by a Friend with a brace of pistols to-morrow [at]1/2 past 3. p.m.,” he wrote on December 22.79 Lee and his second, Evan Edwards, arrived early at the designated meeting spot, a clearing near a wooded area outside Philadelphia. As the two men waited for Laurens and his second, Hamilton, who would witness his first duel, a small audience gathered. Laurens and Hamilton appeared shortly thereafter.80 The duelists chose their pistols and took their positions. At a designated signal, they “approached each other within about five or six paces, and exchanged a shot almost at the same moment.” Laurens’s shot grazed Lee’s torso, while Lee’s shot missed its mark. Lee assured the onlookers that “the wound was inconsiderable; less than he had imagined at the first stroke of the ball” and declared that Laurens should have his second shot. Both Hamilton and Edwards, however, argued that the participants [ 270 ]

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had conducted themselves honorably and that “the affair should terminate as it then stood.” Like all eighteenth-century gentlemen, Lee placed great importance on the code duello, and he held no grudge toward Laurens for challenging him. He stated that “the young fellow behaved splendidly, I could have hugged him.”81 Although Lee revered the code duello, he decided to fend off challenges from Baron von Steuben and Anthony Wayne. Steuben viewed some comments that Lee made about his conduct at Monmouth as an affront to his honor, but he had to be prodded by Hamilton to challenge him to a duel. Lee apologized for his remarks, which was enough for Steuben.82 In January 1779, Wayne accused Lee of trying to “Injure my Military Character in the eye of the World.” He demanded a public apology; if that was not forthcoming, Lee should prepare “to meet that Satisfaction which one Gentleman has a right to claim of an Other.”83 Lee responded that he had never treated Wayne’s “military character with contempt.” But if Wayne felt that a duel was necessary, he was ready to accept.84 Wayne never pursued the duel and the matter was forgotten.85 Lee considered William Henry Drayton one of his main “persecutors.” Drayton had taken a leading role in securing the Continental Congress’s decision to uphold Lee’s court-martial and publicly questioned Lee’s role in the successful defense of Charleston in the summer of 1776 as well as his conduct in late November and December of that year. Lee bitterly denounced Drayton and reminded him of his past support for taxation by Parliament and wrote sardonically that the American people were “the most mercifull People on the face of the Earth,” for if they were not so inclined, they would have surely hanged him along with “every Advocate for the Stamp act.” Lee declared that Drayton’s “present violent airs of Patriotism” could never “wash away the stain.”86 While Lee dueled Drayton with his pen, he also matched wits with the intelligent and flirtatious Rebecca Franks, the daughter of David Franks.87 The attractive brunette was one of the belles of Philadelphia. She was known for her steadfast loyalty to the British Crown and, much like Lee, for possessing a sharp wit that produced mean-spirited attacks aimed at embarrassing her victims. In late December 1778, Lee attended a dinner party at the Franks’ home wearing green sherryvallies, long breeches with leather inserts on the inside of the thighs, that he had received from King Stanislaus. Rebecca wasted no time ridiculing him for wearing breeches [ 271 ]

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that were “patched” with leather. Lee sent her the clothing in question along with a witty note that was directed as much at those who had publicly attacked his character as it was at her. “When an officer of the respectable rank which I bear is grossly traduced and calumniated, it is incumbent on him to clear up the affair to the world, with as little delay as possible,” he wrote. The “spirit of defamation and calumny (I am sorry to say it) is grown to [such] a prodigious and intolerable height on this continent” that even the breeches that a man wears are questioned.88 Lee circulated copies of his playful and witty banter with Rebecca among his Philadelphia acquaintances. In January 1779, however, the letter appeared in a new publication, the United States Magazine, and was widely reprinted. Rebecca was thoroughly displeased and embarrassed. Lee assured her that he had never intended the private correspondence to become public and meant it only as a “harmless jocular” moment. Lee published an apology to Rebecca as well as a scathing denunciation of the editor of the United States Magazine, Hugh Brackenridge, in the Pennsylvania Gazette.89 The Lee-Brackenridge affair escalated as both men attacked each other’s character in the press. Lee eventually challenged Brackenridge to a duel that was flippantly rejected. When he encountered the editor on Market Street in Philadelphia one day, he chased after him with a horsewhip in one hand and a pistol in the other. Brackenridge ran to a nearby tavern and bolted the door as an angry Lee cursed him. The editor sarcastically yelled out that he did not want to be a target for Lee’s pistol and that he had disliked whippings since childhood, which provoked laughter from a group of onlookers. This further infuriated Lee, who stormed from the scene amid more laughter from the gathered crowd.90 Lee continued to defend his honor and reputation from critics who accused him of disrespecting Washington and of deliberately trying to sabotage the American war effort. Yet his behavior on the battlefield at Monmouth was neither disrespectful to Washington nor ill-advised. Lee’s belief that Washington had given him discretionary orders was not unreasonable, given their vagueness. Lee had made an attempt to attack the British rearguard but had retreated when confronted by a superior force. Admittedly, Lee’s lack of reconnaissance and his ad hoc battle plan had contributed to the need for a general retreat, but his performance that day had more to do with immediate circumstances on the battlefield than a conscious attempt to undermine the American war effort. Lee’s attempt to encircle Clinton’s [ 272 ]

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rearguard was hindered by the local terrain, the brutally hot temperatures that day, the appearance of a stronger British force, and the hodgepodge organization of the Continental advance corps that had required him to command unfamiliar officers. Clinton himself later admitted that had Lee not ordered a general retreat, the Continentals would have been caught against the three ravines and annihilated long before Washington’s arrival. By ordering a general retreat, Lee was able to draw the British into an unfavorable position by the time Washington had appeared on the battlefield and probably helped save the Continental Army from a potentially devastating defeat.

[ 273 ]

16

The Bitter End

By the spring of 1779, 47-year-old Charles Lee prepared to leave Philadelphia for Prato Rio, the country estate he had purchased in Hopewell, Virginia, in the foothills of the Shenandoah mountains. He had grown weary of the petty squabbling that was taking place in Congress and among the Continental officer corps. It seemed to him that too many delegates were focused on personal influence and regional ambitions, while military officers scuffled for recognition, promotion, and political advantage. The climate of perniciousness that pervaded Philadelphia in 1779 must have reminded him of the jostling for recognition and the pretentiousness of the British officer corps. Lee tried to avoid further controversy, but his enemies continued to publicly make disparaging remarks about him. Lee advised General Horatio Gates to resign from the army before he became the next victim of a personal and political smear campaign: “For God’s sake take care of yourself there is a mine under your feet, the train ready laid, the materials are heap’d up from self conceit arrogance ignorance and mean jealousy.”1 Lee, however, would have to continue to fight his enemies until the last day of his life. Lee’s departure from Philadelphia was delayed because of financial difficulties. Lee had always had trouble managing his finances, and wartime inflation and the lack of a salary during his suspension had made his financial situation worse, forcing him to seek new sources of revenue. He wrote to his friend Colonel William Butler, who was serving in the British army in occupied New York, to ask him for “a pound of Tea, a new hat and three hundred pounds in money.” After several days, Lee received a response from General Alexander Leslie, who informed him that although Butler had departed for Britain, “with Sir Henry Clinton’s consent, he wou’d endeavour to procure the money.”2 [ 274 ]

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The Continental Congress publicly reprimanded Lee for his attempt to obtain funds from his British connections. Lee explained that when he made the request he was following the advice of Robert Morris and “one or two other members” of Congress who told him that “there cou’d not be the least impropriety in the measure.”3 When Lee joined the American cause, he “possessed, if not of an ample, at least of a very easy fortune for a private Gentleman,” but he claimed that now he was “reduced to nothing at all, to absolute beggary.” Lee declared that had he remained as a halfpay officer in the British military, he could have had “lands either on the Ohio, Miss’sipi or West Florida” and retained his position in the Polish service, where he would have enjoyed “eight hundred ducats per annum” with meals and lodgings and forage for his horses. “Such was the fortune and income I staked on the die of American Liberty,” Lee declared, “and I played a losing game for I might lose all and had no prospect or wish to better it.”4 Although Lee was grateful to the Continental Congress for advancing him the money to purchase Prato Rio, the cost of maintaining the estate was overwhelming. “Unless I am furnished with the means of putting this farm in some order,” Lee explained, he would have to default on the estate.5 The Continental Congress grudgingly agreed to lend him the £300 with the stipulation that he had to reject any funds procured by General Leslie and stop asking for more money from his friends and acquaintances in the British military.6 Lee received the funds from the Continental Congress and promptly demonstrated why he was in financial straits. He returned to Philadelphia, lodging at the most expensive tavern in town, the City Tavern, where he lavishly entertained several of his supporters, including Samuel Adams, James Lovell, New Hampshire delegate William Whipple, Benjamin Rush, General Henry “Light Horse” Harry Lee, and Thomas Mifflin.7 Lee’s spending spree was yet another example of his impulsiveness, but he was also trying to earn back some political capital.8 Lee occasionally dined with the Continental Army’s commandant of Philadelphia, General Benedict Arnold. Lee did not particularly like Arnold and did not trust him, but the two men had a common enemy in Joseph Reed, who, as of December 1778, was president of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council, a position that essentially functioned as the office of governor. Reed frequently criticized Arnold’s administration of the city, while Lee had never forgiven Reed for publicly giving Washington [ 275 ]

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credit for saving the army at Monmouth.9 Lee took every opportunity to impugn Reed’s character in public.10 When he was not attacking Reed’s character, Lee was attempting to clear his own name. The Pennsylvania Packet anonymously published a letter written to Benjamin Rush by the South Carolina physician and later historian of the Revolution, David Ramsay, that passionately defended Lee. Ramsay was appalled by the court-martial and by the Continental Congress’s vote to uphold its decision. He condemned the evidence offered by the prosecution and decried the testimony of Washington’s staff officers, believing that Lee had been the victim of a cruel injustice. Ramsay apologized for “the ingratitude of my country” and declared that instead of reproach and censure, Lee deserved the thanks of the congress, the army, and the American people.11 Lee tried to parlay Ramsay’s letter into another opportunity for public vindication. In March 1779, he wrote an untitled essay calculated to damage Washington’s reputation and make Reed uneasy. Lee distributed the essay among some of his supporters and acquaintances, who thought it had merit. Emboldened by this response and by Ramsay’s letter, Lee sought to make the essay public, but he could not find a printer in Philadelphia who was willing to publish it, even with Lee as an anonymous author.12 Lee eventually sent the essay to the Baltimore printer William Goddard, who, along with his business partner, the former artillery officer Eleazer Oswald, was sympathetic to his plight. Goddard arranged to have it published anonymously under a Philadelphia dateline in the July 6, 1779, edition of the Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, a newspaper that was co-edited by his sister, Mary Katherine. Lee’s essay appeared as “Some Queries, Political and Military, Humbly Offered to the Consideration of the Public.” It contained twenty-five pointed questions that were designed to justify his actions at Monmouth, damage Washington and Reed’s reputations, and warn readers of the potential for tyranny by the Revolution’s leaders. Lee asked “whether it is salutary or dangerous, consistent with, or abhorrent from the true principles of liberty and republicanism to inculcate and encourage an idea in the People that their safety welfare and glory depend on one man.” Who was really responsible for moving the cause of America forward? Was it Washington, who was outmaneuvered by British general William Howe during the Philadelphia campaign, or Gates and Arnold, who dealt the British military a major setback at Saratoga? [ 276 ]

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Why did the Continental Congress in 1776 summon “General Lee . . . from Georgia, with injunctions to join the army under General Washington, then in [New] York-Island, without loss of time?” Had not one of Washington’s most trusted aides, Colonel Joseph Reed, questioned Washington’s abilities as a commander in a letter to Lee in November 1776? Why is it that every loss that Washington sustained on the battlefield was someone else’s fault and every victory was to his credit? Was Lee’s court-martial conducted along the same lines as those of other Continental Army officers? Could liberty exist where a man is afraid to speak his opinion?13 The publication of “Queries” touched off a firestorm in Baltimore. On July 8, a mob of thirty men broke into Goddard’s print shop, woke him from his sleep, and destroyed his type. Goddard agreed to meet with the leaders the next morning at a local coffeehouse, but before the meeting, another mob accosted him in the street. Fearing for his life, Goddard revealed that Lee was the author of “Queries” and promised to publish a retraction and make a public apology to Washington in the next edition.14 Reed sent Goddard a stern reply to Lee’s essay, which the printer promptly published. In it, the Pennsylvania executive fumed that Lee was unscrupulously using him to assault Washington and asserted that by revealing the contents of his November 21, 1776, letter Lee had violated the sacred trust of confidentiality inherent in any private correspondence. Reed disingenuously explained that he had questioned Washington’s military judgment only once and that was over whether Fort Washington should be abandoned. He explained that Washington’s indecision at the time arose not from a lack of military skills and abilities but from timidity, which, with experience, he had overcome.15 Although Washington was as troubled by Lee’s “Queries” as Reed, he chose not to respond publicly. Instead, Washington privately wrote that “Queries” demonstrated that Lee had “motives, still more hidden and dark.”16 Lee condemned the mobs that had attacked Goddard and his print shop as enemies of a free press and wrote a follow-up to “Queries” in which he defended his actions at Monmouth and clarified his critique of Washington. Lee declared that he had “no doubt of the General’s being a man of strict veracity and is convinced . . . that whenever he acts from himself no Officer in his Army will have reason to complain of injustice or indecorum.” But Washington had been “grossly deceived” by “the vague idle reports of Men who had seen little, knew less, and who were totally ignorant of the . . . circumstances” at Monmouth.17 Perhaps fearing a replay of the firestorm [ 277 ]

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caused by “Queries,” Goddard did not publish Lee’s follow-up essay. Disappointed, Lee tried to secure its publication in Philadelphia, but all of that city’s printers also refused to publish it.18 By late April 1779, Lee was ready to leave Philadelphia. “In this State a most odious Tyranny is establish’d,” he declared. “Washington is their God, Joe Reed their Dictator, or rather Despotic Prince.”19 Lee felt he could accomplish nothing more in the city, and on April 20, accompanied by his beloved dogs and by his new housekeeper, Elizabeth Dunn, he departed. Lee’s loyal servant Giuseppe Minghini remained in Philadelphia to gather his luggage and belongings and would join him later.20 Lee made his way to the Great Road near the Potomac River, which would take him to Hopewell, Virginia, the location of Prato Rio. As he traveled to Hopewell, the grandness of the Shenandoah Valley opened before him. For the first time since Lee had left his hometown of Chester, England, as a young man, he was about to embark on the life that his sister Sidney had always wanted for him—that of a country gentleman.21 On the grounds of Prato Rio stood Lee’s narrow, neglected, one-anda-half-story farmhouse. The structure was framed with heavy hand-hewn oak beams, and its limestone walls were whitewashed and contained windows that differed in size, were not level, and were missing some of their glass. It was set back from the road and hidden from view by a tangled copse. The furnishings were sparse, and it was said that Lee removed some of its interior walls for easier maneuverability during his recurrent bouts with gout.22 Lee occasionally entertained guests, but he lived mostly a quiet existence with Minghini, Dunn, his canine companions, and two slaves, a female named Sidney and a male named Jack, of whom little is known. He passed his days training his dogs to perform new tricks, nursing his several physical ailments, reading and rereading the various books in his extensive library, and writing letters and essays to try to clear his name. “My amusement here (for I am a wretched Farmer), is reading,” Lee admitted to Rush, and to Horatio Gates he declared, “I have been amusing myself here in Writing or rather throwing on paper sev’ral crude Reveries, which you shall one day see.”23 Among Lee’s “crude Reveries” was one of the eighteenth century’s most detailed plans for a utopian republic, A Sketch of a Plan for the Formation of a Military Colony.24 Lee imagined a well-ordered, simple agrarian community of soldiers and their families “in some happy Climate of America.”25 [ 278 ]

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The farmhouse on Charles Lee’s estate, Prato Rio. Date of photo unknown. Source: Library of Congress.

In Lee’s utopia, luxury and the accumulation of material wealth, which tend to “emasculate the body, narrow the mind, and . . . corrupt every true republican and manly principle,” were discouraged, as were primogeniture and entail. The distribution of land would be regulated by agrarian law; no one would be allowed to own more than 5,000 or less than 400 acres. Society would be governed by a legal system based on English common law. Those who committed criminal acts would be condemned to slavery, sentenced to labor on public projects, or punished by mutilation, branding, or exile. Lee declared that like the Romans during their age of “simplicity, virtue and glory,” lawyers would not be necessary in his imagined republic.26 Nor would there be any need for clergy. Like many eighteenth-century critics of religion, Lee offered a scathing denunciation of the Bible as the word of God. In his utopian society, rigid sectarianism and dogma would be barred. “These sophistical subtleties only lead to a doubt of the whole” and to “impertinence and ill consequences,” Lee wrote. There would be “one common form of worship . . . of the Supreme Being” and religious ceremonies would be conducted by a “supreme servitor” who would be chosen [ 279 ]

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for his dignified appearance, his manners, and his “distinct and melodious voice.” Music and poetry would be important components to religious worship and with history, literature, and philosophy would form the basis of education. Lee believed that a competency in these subjects was “absolutely requisite to qualify every citizen of the community” to participate in public life.27 Although Lee’s utopian plan emphasized participation in civic life, he said little about government beyond the existence of a legislature that would be responsible for, among other things, regulating the military establishment. Every able-bodied adult male citizen would be required to serve in the militia and participate in weekly drills. They would “practice some simple evolutions, such as marching in front, retreating and rallying by their colours, and all firing at marks.” Strict laws would govern this system and keep it equitable. There would be “no substitutes . . . on any pretence, but absolute infirmity.” Those who avoided their military duty would bring dishonor and shame to themselves and their families. Lee imagined a “nation in arms” in which every resident, of both sexes and all ages, would be expected to contribute to the common defense.28 Lee would welcome any individuals who chose to live as parts of a whole.29 They would be free citizens of a society where everyone bore an equal measure of civic responsibilities. Lee’s utopian polity reflected, as Gordon S. Wood notes, his desire for a Spartan collectivistic republic “where every man was a soldier and master of his own soul and land” and where citizens were ready to sacrifice their private interests for the common good.30 From writing his utopian manifesto, Lee returned to a bitter critique of the Revolution and its leaders. In both his private correspondence and in public gatherings he assailed the Revolution’s political and military leadership for having “committed some unworthy actions” against him and against the American people. He had “true uneasy feelings” about the direction in which the Revolution and America had taken, confessing that he had lost faith in the movement to which he had “sacrificed ev’ry thing, the greater part of my fortune; my relations connexions and military pretentions.” Lee declared that he would “always respect the virtue of her [America’s] first Patriots” and warned that “the time is now . . . arriv’d when . . . you will severely smart for your hasty unmanly precipitancy in Censuring . . . the real and true Saviours” of the American cause. “The consequences of this ungenerous procedure . . . must be fatal to the People. . . . Read the history [ 280 ]

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of Carthage—of Sparta—of Rome when fall’n degraded into Imperial Slavery—read that of modern Turkey and you will see the horrid truth illustrated.” Lee predicted that unless “a new way of thinking and new principles can be introduced among the People of America . . . there are little hopes of the present republican Governments or anything like republican Governments being of any duration.” The current leaders of the Revolution “are most destitute of all true republican spirit and ideas” and “have a monstrously glaring propensity to Monarchy, or the consecration of one Man [Washington], on whose existence and continuation in power their whole glory, safety, and happiness . . . must depend.”31 Lee’s deep resentment at the way he had been treated by the revolutionaries may have contributed to severe episodes of paranoia. Beginning in September 1779, Lee claimed in private and in public utterances that Washington planned to assassinate him. “I am confident as I am of my own existence, that it is the determin’d purpose of that dark designing sordid ambitious vain proud arrogant and vindictive knave W[ashington]: to remove me from the face of the earth by assassination direct or indirect,” Lee confided to Gates.32 The few revolutionaries who still supported Lee were greatly concerned about his recent pronunciations and actions, especially since his year-long suspension from the Continental Army was coming to a close and the Continental Congress would soon determine his future. Joseph Nourse, who had served as one of Lee’s military secretaries, informed Gates that his former commanding officer’s criticism of the Revolution’s leaders “only tended to render him more unpopular—however true and just in a Republican Government they have not suited the minds of the people.”33 On December 4, John Forbes, a delegate from Maryland and a member of the Continental Congress’s Board of War, presented a resolution “That Major General Charles Lee be informed that Congress have no further occasion for his services in the army of the United States of America.”34 Although Lee’s supporters in the congress tried to influence the vote in his favor, they failed. Forbes’s resolution was approved.35 Surprisingly, Lee reacted to the news of the Continental Congress’s decision with much restraint. “I have this day received your letter, with my dismission from the service of the United States; nor can I complain of it as an act of injustice,” Lee wrote to the president of the congress, Samuel Huntington of Connecticut. “The greatest respect is indisputably due to every public body of men, and above all to those who are the representatives [ 281 ]

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and at the same time the legislature of a free people.” He apologized for his “highly improper, disrespectful and even contumacious” behavior and acknowledged that his temper had gotten the best of him. Lee also confessed that his actions had originated from the deep resentment that he felt toward Washington and many of the other revolutionaries. He hoped that in the future, the Continental Congress might “find many servants ready to make as great sacrifices as I have made, and possessed with the same degree of zeal for their service as has from the beginning governed all my actions.”36 Lee’s service in the Continental Army had come to an end. Although he was pleased to learn that the Continental Congress had published his apology in the local newspapers, he was “disappointed that it was not accompanied by any comments in my favor.” In a letter to the delegates, Lee railed that his apology was “an honourable measure” that the congress had cast aside without gratitude. “I observe that the greatest defect in the American character both of Individuals and Bodies is their making it a rule never on any occasion to confess themselves in the wrong,” he declared. Lee accused several delegates of basing their decision on “the pernicious principle that Justice must be postpon’d to Expedience, by which in this particular case I suppose was meant that as General Washington is considered a necessary man, He is to be humor’d in the sacrifice of every officer whom from pique or jealousy He . . . devotes . . . to destruction.” Lee boldly demanded “some reparations” for his services, arguing that he had “risk’d his fortune sacrificed his military rank, his friends and connexions to the cause of America.”37 Lee sent the letter to Benjamin Rush, asking his friend to forward it to Huntington. The level-headed Rush never sent the letter, ending the matter.38 Lee never again wore a military uniform or held a command. His quarrel with Washington, his court-martial, and the fight to defend his honor had taken their toll on him physically and mentally. “I am . . . most heartily sick of this country and have thoughts of quitting it soon; if I can settle my affairs in such a manner as to set me at liberty,” he admitted to Rush, “for as to great, wholesome equal republics which you and I have been fanatically in pursuit of, I am now convinced they are in these modern ages quite chimerical.”39 Lee declared that he would rather live under the Hapsburg monarchies in Tuscany or Austria-Hungary than in a republic where liberty [ 282 ]

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was professed but not really practiced. “These ranting whigs are in fact most absolute Tories in all their theory and practice,” Lee exclaimed.40 Lee’s pronouncements about leaving America were idle bluster. Instead, he traveled throughout Virginia and Maryland, staying with various friends and acquaintances, including Washington’s cousin, Colonel William Washington, borrowing small sums of money from them.41 In October 1780, Lee was again in financial straits. He appealed to the Continental Congress for monetary support, claiming that he had been “reduced to a very distressing state of indigence.” Lee accompanied his request for financial support with an appeal for an order of protection. Several false accusations had appeared in the Irish newspaper Flynn’s Hibernian Chronicle and had been reprinted in the Pennsylvania Packet accusing Lee of accepting a bribe from British general Henry Clinton before the Battle of Monmouth and of having a role in Benedict Arnold’s plan to surrender the military garrison at West Point, New York, to the British. Lee publicly denounced the accusations, calling them a “hellish malignant libel,” and in a paranoid frenzy he asked the Continental Congress “to restrain by any law . . . this Scoundrel Calumniator” who was seeking to make him the “proper subject for the hand of Assassination.”42 Lee’s requests were referred to a congressional committee composed of Samuel Adams, John Mathews of South Carolina, and William Sharpe of North Carolina.43 The committee denied Lee’s request for funds, indicating that the Continental Congress had already advanced him a large sum upon his acceptance of his military commission four years ago and that he had not furnished proof of any losses “in consequence of his engaging in the service of the United States.” As for Lee’s appeal for special protection, the committee concluded that the “illiberal insinuations” against him were “unworthy . . . of the attention of Congress” and should be ignored.44 The decline in Lee’s physical and mental health was precipitous during this period. By the spring of 1781, gout had left him almost crippled and a steady, painful cough had worsened. Lee also displayed signs of extreme depression and anxiety. At times his conversations devolved into incoherent rants, and he was often unable to control his rage, using profanity and physical violence against anyone who disagreed with him. Yet Lee maintained positive relationships with some of the most distinguished residents of Virginia and Maryland and continued to receive support from persons [ 283 ]

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who had always believed that he had been wrongly convicted or who had recently come to that conclusion. Among them were his former subordinate, Nathanael Greene, who spoke about him in “the highest terms of esteem,” and the future president of the United States, James Monroe, who first met Lee in April 1778 while serving on the staff of General William Alexander. Lee sensed great abilities behind Monroe’s shy exterior and encouraged him to display more self-confidence. “I have always asserted that you wou’d appear one of the first characters of this Country, if your shyness did not prevent the display of knowledge and talents you possess,” he advised. Lee supported Monroe’s decision to study law but counseled him to supplement his legal pursuits with “other more liberal studies.” The law could be “a most horrid narrower of the mind,” he cautioned.45 Although Lee was able to maintain some friendships and gain new support from key persons, both civil and military, a few of his longtime acquaintances became strained, especially his relationship with Gates. In May 1780, the British captured Charleston, South Carolina, something they had failed to do four years earlier, when Lee was in command of the Southern Department. Congress responded by replacing the commander of the southern army, General Benjamin Lincoln, with Gates. Lee advised his friend to beware “lest your Northern laurels [referring to Gates’s victory over Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1777] turn to Southern willows.”46 Lee’s warning was prophetic. In August 1780, Gates was routed by British general Charles Cornwallis at Camden, South Carolina. The humiliated Gates temporarily retired to his estate, Traveller’s Rest. Lee often visited Gates, but argued bitterly with his wife Elizabeth on an assortment of private and public matters. “Gates is a man I have always lov’d and whom I know to be full of good qualities; but he is not a free agent,” Lee wrote to Robert Morris in June 1781. “That Medusa his wife governs with a rod of Scorpions.”47 Lee’s disagreements with Elizabeth Gates reached their climax at a dinner party at Traveller’s Rest in which she berated her husband in front of their guests. Lee exploded: “Madam . . . you are a tragedy in private life and a farce to all the world!” Elizabeth demanded that he leave immediately.48 After that, Lee was estranged from Gates, but he did not blame his old friend for their ruptured friendship. Instead, he described Gates as a victim of “a most damnable gynæcocracy.”49 The relationship became further estranged when an unsubstantiated rumor surfaced that Lee was planning to join the British. This rumor was attributed to Gates, who confessed that [ 284 ]

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he had come to this conclusion after he had heard that Lee had met with several known or suspected Loyalists in Virginia and Maryland. Perhaps Gates, whose star had dimmed following his implication in the Conway Cabal and the disaster at Camden, South Carolina, was trying to salvage his reputation at Lee’s expense. Lee’s meetings with Loyalists or persons suspected of Loyalist behavior had also raised a doubt about his allegiance in the mind of his longtime financial advisor and advocate, Robert Morris, who reminded him that he had “impelled the Americans to this war.” Lee responded that he had met many “Men who are in reality the true adherents to the rights of mankind.” He also warned that the current leaders of the Revolution were dangerous because they claimed to be republicans and friends of liberty yet supported the disfranchisement of citizens, the suppression of the freedom of the press, and the confiscation of property from one group of individuals for the benefit of another group. “Tyranny whatever garb it assumes whether the Royal robes of England, the red cloaks of attorneys or waggoners frocks—in fact Tyranny is Tyranny however dress’d,” Lee reminded Morris.50 For Lee, who had been captivated by the republican virtues of the ancient Greek citystates and of the Roman republic since his youth, America had been the one place where these virtues could be successfully replicated in the modern world. By 1781, however, he had begun to feel differently about America’s potential. An acquaintance had once asked him whether he would stop his restless wandering, to which he replied that he would do so “whenever I cou’d find a Country where power was in righteous hands.” Lee felt no closer to his goal than when he first began his quest. “I now find, I may be a pilgrim to all eternity. . . . Great God, what a Dupe and a victim have I been to the talismanic name of Liberty! for I now have reason to believe (from the materials of the Modern World) that this bright Goddess is a Chimera.”51 After American independence was assured by British general Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781, Lee argued that the revolutionaries were headed for “absolute tyranny” unless they proposed “immediately to the British . . . a cessation of arms” for a period of six years. “America wou’d have then time to look about her to examine her resources, in Men, Provision Revenue and Maritime force—but above all her fund of Virtue” which was necessary for the success of any “federation of Republicks.”52 Lee recommended that after six years, should the Americans discover that as a society they lacked the resources—both human [ 285 ]

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and capital—and the civic virtue that was needed to establish a successful republic, they could become a British protectorate. It seems that Lee had begun to favor a loose political connection with Britain.53 He also feared France’s growing power and believed that it was a matter of time before the French turned their sights on the American states. Lee warned that France would try to control the Americans either by political intrigue or by conquest. “I confess I am not politician enough to comprehend what Congress mean in declaring they will have no peace, however salutary, until their good allies assent which construed into plain English is that they will have no peace until France has stripp’d G. Britain of all her possessions in the East and West Indies in short not until France has secured the Empire of the Sea which added to her immense national resources will enable her to give law to the whole world, and amongst the rest to scourge the Americans themselves whenever they grow naughty or refractory.” Lee concluded that the Americans would bear the burden of a war that would ultimately lead to France’s domination of the world.54 As Lee’s confidence in America waned, he renewed his attacks on Washington and the congress. To Sidney, he condemned Washington as someone “whose infallibility is not to be disputed” and to whom “every man must bow down on pain of political damnation.” Lee told his sister that even though Washington was not an intellectual, he was a shrewd manipulator who used cunning and intrigue “to work the ruin of every Man who has excited his jealousy or offended his pride, and whoever sins in either of these two points has no chance of being forgiven.” Lee’s final assessment of Washington was that of a “puffed up Charlatan” who was “not really a great soldier.” The thought that a person “without fashion, air, manners, or Language enough to relieve a Corporals Guard, and who has blundered himself into innumerable defeats & disgraces . . . should ever become the object of popular adoration, I confess astonishes me,” he wrote bitterly, but with envy.55 As for the congress, the Americans would be in a better situation if they were to be defeated by the British rather than “endure . . . such an odious tyranny as the capricious arbitrary government of an unlimited, uncontrollable Assembly” that had committed several “damned acts of atrocious tyranny, crying injustice, and felonious violence.” It was time, he declared, to put “some immediate restraint on the Powers of men who have been guilty of such accumulated villainy.”56 But by the summer of 1782, these were viewed as the delusional rants of a bitter, dying man. Lee’s mental [ 286 ]

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debilities were compounded by his worsening health. His attacks of gout had become more painful and were occurring with more frequency, while the agonizing chronic cough that he had developed in the spring of 1780 had intensified and was now accompanied by a very high fever, night sweats, weight loss, and a significant discharge of blood-tinged phlegm. According to modern medical scholarship, Lee was possibly suffering from tuberculosis or, in eighteenth-century terms, “consumption.”57 Although in poor mental and physical health, Lee spent the last months of his life traveling to familiar places: Baltimore, Williamsburg, Fredericksburg, and western Pennsylvania, where he recalled his participation in Braddock’s disaster along the Monongahela in 1755. He also tried to stretch his dwindling income. Lee was £800 in debt, and although he continued to borrow money from acquaintances, the economic uncertainty of the times made borrowing large amounts more difficult. Despite his recent spat with Lee, Robert Morris tried to help him make some sense out of his finances. Morris understood that Lee was not entirely without assets and advised him to sell Prato Rio. Lee took his advice. After an initial agreement with potential buyers from Maryland fell through, Morris helped Lee find another buyer for the property. In August 1782, John Vaughan, a British entrepreneur interested in speculating in American lands, visited Prato Rio and offered Lee £6,000 for the estate. Lee accepted the offer and the two men entered into a tentative agreement that was subject to Morris’s approval.58 “Mr. Vaughan will have a very good purchase if you decide,” Lee wrote to Morris.59 In early September, Lee set out for Philadelphia with his personal servant Minghini and some of his canines to meet with Morris and complete the transaction. He never returned to Virginia. In late September 1782, Lee stopped at Frederick, Maryland. He was in great physical pain and his chronic cough had worsened. Perhaps Lee knew that he was dying, for he decided to write his last will. It was a document that reflected his financial straits but also illustrated the value he placed on personal loyalty. Lee’s staunch supporters Jacob Morris, Evan Edwards, Eleazer Oswald, and William Goddard were all given a share of Prato Rio, provided that it was still in his possession at his death, after the payment of taxes and the settlement of his debts. Morris and Edwards received a third of the estate and Oswald and Goddard divided the other third between them. To his “old and faithful servant, or rather humble friend” Minghini he left £300 and a substantial amount of his moveable property, including [ 287 ]

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some of his horses, mares, and colts and “all my wearing apparel and plate, my waggons and tools of agriculture, and his choice of four milch cows.” Lee’s housekeeper, Elizabeth Dunn, was remembered with £100 and his “whole stock of cattle,” except for those that he had bequeathed to Minghini. Lee gave his sister Sidney “all my other property of every kind, and in every part of the world.” He also left small bequests to some of his Virginia friends and acquaintances. His two slaves, Sidney and Jack, were to be divided between Minghini and Dunn. Although Lee made no mention in his will for the provision of his dogs, he more than likely entrusted them to Minghini.60 Lee made one special request in his will that denounced the formal trappings of organized religion. “I desire most earnestly, that I may not be buried in any church, or church-yard, or within a mile of any Presbyterian or Anabaptist meeting-house; for since I have resided in this country, I have kept so much bad company, when living, that I do not chuse to continue it when dead,” he declared. Lee recommended his soul “to the Creator of all worlds and of all creatures; who must, from his visible attributes, be indifferent to their modes of worship or creeds, whether Christians, Mahometans, or Jews.” He indicated that whether “instilled by education, or taken up by reflection,” these religious faiths were “more or less absurd.” Lee believed that the existence of God was discernible not through the reading of holy books or through strict adherence to religious laws and ceremonies but in the creation of the universe that was visible every day in nature. He concluded in true deistic fashion that a person could understand God only through reason and was no more answerable to Him for his “persuasions, notions, or even skepticism in religion, than for the colour of his skin.”61 The inclusion of these statements in Lee’s will led several American theologians and political leaders to condemn him posthumously as an atheist and a blasphemer.62 Thomas Paine experienced a similar fate for his deism, as did the Vermont revolutionary Ethan Allen. Lee proceeded to Baltimore, where he visited William Goddard and took the opportunity to write to Nathanael Greene to thank him for his support and congratulate him for his victory over Cornwallis in the South, an event that paved the way for the British general’s eventual surrender at Yorktown. In defeating Cornwallis, Greene had relied on tactics similar to those Lee had supported earlier in the war: the use of the militia and roving partisans in coordination with small units of the Continental Army to [ 288 ]

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harass the British lines, ambush isolated patrols, and cut off the enemy’s communications and supplies. “I have long wish’d to thank you . . . for the handsome and generous part you have acted by me,” Lee wrote. “My friends . . . have frequently inform’d me, of the generous indignation you have express’d at the unworthy and scoundrel treatment I have receiv’d—I thank you therefor most cordially and devoutly.”63 By this time, Lee’s physical and mental strength had weakened significantly. Arriving in Philadelphia in late September, an ashen-faced, gaunt Lee took a small, poorly lit room on the second floor of the Conestoga Wagon Inn on Market Street. The Conestoga, a favorite of local farmers and carters, was a far cry from the elegant City Tavern where Lee used to lodge when in town. Although physically enfeebled, Lee walked about the streets near the Conestoga, assisted by Minghini and trailed by his canine companions. On September 27, he awoke in the middle of the night shivering and with excruciating pain in his lungs and in his extremities. By the afternoon, Lee’s fever had not subsided; he was groaning deeply and was delusional. Lee shouted the names of random persons and barked commands to imaginary troops. Although Minghini sent for a local doctor, there was little the physician could do to improve Lee’s rapidly failing health; he had only days to live. Minghini notified Eleazer Oswald, who was now the publisher of one of Philadelphia’s premier newspapers, the Pennsylvania Independent Gazetteer, of Lee’s deteriorating physical and mental state. Both men did their best to comfort him and ease his suffering. As the sun set on October 3, 1782, Minghini noticed Lee clutching at his bedclothes and attempting to sit upright. He comforted him until he went back to sleep. At ten o’clock, Lee suddenly sat up in bed. He called out, “Stand fast, my brave grenadiers, Stand fast!” before sinking back down into his bed and to death. Minghini immediately sent for the doctor. Lee’s dogs, which had been lying on the floor, leapt to their feet and ran to his bedside, barking and licking his hands in a futile effort to awaken him. Lee’s death attracted very little immediate attention other than a few obituaries in American newspapers. James Madison, who was in Philadelphia serving in the Congress of the Confederation, informed fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph that “Genl. Lee died here . . . after a short illness.”64 When Washington heard of his former subordinate’s death, he wrote simply to Lafayette, who was in France, “Genl Lee . . . is dead, he breathed his last at Philadelphia.” Washington made no further comment.65 [ 289 ]

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Jacob Morris made Lee’s funeral arrangements and paid all of the expenses. On October 4, pallbearers carried a mahogany coffin containing Lee’s body to the City Tavern, where several friends, acquaintances, and dignitaries came to pay their respects, including the president of the Congress of the Confederation, John Hanson; General Benjamin Lincoln; Gouverneur Morris; Robert Morris; the French minister to the United States, Anne-César, Chevalier de la Luzerne; a French officer, Armand Louis de Gontaut, Duc de Lauzun, who was serving in America; and, astonishingly, John Dickinson, who had clashed with Lee over declaring independence. The funeral party, which was provided with a military escort, proceeded slowly up Second Street from the City Tavern to Christ Church. After a brief service in the rites of the Anglican Church, Lee’s coffin was lowered into the ground in an unmarked grave in Christ Churchyard near the south wall adjoining Church Alley (Christ Church Alley).66 Lee died deeply in debt. The difficult task of managing his estate fell to one of his executors, Virginia attorney Alexander White, who skillfully paid Lee’s creditors, which included George Washington. Lee had never repaid Washington the £15 that he had borrowed from him in 1775. White also reimbursed the Congress of the Confederation the money that was advanced to Lee before he joined the Continental service. When Sidney needed a certified copy of her brother’s will so she could take possession of his English properties, she turned to Washington for assistance. Washington responded with dignity and grace, offering his condolences for “the loss of so near a relation who possess’d many great qualities” and assured her that he would do everything in his power to “procure for you an authentic copy of General Lee’s Will.” After great effort and at some expense, Washington obtained a copy of Lee’s will and sent it to Sidney in early 1784. She warmly thanked Washington for his assistance and hoped for nothing but the best for him and the newly independent United States. Sidney Lee never married and died in January 1788. She had no immediate heirs and bequeathed all of her belongings, including the properties she had inherited from Charles, to various relatives. When Lee’s will was read several weeks after his burial, his desire not to be buried “in any church, or church-yard” was discovered, but his executors made no effort to honor his request. In 1861, almost eighty years after Lee’s death, Church Alley was widened and his remains were exhumed and reinterred between the first and second windows a few feet east of the church’s [ 290 ]

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southwest door. Today, very few people who walk or drive past Christ Church on a daily basis or visit its churchyard know that George Washington’s second-in-command, his senior major general, the most experienced officer in the Continental Army, and one of America’s earliest advocates, is buried at the site. In death, as in life, Charles Lee’s wishes were thwarted and his support of liberty and his contributions to the cause of America’s independence have been, in effect, forgotten by Americans.

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Notes

Notes to the Introduction

1. Quoted in Richard M. Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1973), 200. 2. Mercy Otis Warren, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 3 vols. (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1805), 1:292. 3. John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 105. Lee’s soldiers affectionately called him “Naso.” 4. For a discussion of eighteenth-century American ideas of gentility and genteel behavior, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, and Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Caroline Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington’s Army (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Cox writes: “The distinction of gentry status had been a key social division in American life for many years, but it was increasingly important as the eighteenth century progressed. Gentility was a social division that existed between the wealthiest families and everyone else. While there was a correlation with wealth, education and manners could sometimes help an individual or family of lower economic status claim to be gentry. Members of the gentry . . . constantly policed themselves and others for the bearing, speech, dress, and manners that separated them from everything they considered coarse or awkward” (25–26). 5. John Shy writes, “To understand Lee the insights of psychology are as useful as the skills of the historian”; Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 135. 6. On Washington’s leadership qualities, see Caroline Cox, “Integrity and Leadership: George Washington,” in The Art of Command: Military Leadership from George Washington to Colin Powell, edited by Harry S. Laver and Jeffrey J. Matthews (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 11–32; Richard Brookhiser, George Washington: On Leadership (New York: Basic Books, 2009); James C. Rees, George Washington’s Leadership Lessons: What the Father of Our Country Can Teach Us about Effective [ 293 ]

Notes to the Introduction Leadership and Character (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007); Robert F. Jones, George Washington: Ordinary Man, Extraordinary Leader (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002); Bruce Chadwick, George Washington’s War: The Forging of a Revolutionary Leader and the American Presidency (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2004); Thomas Fleming, “George Washington: The General,” in Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness, edited by Walter Isaacson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 19–33; Gerald M. Carbone, Washington: Lessons in Leadership (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Matthew J. Flynn and Stephen E. Griffin, Washington & Napoleon: Leadership in the Age of Revolution (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012). 7. Four works on Lee appeared in the years between the end of the American Revolution and the Civil War: Edward Langworthy’s Memoir of Major General Lee (1792), Sir Henry Bunbury’s Memoir of Charles Lee, Major-General in the Service of the U. S. of America (1838), Jared Sparks’s Life of Charles Lee, Major-General in the Army of the Revolution (1846), and George H. Moore’s The Treason of Charles Lee, Major General, Second in Command in the American Army of the Revolution (1860). Only Sparks’s study presented a thorough and balanced assessment of Lee. Two biographies of Lee appeared during the revival of interest in the military history of the American Revolution that occurred in the 1950s: John R. Alden’s General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951) and Samuel W. Patterson’s Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958). Of these two biographies, Alden’s is the more scholarly and noteworthy. Lee’s actions at the Battle of Monmouth and his controversial and highly publicized court-martial are treated sympathetically in Theodore Thayer, The Making of a Scapegoat: Washington and Lee at Monmouth (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1976). John Shy analyzed Lee’s military and political ideas in “American Strategy: Charles Lee and the Radical Alternative,” which originally appeared in George A. Billias, George Washington’s Generals (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1964) and was later reprinted in Shy, A People Numerous and Armed. While Lee has for the most part been forgotten in the historiography of the American Revolution, he is remembered in the names of towns such as Fort Lee, New Jersey; Leetown, West Virginia; and Lee, Massachusetts. 8. George Washington to John Augustine Washington, 31 March 1776, in The Papers of George Washington, 12 vols., edited by W. W. Abbot, Philander D. Chase, and Dorothy Twohig (hereafter PGW) (Charlottesville: University of Press of Virginia, 1985–2002), 3:570. 9. John Adams to James Warren, 24 July 1775, in Warren-Adams Letters, Being Chiefly a Correspondence between John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917–1925), 1:189. 10. John Adams to Samuel Holden Parsons, 2 October 1776, in Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 4 vols., edited by L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962), 3:446. 11. Saul Cornell, “Beyond the Myth of Consensus: The Struggle to Define the Right to Bear Arms in the Early Republic,” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the [ 294 ]

Notes to the Introduction Political History of the Early American Republic, edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 255. 12. Lawrence D. Cress, “Radical Whiggery on the Role of the Military: Ideological Roots of the American Revolutionary Militia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40 ( January 1979): 43–44; Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice: 1763–1789 (1971; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983), 13; John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture: From Ancient Greece to Modern America (2003; repr. New York: Basic Books, 2008), 185; and Everett C. Dolman, The Warrior State: How Military Organization Structures Politics (New York; Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 33. See also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Considerations on the Government of Poland,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Political Writings [1772], trans. and ed. Frederick Watkins (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 237. 13. Shy, “American Strategy,” 161. 14. Michael S. Neiberg, Making Citizen Soldiers: ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 4. 15. Michael A. Bellesiles argues that despite the occasional anecdote that suggested that every American male was proficient with a firearm, there were relatively very few guns in America before the Civil War. In the colonial and revolutionary periods, many colonial officials (and later revolutionaries) bemoaned the shortage of firearms. This dearth of guns was caused, Bellesiles contended, by the scarcity of gunsmiths and the absence of gun manufactories in the colonies. These circumstances required Americans to import their guns from Europe at a great financial expense. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). 16. Samuel Adams quoted in John K. Alexander, Samuel Adams: America’s Revolutionary Politician (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 174. 17. For a copy of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, 12 June 1776, see The Papers of George Mason, 1725–1792, 3 vols., edited by Robert A. Rutland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 1:287–291. 18. Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, 117–118. 19. This strategy was named for the Roman politician and general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (280–203 BC), who implemented a series of delaying tactics against the larger Carthaginian army and its famous commander Hannibal during the Second Punic War (218–202 BC). Fabius refused to confront Hannibal’s superior forces in the open field, hoping to exhaust the Carthaginians through a war of attrition. His troops used the terrain and used hit-and-run tactics against the enemy’s foraging parties and their flanks. Fabius also used a “scorched-earth” policy to impede the efforts of the Carthaginians to sustain themselves from local food supplies. 20. Cox, “Integrity and Leadership,” 24. 21. Ibid. Unlike Lee, Washington viewed the option of taking the war into the hinterland as a last resort to stave off disaster. Historian Edward G. Lengel [295 ]

Notes to Chap ter 1 disagrees with the assessment of Washington as a Fabian strategist: “The strategy that Washington pursued after the Battle of Long Island is sometimes called Fabian. . . . Admiring historians have described Washington, like Fabius, as standing patiently on the defensive, preserving his forces, and watching for the right moment to strike. Some have even drawn comparisons between Washington and twentieth-century practitioners of guerrilla warfare, who attacked only when circumstances promised a stunning victory and defended only when critical objectives were at stake. In the interim, it is said, he limited himself to interdicting and harassing the enemy with small parties of militia or other “expendable” military assets. Yet, Washington’s reputation as a Fabian, and particularly as a guerrilla warrior, is unjustified. Despite what he sometimes said in writing, his instincts were always for seeking decisive engagements that would kill redcoats, demoralize the British in America and Europe, and speed the end of the war”; Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, Inc., 2005), 150–151. 22. Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 127. 23. Don Higginbotham, “Reflections on the War of Independence, Modern Guerrilla Warfare, and the War in Vietnam,” in Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution, edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), 8. 24. The issue of the right to bear arms was closely connected to the debate over the creation of a powerful standing army and control of the state militias under the federal system. Saul Cornell writes, “It is impossible to understand the argument between Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the meaning of the right to bear arms without noting that this issue was closely connected to the larger debate over the meaning of federalism”; Cornell, “Beyond the Myth of Consensus,” 256–257.

Notes to Chapter 1

1. “William and Thomas, twins born in 1718, a second Thomas, born in 1721, Henry, born about 1722, and Elizabeth, born in 1728, all died in childhood or youth”; John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 2. 2. Isabella’s maternal uncle was the Tory parliamentarian Sir Thomas Hanmer, who served as speaker of the House of Commons from 1714 to 1727. During his retirement, Sir Thomas began a second career as a Shakespearean scholar. See A. S. Turberville, English Men and Manners in the 18th Century (1926; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 196. 3. Chester was the site of a Roman fortress, Deva or Castra Deva, which was built in the first century AD. The fortress wall has remained. Chester’s market area, “the Rows,” is still the town’s most distinctive medieval feature. See John Stobart, “Leisure and Shopping in the Small Towns of Georgian England: A Regional Approach,” Journal of Urban History 31 (May 2005): 479–503; and Joan Thirsk, “The Fantastical Folly of Fashion: The English Stocking Knitting Industry, 1500–1700,” [ 296 ]

Notes to Chapter 1 in Thirsk, The Rural Economy of England: Collected Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1984), 241, 244, 249, 251. 4. Alden suggests that the estrangement stemmed from a dispute regarding Colonel Lee’s will in which Isabella received £1,000 in trust, the principal to go to Charles only after her death. Perhaps their uneasy relationship was rooted in the volatility of their respective personalities; Alden, General Charles Lee, 5. See also Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 8 October 1754, in The Lee Papers (hereafter cited as LP), 4 vols. (New York: New York Historical Society Collections, 1871), 1:1. 5. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 4 July 1761, LP, 1:33; Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 28 March 1772, LP, 1:110. 6. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 30 January 1776, LP, 2:266. 7. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 10 February 1761, LP, 1:31. 8. For Europe’s elite, “taking the waters” offered hygienic benefits and a chance to socialize. During the spring and autumn, spa resorts such as Bath, Epsom Wells, Buxton, Harwich, Tunbridge Wells, Scarborough, and Cheltenham in England; Bourbon, Lyons, Valois, and Vichy in France; Baden Baden in Germany; Spa in Belgium; Buda in Hungary; and Leghorn in Italy swelled with a cosmopolitan array of middle-class clientele. Many spa resorts on the continent were founded as middle-class therapeutic centers, but those in Britain tapped into the burgeoning consumer society and became big business. See Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 210; and Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 268. 9. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 30 September 1769, LP, 1:86. 10. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 27 March 1771, LP, 1:99. 11. Benjamin Franklin to Oliver Neve, n.d. [before 1769], in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 37 vols., edited by Leonard W. Labaree, William B. Willcox, and Claude A. Lopez (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–2004), 15:298 (hereafter cited as PBF). 12. [Charles Lee], Fragment of a Letter to the Public, n.d., LP, 1:149. 13. The British bluestocking circles were similar to the literary salons of Paris and were organized by female hostesses. They offered middle-class women an opportunity to exchange ideas with other women and with men and to read and critique classical literature. See Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds. Reconsidering the Bluestockings (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2003); Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Evelyn Gordon Bodek, “Salonières and Bluestockings: Educated Obsolescence and Germinating Feminism” Feminist Studies 3 (Spring 1976): 185–186. 14. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 8 October 1754, LP, 1:1; Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 June 1765, LP, 1:1–2. 15. Fanny Burney to Susanna Elizabeth Burney, 9–20 April 1780, in The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. 4, The Streatham Years, Part II, 1780–1781, edited by Betty Rizzo (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003), 37. [297 ]

Notes to Chap ter 1 16. Alden, General Charles Lee, 5. 17. R. W. Elliott, The Story of King Edward VI School, Bury St. Edmunds (Bury St. Edmunds.: Foundation Governors of the School, 1963), 55–57, 63. 18. Thomas Charles Bunbury was the son of the Rev. Sir William Bunbury. He served as a Whig MP for Suffolk from 1761 to 1784 and again from 1790 to 1812. In June 1762, he married Lady Sarah Lennox, the daughter of Charles Lennox, the second Duke of Richmond. Thomas Charles, or “Sir Charles” to his close friends and relatives, seems to have suffered from the same maladies and mood swings as his first cousin. Charles Davers was the son of Sir Jermyn Davers, an MP for Bury St. Edmunds from 1722 to 1743. The younger Davers followed in his father’s footsteps, serving in the House of Commons as a Whig MP for Weymouth. Lee often referred to Davers as “my best friend.” William Butler was from Flintshire and served with Lee in the British army. 19. Elliott, Story of King Edward VI School, 32, 147–148, 159–177. 20. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 15 August 1782, LP, 4:26. In a letter to Patrick Henry, Lee admitted that he regretted “not being thrown into the world in the glamorous third or fourth century of the Romans.” See Charles Lee to Patrick Henry, 29 July 1776, LP, 2:177. 21. Carl J. Richard, Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 15. 22. Charles Lee to Miss [Mary] Robinson, 15 December 1775, LP, 1:231. 23. The Enlightenment championed human reason and understanding; the importance of liberty; an emphasis on virtue; a reliance on method and experimentation; support for education; a trust in natural law as the basis of all activities in society and in the physical world; a belief in progress; a desire that human affairs be guided by rationalism rather than religious faith, superstition, and revelation; and a corresponding skepticism that questioned the validity of customs and traditions, myths, constituted authority, and dogma. 24. Alden, General Charles Lee, 1. 25. [Charles Lee], A Sketch of a Plan for the Formation of a Military Colony, 1779, LP, 3:325. 26. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 26 September, 1779, LP, 3:373–374. 27. The Grand Tour, which was undertaken by many young men of the English gentry, included visits to Paris, France; Brussels, Belgium; Geneva, Lausanne, and Basel in Switzerland; Vienna, Austria; Barcelona, Spain; Berlin and Munich in Germany; Amsterdam in the Netherlands; and Turin, Padua, Pisa, Bologna, Rome, and Venice, Italy. 28. Evelyn Lord, The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), xxii–xxvi. 29. Charles Lee to unknown recipient, 1771, LP, 1:97. 30. Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 21; J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 215–310. Colin Bonwick [ 298 ]

Notes to Chapter 1 writes that “commonwealth ideology comprised not a logically integrated system but an amalgam of moral principles and political ideals that gave philosophical purpose to the state and provided a set of normative values through which fundamental beliefs could be articulated in specific situations”; Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 14. 31. Lawrence D. Cress, “Radical Whiggery on the Role of the Military: Ideological Roots of the American Revolutionary Militia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 40 ( January 1979): 52. 32. Charles Lee to Miss [Mary] Robinson, 15 December 1775, LP, 1:230; [Lee], “An Account of a Conversation, Chiefly Relative to the Army,” n.d., LP, 4:99. 33. Sylvia R. Frey, The British Soldier in America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 118; Alden, General Charles Lee, 4. The cost to purchase a lieutenant’s rank (either First Lieutenant or an ensigncy) was about £500, for a captaincy it was £1,500, for a major it was £2,600, and for a colonelcy (either full colonel or a lieutenant-colonel) it was between £3,500 and £4,500. These prices were for commissions in an infantry regiment. See also David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 34; Willard M. Wallace, Appeal to Arms: A Military History of the American Revolution (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1951), 10; Christopher M. Ward, The War of the Revolution, 2 vols. (New York: MacMillan, 1952), 1:25; and Ira D. Gruber, Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 7. 34. Alden, General Charles Lee, 7. 35. John R. Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 343; and Michael S. Neiberg, Making Citizen Soldiers: ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 13–14. The British army also became a major source of royal patronage. 36. Stephen Conway, War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1; Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 11. 37. Howard H. Peckham, The War for Independence: A Military History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 12–13. See also Wallace, Appeal to Arms, 8–11; Ward, The War of the Revolution, 1:26–27; and Daniel Marston, The American Revolution, 1774–1783 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002). British infantry regiments numbered 475 officers and men and were commanded by a colonel or by a lieutenant-colonel. By 1775, 8,000 British troops were garrisoned in North America. 38. Stuart Reid, Redcoat Officer, 1740–1815 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002), 10–11. See also J. A. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Stephen Conway writes that contrary to the generally accepted view that the eighteenth-century British officer corps was drawn largely from the very top of society, “officers came from a bewildering variety of backgrounds”; Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 32. [299 ]

Notes to Chap ter 1 39. Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence, 32; and Shy, Toward Lexington, 343. Members of the Royal Artillery were not permitted to purchase officers’ commissions. 40. Houlding, Fit for Service, 100–103; Ward, The War of the Revolution, 1:25; Frey, The British Soldier in America, 66; Peckham, The War for Independence, 13; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 34; Mark Urban, Fusiliers: The Saga of a British Redcoat Regiment in the American Revolution (New York: Walker & Company, 2007), 11; Armstrong Starkey, War in the Age of Enlightenment, 1700–1789 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003), 77; and Alan J. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline: Officership and Administration in the British Army, 1714–63 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 40–41. The competition for preferment was more intense during peacetime, when the military was usually reduced. 41. Reid, Redcoat Officer, 49–50, quote on 49. See also Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline, chapter 4; Houlding, Fit for Service, 102–115; and Richard H. Kohn, “American Generals of the Revolution: Subordination and Restraint,” in Reconsiderations on the Revolutionary War: Selected Essays, edited by Don Higginbotham (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978), 107. Half-pay essentially acted as a retaining fee. 42. Wallace, Appeal to Arms, 6–7; and Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence, 34. See also Stuart Reid, British Redcoat, 1740–93 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1996), 3; and Frey, The British Soldier in America, chapter 1, quote on 13. Stephen Brumwell takes a more traditional view of the British army’s rank-and-file. He writes, “In Georgian Britain soldiering in the ranks was deemed a low-caste occupation: besides being unpopular, soldiers were also poor”; Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57. Some recruits sought to escape the overcrowded conditions in some regions of Britain. For this viewpoint, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 41–42. 43. Fischer writes: “More than a few felons were given a free choice between prison and the army, or occasionally (and illegally) between a rope and a red coat”; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 38. See also Reid, British Redcoat, 5. Conway notes that “convicted and putative offenders were certainly enlisted: legal records show that conditional royal pardons were employed to offer criminals the choice of service in the army, and that others were given the option by judges and magistrates; the army’s muster rolls confirm that some of these offenders arrived in the ranks”; Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence, 33. The number of recruits who joined the British army to avoid legal responsibilities to pregnant women was not great. 44. Reid, British Redcoat, 3–5. 45. Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence, 12; Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 49–50; Frey, The British Soldier in America, 4–5, 16–17; and Reid, British Redcoat, 5. Certain groups of men, in theory, were not eligible for service in the British army: Catholics, indentured servants, apprentices, members of the militia, [ 300 ]

Notes to Chapter 2 the disabled, and the criminally insane. Recruits had to be at least 5 feet 6 inches tall, of sound mind and body, and be prepared to swear before a judge that they were Protestant and were not inflicted with any physical ailment that would hamper their service. Caroline Cox writes that “the British were mostly able to meet the country’s manpower needs through . . . recruiting parties and did not have to turn to a draft”; Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington’s Army (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 6. 46. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 42, 53; and Ward, The War of the Revolution, 1:29. Recruits were drilled in the “Prussian step” made popular by the armies of Frederick the Great until they could do it without thinking. They were trained to march in time to the beat of the drum. British soldiers could move together in close order with precision under any conditions, whether on a parade ground or in battle. Recruits were introduced to weapons training, which included firing flintlock smooth-bore muskets in volleys and in formation, first in a single line, then in two ranks, and finally in three. British soldiers became experts at firing and reloading; two or three shots a minute was deemed a good rate of fire. They were also taught the uses of the bayonet and the linear movements popular with eighteenth-century European armies. Desertion and mutiny were punishable by death. 47. Flogging was common in the British army. The men of the 44th Regiment were nicknamed the “steel-backs” for the frequent and heavy floggings they endured. See Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 40, 45; and Frey, The British Soldier in America, 97. Methods for disciplining soldiers were outlined in the British Articles of War, a set of parliamentary laws designed to regulate and govern the army, and in popular training manuals such as A System for the Compleat Interior Management and Oeconomy of a Battalion of Infantry (Dublin: Boulter Grierson, 1768) and A New System of Military Discipline, Founded upon Principle by a General Officer (London: Printed for J. Almon, 1773). The former was attributed to Captain Bennet Cuthbertson, while the latter, although published anonymously, has been linked to Richard Lambart, the sixth Earl of Cavan. By 1775, Major General Humphrey Bland’s A Treatise of Military Discipline in Which Is Laid Down and Explained the Duty of the Officer and Soldier Thro’ the Several Branches of the Service (London: R. Baldwin, 1762) had been officially adopted as the army’s training manual.

Notes to Chapter 2

1. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 8 October 1754, LP, 1:1. 2. Both regiments were undersized at the time they were called up for active service in America. Stephen Brumwell writes, “When ordered upon American service in October 1754, both [regiments] were on the weak ‘Irish’ establishment of 310 rank and file. Before embarking from Cork they were to be raised to 520 each by drafts of 420 men drawn from regiments in Great Britain and Ireland. In America, both . . . were to be further augmented to 730 by local recruiting”; Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12. [301 ]

Notes to Chap ter 2 3. For Braddock’s military career, see Paul E. Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977); Lee McCardell, Ill-Starred General: Braddock of the Coldstream Guards (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958); and Alan Axelrod, Blooding at Great Meadows: Young George Washington and the Battle That Shaped the Man (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2007), 247–248. Fred Anderson writes, “Braddock had been the duke of Cumberland’s choice to assume the supreme command in North America not because he was an able tactician or even a particularly experienced battlefield leader, but because he was a noted administrator and disciplinarian who was also politically reliable”; Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 86. 4. Gregory Evans Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 44. 5. Walter R. Borneman, The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), 42; Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela, 7; and Axelrod, Blooding at Great Meadows, 247. 6. For a detailed study of Braddock’s expedition against Fort Duquesne in 1755, see Kopperman, Braddock at the Monongahela. See also Ruth Sheppard, ed., Empires Collide: The French and Indian War, 1754–63 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2006), 67–68. 7. Dowd, War under Heaven, 45. 8. Washington quoted in Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), 60. See also Fred Anderson, ed., George Washington Remembers: Reflections on the French and Indian War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 19. 9. Washington quoted in Anderson, George Washington Remembers, 19. 10. “Many attempts were made to dislodge the enemy from an eminence on the Right but they all proved eneffectual; and fatal to the Officers who by great exertions and good examples endeavourd to accomplish it. In one of these the Genl [Braddock] recd the Wd of which he died; but previous to it, had several horses killed & disabled under him. . . . G.W. remained the sole aid through the day, to the Genl . . . Sir Peter Halket (secd in Command) being early killed—Lieutt. Colo. Burton & Sir Jno. St Clair (who had the Rank of Lt Colo. in the Army) being badly wounded—Lieutt Colo. Gage (afterwards Genl Gage) having recd a contusion—No person knowing in the disordered State . . . who the Surviving Senr Officer was & the Troops by degrees going off in confusion. . . . G.W. placed the Genl in a small covered Cart, which carried some of his most essential equipage, and in the best order he could, with the last Troops (who only contind to be fired at) brought him over the first ford of the Monongahela; where they formed in the best order circumstances would admit on a piece of rising ground; after wch, by the Genls order, he rode forward to halt those which had been earlier in retreat.” Washington in Anderson, George Washington Remembers, 19–20. Washington valiantly tried to rally the British forces, but his efforts were for naught. [ 302 ]

Notes to Chapter 2 11. Borneman, The French and Indian War, 48–55. The British suffered over 900 casualties, while the French and their Indian allies suffered only twenty-three killed and sixteen wounded. 12. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 June 1756, LP, 1:3. Peter Silver notes that the “Indians’ propensity for mutilating their dead or dying opponents . . . [and the] dread of posthumous abuse (especially of decaying visibly, or becoming food for animals) accounted for an enormous part of the fear” that provincial and regular British troops felt when confronted by an Indian attack; Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 58–59. 13. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 June 1756, LP, 1:3. 14. Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 1675–1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 27. 15. James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 262. 16. Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 27. 17. [Charles Lee], “An Essay on the Coup d’oeil,” n.d., LP, 4:87. See also Wayne E. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America: Firearms, Forts, and Polities,” in Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World, edited by Wayne E. Lee (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 60; Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 27. Matthew C. Ward argues that the conscious use of psychological warfare was a new military practice for the Native Americans. He writes, “It was the British troops’ fear of the Indians that won the battle for the French”; Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania 1754–1765 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 7–8. Silver notes that “the experience of Indian war, in this first taste of it during the Seven Years’ War and again in the Revolution, was the experience of almost unlimited fear”; Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 40. 18. John Shy writes, “The colonial militia, in particular, represents the happy uniqueness of America, where Englishmen in the seventeenth century revived this relic of the middle ages just as, in Europe, it was sinking beneath the military superiority of the politically dangerous mercenary army . . . the early American militia was a more complicated—and more interesting—institution, that it varied from province to province, that it changed through time as the military demands placed upon it changed, and that these variations and changes are of some historical importance”; Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 31. 19. For general studies of the militia see Saul Cornell, A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13; Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), chapter 1; Charles P. Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 8–17; and James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender, A Respectable Army: The Military [303 ]

Notes to Chap ter 2 Origins of the Republic, 1763–1789 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2006). For studies of individual colonial militias, see Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976); Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Steven J. Rosswurm, Arms, Country, and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and the “Lower Sort” during the American Revolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); and Gregory T. Knouff, The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), chapter 2. See also Brian McAllister Linn, The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 68–69; David H. Overy and Kevin M. Gannon, “The Colonial Wars and the American Revolution,” in The American Military Tradition from Colonial Times to the Present, edited by John M. Carroll and Colin F. Baxter (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 3–4; and John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 21. Brumwell writes, “The Indians were expert guerrilla fighters; [and] many of the white men . . . were scarcely less skilled in waging the savage war of the backwoods”; Brumwell, Redcoats, 203. 20. For this dichotomy, see Grenier, The First Way of War, 19; and Brumwell, Redcoats, 183. 21. Sheppard, Empires Collide, 119–121; John L. Tierney Jr., Chasing Ghosts: Unconventional Warfare in American History (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006), 23–25; Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004), 99–101; and Grenier, The First Way of War, 134. 22. For an excellent study of the Ohio frontier during the French and Indian War, see Ward, Breaking the Backcountry. 23. James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 36; and Ward, Breaking the Backcountry, 2. 24. The British troops were quartered in barracks in the Northern Liberties and Southwark sections of the city. The 44th Regiment was assigned to the Southwark barracks. See John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, in the Olden Time, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Elijah Thomas, 1857), 1:329; Billy G. Smith, The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 8–10; and Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 110. 25. Billy G. Smith, ed., Life in Early Philadelphia: Documents from the Revolutionary and Early National Periods (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 5–10. See also Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the [ 304 ]

Notes to Chapter 2 Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America, 1625–1742 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6; and Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 65–68. For an excellent discussion of the lives of enslaved Africans and African Americans in colonial Philadelphia, see Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), chapter 1, quote on 9. Nash notes that by the 1740s about 15 percent of Philadelphia’s laborers were enslaved Africans. By the 1760s, this statistic had increased to 20 percent. Philadelphia had a visible and growing free African American community whose members could own property under Pennsylvania law. This community had its own churches, businesses, and support networks. 26. Smith, ed., Life in Early Philadelphia, 5–10. See also Nash, Forging Freedom, 11, 18; and Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 48. Billy G. Smith described Philadelphia as “the Athens of America”; Life in Early Philadelphia, 3. 27. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 June 1756, LP, 1:3. 28. Richard Godbeer writes, “sexual surveillance and effective stewardship by relatives and neighbors was much less visible in a bustling seaport than in smaller communities. . . . There was comparatively little pressure upon the city’s unmarried inhabitants to think of sexual involvement as a component of courtship. . . . Meanwhile, husbands and wives inclined to cheat on their spouses found ample opportunity to do so”; Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 300–301. 29. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble, 112. 30. Ibid., 104–112. See also Karin A. Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 142; Smith, Life in Early Philadelphia, 10; and Smith, The “Lower Sort,” 22; Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 317; and Joseph J. Kelley, Life and Times in Colonial Philadelphia (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1973), 182. 31. Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, 301; and Lyons, Sex among the Rabble, 112–114. While there were places in Philadelphia that sold contraceptives, residents as well as the British troops quartered in the city were either unaware of these places, could not afford contraceptive devices, or simply did not care. 32. For the colonial history of Albany, see Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany: 1630–1710: The Dutch and English Experiences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652–1664 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Jaap Jacobs, The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, [305 ]

Notes to Chap ter 2 NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); and Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). See also Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 17. 33. Fred Anderson, The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War (New York: Viking, 2005), 57–60. See also Robert C. Newbold, The Albany Congress and Plan of Union of 1754 (New York: Vantage Press, 1955). Shannon writes, “The Indians had retained (or invented) their own record of what happened at Albany in 1754, and it did not address issues of colonial taxation or union. Rather, their narrative of the Albany Congress concerned an alliance known as the Covenant Chain, which maintained peace and trade between the British colonies, the Six Iroquois Nations, and other Indians associated with their confederacy”; Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire, 6. For Franklin’s role at the Albany Congress, see Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 82–92; Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 158–162; H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Random House, 2010), 232–240; and Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 72–78. 34. Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755–1763 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 82. 35. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 June 1756, LP, 1:3. 36. Ibid. 37. Fintan O’Toole, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 321–322; and James T. Flexner, Mohawk Baronet: A Biography of Sir William Johnson (New York: Harper, 1959), 343–344. The name of Johnson’s German wife was Catharine Weisenberg. She bore him three children. After her death, Johnson began a common-law relationship with Mary “Molly” Brant, the daughter of a prominent Mohawk chief from the Wolf clan and the sister of Joseph Brant, a popular Mohawk leader during the American Revolution. Molly bore Johnson eight children. 38. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 June 1756, LP, 1:3–4. 39. Troy O. Bickham, Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), chap. 2. 40. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 June 1756, Lee Papers, 1:3–4. 41. Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 66–70; and Charles Scruggs, “La Hontan: Precursor of the Enlightenment and the Myth of the Noble Savage,” The Language Quarterly 19 (Spring– Summer, 1981): 23–25, 31. Rousseau made this argument in his treatise Discourse on Inequality, or the Second Discourse (1755), and in The Social Contract (1762). See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, edited by Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 115–116. Many [ 306 ]

Notes to Chapter 3 English translations of Rousseau’s writings existed in the British press. See Bickham, Savages within the Empire, 93. 42. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 June 1756, LP, 1:4. 43. Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America, 177. 44. Charles told Sidney that “I have the honour to be adopted by the Mohocks [sic] into the Tribe of the bear under the name of Ounewaterika, which signifies boiling water, or one whose spirits are never asleep”; Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 June 1756, LP, 1:4–5. The Central Council of the Iroquois League was also known as the Great Council. 45. Ibid., 5. 46. Michael P. Morris, The Bringing of Wonder: Trade and the Indians of the Southeast, 1700–1783 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 27. 47. Alden, General Charles Lee, 9. 48. Anderson, Crucible of War, 208. 49. Alden, General Charles Lee, 10; Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 29; and William Smith Jr., The History of the Late Province of New-York, 2 vols., edited by Michael Kammen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 2:317. 50. Brumwell, Redcoats, 22.

Notes to Chapter 3

1. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 June 1756, LP, 1:6. 2. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:9. 3. Major Robert Rogers was the author of Rogers’ Rules of Ranging, the clearest and most systematic explanation of irregular warfare in America. See John F. Ross, War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier (New York: Bantam Books, 2009); Max Boot, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), chapter 13; John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); John L. Tierney Jr., Chasing Ghosts: Unconventional Warfare in American History (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006), 23–25; and Gary Zaboly, American Colonial Ranger: The Northern Colonies, 1724–64 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2004). 4. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1: 9. 5. René Chartrand, Ticonderoga, 1758: Montcalm’s Victory against All Odds (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2000), 40–41; William R. Nester, The Epic Battles for Ticonderoga, 1758 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 128–132; and Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 241. 6. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:10. 7. Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004), 123. 8. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:10. [307 ]

Notes to Chap ter 3 9. Ibid. For the admiration that many British officers and soldiers had for Howe, see Robert Rogers, Journals of Major Robert Rogers (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1966), 114. 10. Anderson, Crucible of War, 241; and Chartrand, Ticonderoga, 1758, 41, 44–45. 11. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:10. 12. Ibid., 11. See also Chartrand, Ticonderoga, 1758, 45; and William F. Fowler Jr., Empires at War: The French and Indian War and the Struggle for North America, 1754–1763 (New York: Walker & Company, 2005), 148. 13. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:10. 14. Chartrand, Ticonderoga, 46; Anderson, Crucible of War, 241; and Fowler, Empires at War, 148. 15. Anderson, Crucible of War, 241. 16. Ibid., 242. See also Fred Anderson, The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War (New York: Viking, 2005), 135; and Chartrand, Ticonderoga, 48, 53–56. These small-bore cannon were called “wall pieces.” 17. Anderson, Crucible of War, 242. 18. Ibid., 242–243. Lieutenant Matthew Clerk was killed in the assault against Fort Carillon. René Chartrand writes that “although he [Clerk] was later blamed by Abercromby for providing bad intelligence which led to the disastrous attack (and has been repeatedly condemned by countless historians since), Clerk was far from the only officer to blame”; Chartrand, Ticonderoga, 19. 19. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:12. See also Anderson, Crucible of War, 242–243. 20. Chartrand, Ticonderoga, 59; and Walter R. Borneman, The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), 134. 21. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:13. 22. Charles Lee to Thomas Gage, 1774, LP, 1:133. 23. Anderson, Crucible of War, 243. 24. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:12. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 7. See also John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 10, 13; and Anderson, The War That Made America, 137–138. 27. Anderson, Crucible of War, 246. 28. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:14. 29. Anderson, Crucible of War, 246–248. 30. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:7–8, 13. 31. Ibid., 14. 32. Ibid., 7, 14. 33. Anderson, Crucible of War, 265. See also William Pitt to the Governors in America, 18 September 1758, in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, 15 vols., edited by E. B. O’Callaghan (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1853–1887), 7:345–346; and William R. Nester, The Great Frontier War: [ 308 ]

Notes to Chapter 3 Britain, France, and the Imperial Struggle for North America, 1607–1755 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000), 148. 34. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 7 December 1758, LP, 1:18. 35. Anderson, Crucible of War, chapters 25–27; and Ruth Sheppard, ed., Empires Collide: The French and Indian War, 1754–63 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2006), 178, 182. 36. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 September 1758, LP, 1:7–8. 37. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 7 December 1758, LP, 1:18. The fort was renamed Fort Pittsborough, in honor of William Pitt, and later shortened to Fort Pitt. Today, it is the city of Pittsburgh. 38. Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Viking, 2008), 136. 39. Anderson, The War That Made America, 179–180; Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy, 159; and James T. Flexner, Mohawk Baronet: A Biography of Sir William Johnson (New York: Harper, 1959), 199. For the commercial importance of Fort Niagara, see Walter S. Dunn Jr., Opening New Markets: The British Army and the Old Northwest (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002), 53. 40. Anderson, Crucible of War, 331; and Milton W. Hamilton, Sir William Johnson, Colonial American, 1715–1763 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1976), 243. 41. Flexner, Mohawk Baronet, 202; and Fintan O’Toole, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 202–203. 42. Anderson, Crucible of War, 333–334. 43. Ibid. 44. Charles Lee to Sir William Bunbury, 9 August 1759, LP, 1:21. 45. Anderson, Crucible of War, 336–337; Fowler, Empires at War, 195–196; Borneman, The French and Indian War, 195–198; Flexner, Mohawk Baronet, 202–207; and O’Toole, White Savage, 205–206. 46. Charles Lee to Sir William Bunbury, 9 August 1759, LP, 1:21. 47. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 30 July 1759, LP, 1:19. 48. Charles Lee to Sir William Bunbury, 9 August 1759, LP, 1:21. 49. Anderson, Crucible of War, 337. 50. O’Toole, White Savage, 206. 51. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 30 July 1759, LP, 1:19. 52. Charles Lee to Sir William Bunbury, 9 August 1759, LP, 1:21–22. 53. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 30 July 1759, LP, 1:19–20. 54. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 30 July 1759, LP, 1:19. 55. Charles Lee to Sir William Bunbury, 9 August 1759, LP, 1:20–21. 56. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 1 March 1760, LP, 1:26. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 27. 59. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, n.d., LP, 4:11. See also Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2010), 84–85; and Charles Rappleye, Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution [309 ]

Notes to Chap ter 3 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), chapter 1. In 1743, Franks married Margaret Evans, who was from a prominent Anglican family. 60. Alden, General Charles Lee, 13. 61. Joanne B. Freeman notes that the code of sensibility “enforced gentlemanly standards of behavior” that included the belief that any true gentleman “avoided crossing lines but knew how to behave if lines were crossed”; Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 170. 62. Alden, General Charles Lee, 13. 63. Anderson, Crucible of War, 387–409; Fowler, Empires at War, 236; and Borneman, The French and Indian War, 247–249. 64. Sir William Bunbury to Charles Lee, 28 November 1759, LP, 1:25. 65. Ibid. 66. Earl of Pembroke to Charles Lee, 26 November 1759, LP, 1:23. 67. Alden, General Charles Lee, 15. See also Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 16 May, 1760, LP, 1:30. 68. Patterson, Knight Errant, 35. Lee lodged at the Smyrna Coffee House in London’s posh Pall Mall district. 69. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, 75–76, 122–123. For a general overview of the controversy, see Paul Mapp, “British Culture and the Changing Character of the MidEighteenth Century British Empire,” in Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years’ War in North America, edited by Warren R. Hofstra (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 44–50. 70. Charles Lee, The Importance of Canada Considered in Two Letters to a Noble Lord (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1761), 3. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 17. 71. Gregory Evans Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations and the British Empire (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 70; Matthew C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania 1754–1765 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 208; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapter 6; and Gail D. MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 101. 72. Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147–148; White, The Middle Ground, 258; William R. Nester, The Great Frontier War: Britain, France, and the Imperial Struggle for North America, 1607–1755 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000), 159; and MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements, 189. 73. John Hanson to Sir William Johnson, 8 February 1764, in The Papers of Sir William Johnson, 13 vols., edited by Milton W. Hamilton (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921), 4:320. 74. Alden, General Charles Lee, 23–24; and White, The Middle Ground, 290. [ 310 ]

Notes to Chapter 4 75. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 18 February 1761, LP, 1:30; to Sidney Lee, 1760–1761, LP, 1:32. 76. Alden, General Charles Lee, 20. 77. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 4 July 1761, LP, 1:33. 78. Richard Middleton, The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the Seven Years’ War, 1757–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 202. 79. Franz A. J. Szabo, The Seven Years’ War in Europe, 1756–1763 (London: Pearson Longman, 2008), 406; Richard J. Hargrove Jr., General John Burgoyne (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), 36; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 20–21. 80. Anderson, Crucible of War, 497; Szabo, The Seven Years’ War in Europe, 407; Alden, General Charles Lee, 21; Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Combined Strategy, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 2:297, 313, 317, 322; Jeremy Black, “The British Expeditionary Force to Portugal in 1762,” British Historical Society of Portugal Annual Report and Review 16 (1989): 66–75; and H. E. S. Fisher, The Portugal Trade: A Study of Anglo-Portuguese Commerce (London: Methuen, 1971). 81. Szabo, The Seven Years’ War in Europe, 406. 82. Charles Lee quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 22. 83. Szabo, The Seven Years’ War in Europe, 407; and Hargrove, General John Burgoyne, 37. 84. Alden, General Charles Lee, 22. See also Hargrove, General John Burgoyne, 38. 85. Alden, General Charles Lee, 22. See also Hargrove, General John Burgoyne, 39–40. 86. Alden, General Charles Lee, 22–23. 87. Ibid, 23. 88. Ibid, 24. 89. Alexander Carlyle, The Autobiography of the Reverend Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, Containing Memorials of the Men and Events of His Time, edited by John Hill Burton (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), 367–368. 90. Ibid., 368. 91. Charles Lee to Sir William Johnson, 25 July 1764, LP, 1:34. 92. Alden, General Charles Lee, 26. 93. Charles Lee to Sir William Bunbury, 7 December 1764, LP, 1:36.

Notes to Chapter 4

1. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Bunbury, 7 December 1764, LP, 1:36. 2. Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 31. 3. Richard Butterwick, Poland’s Last King and English Culture, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, 1732–1798 (London: Clarendon Press, 1998), 129–130. See also Charles Lee to Sir Charles Yorke, 27 May 1765, LP, 4:218; and John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 26. 4. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 3 April 1765, LP, 1:37. [311 ]

Notes to Chap ter 4 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. Before he left Brunswick, Lee obtained strong letters of recommendation from Prince Charles William Ferdinand to Frederick II and King Stanislaus. 7. Alden, General Charles Lee, 27; and Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 39–40. 8. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 3 April 1765, LP, 1:37. 9. Ibid., 37–38. Like his uncle, Frederick William was very interested in Lee’s views regarding America. 10. Alfred John Wrobel, “The American Revolution and the Poland of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1967), 1–3. 11. On Polish serfdom, see M. L. Bush, Servitude in Modern Times (Cambridge: WileyBlackwell, 2000), 132–134; Norman Davies, God’s Playground, A History of Poland: The Origins to 1795 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 279–281; and Jerzy Lukowski, Liberty’s Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697–1795 (London: Routledge, 1991), 12–13, 35–61. 12. Wrobel, “The American Revolution and the Poland of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski,” 3; and Gary B. Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and A Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 25. 13. Jerzy Lukowski, Liberty’s Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697–1795 (London: Rutledge, 1991), 13–18; Wrobel, “The American Revolution and the Poland of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski,” 3–6; and Nash and Hodges, Friends of Liberty, 25–26. 14. Butterwick, Poland’s Last King, 2, 158–159. 15. For Stanislaus’s early education and his service as secretary to Sir Charles HanburyWilliams see ibid., chapters 3–6. 16. Virginia Rounding, Catherine the Great: Love, Sex, and Power (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006), chapter 5; Simon Dixon, Catherine the Great (New York: Ecco, 2009), 93–94, 100, 103–105, 185–186; and Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (New York: Random House, 2012), 182–186, 202–205. Catherine’s daughter with Stanislaus, who was named Anna, survived only fifteen months. 17. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 3 April 1765, LP, 1:38; Charles Lee to the Earl of Charlemont, 1 June 1765, LP, 1:40. See also James J. Schaffer, “The Whole Duty of Man: Charles Lee and the Politics of Reputation, Masculinity, and Identity during the Revolutionary War, 1755–1783” (PhD diss., University of Toledo, 2006), 85. 18. Daniel Stone, The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), chapter 18. See also Charles Lee to the Earl of Charlemont, 1 June 1765, LP, 1:39; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 40. 19. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 3 April 1765, LP, 1:38; Charles Lee to Sir Charles Yorke, 27 May 1776, LP, 1:218. See also Butterwick, Poland’s Last King, 129–130. [ 312 ]

Notes to Chapter 4 20. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 3 April 1765, LP, 1:38. 21. Ibid. 22. Charles Lee to the Earl of Charlemont, 1 June 1765, LP, 1:41. 23. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 3 April 1765, LP, 1:38; Charles Lee to Sir Charles Yorke, 27 May 1765, LP, 4:219. 24. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 83, 85; and Wrobel, “The American Revolution and the Poland of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski,” 24–25. 25. Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 144–146. See also Wrobel, “The American Revolution and the Poland of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski,” 6. 26. Charles Lee to the Earl of Charlemont, 1 June 1765, LP, 1:40. 27. Ibid. See also Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 87–88. 28. Charles Lee to the Earl of Charlemont, 1 June 1765, LP, 1:41. Lee frequently defended the Puritan revolutionaries who beheaded England’s King Charles I in 1649. 29. Ibid. See also Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 86; and Butterwick, Poland’s Last King, 164. 30. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 3 April 1765, LP, 1:39. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 27; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 40. 31. Charles Lee, “A Political Essay,” n.d., LP, 4:107. Lee’s definition of liberty owed much to John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 32. Ibid., 107–108. 33. Charles Lee to the Earl of Charlemont, 1 June 1765, LP, 1:40. 34. Ibid., 41. 35. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), chapter 2; and Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), chapter 1. 36. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 5–6; and Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 63. 37. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 1 March 1766, LP, 1:43. 38. Alden, General Charles Lee, 27; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 41. See also Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 1 March 1766, LP, 1:42. 39. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 1 March 1766, LP, 1:42. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 42–43. 42. Ibid, 43. In the eighteenth century, English Tories supported the monarchy and the Anglican Church and opposed most political reforms. 43. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 28 May 1766, LP, 1:45. 44. The Fatih Camii was built by Sultan Mehmet II over the site of the Church of the Holy Apostles. See Jason Goodwin, Lords of the Horizon: A History of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Picador, 1998), 80. [313 ]

Notes to Chap ter 4 45. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 28 May 1766, LP, 1:45. 46. Ibid, 44–45. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. See also Butterwick, Poland’s Last King, 130–131. 49. London’s radical political circles included Dr. Richard Price, James Burgh, Joseph Priestley, David Hartley, John Horne Tooke, Thomas Hollis, James Townshend, John Cartwright, and Catherine Macaulay and her brother John Sawbridge. 50. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 6 February 1767, LP, 1:51. Lee reminded George III that three years earlier he had promised to secure a promotion for him to a permanent rank. 51. Sir Thomas Wroughton to Charles Lee, 29 April 1767, LP, 1:52. 52. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 6 February 1767, LP, 1:51; Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 12 May 1767, LP, 1:55. 53. Sir Thomas Wroughton to Charles Lee, 29 April 1767, LP, 1:52–53. 54. Ibid., 53. 55. At the same time that it repealed the stamp tax, Parliament issued the Declaratory Act, which asserted its absolute right to legislate and to tax the colonies. The quote is from Charles Lee to King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, 20 October 1767, LP, 1:57–58. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 59. See also Charles Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 60. 58. Charles Lee to Earl Percy, n.d., LP, 1:171. 59. For Wilkes’s background and the Wilkes controversy, see Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 1, 8, 12–16, 18, 27, 32–35, 45–46, 57–58, 68, 72; William B. Willcox and Walter L. Arnstein, The Age of Aristocracy, 1688–1830, 5th ed. (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1988), 149; Ian R. Christie, Wars and Revolutions: Britain 1760–1815 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 63–64; Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend of Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1–3, 8–11, 59; and Evelyn Lord, The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 132–140. 60. George Rudé, Hanoverian London, 1714–1808 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 164–167; Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 99–100, 165–166, 227, 233, 247, 252–254; Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 357; Christie, Wars and Revolutions, 64, 75–76; and Willcox and Arnstein, The Age of Aristocracy, 149–151. An officer and two soldiers were charged with murder in the St. George’s Fields “massacre,” but they were acquitted. 61. Lee, “A Political Essay,” LP, 4:104. 62. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 21 December 1768, LP, 1:70. 63. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 15 August 1782, LP, 4:26. [ 314 ]

Notes to Chapter 5 64. Charles Lee to Lady Blake, 2 May 1769, LP, 1:74. Annabella Bunbury Blake was the daughter of Lee’s uncle, Rev. Sir William Bunbury, and his wife, Eleanor Graham. In 1765, she became Lady Blake when she married Sir Patrick Blake, the first Baron of Langham. After her divorce from him in 1773, she married George Boscawen. 65. Ibid., 74–75. 66. Grant of Lands in East Florida, 3 December 1766, LP, 46–47. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 31; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 43. 67. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 24 December 1769, LP, 1:92. See also J. M. Bumsted, “1763–1783: Resettlement and Rebellion,” in The Atlantic Region to Confederation: A History, edited by Phillip Alfred Buckner and John G. Reid (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 157–159, 165; and Brendan O’Grady, Exiles and Islanders: The Irish Settlers of Prince Edward Island (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 7, 14–15. Walter Patterson, one of Lee’s friends from the army, was the first governor of St. John’s Island. He helped Lee develop his lands on the island. 68. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 21 December 1768, LP, 1:70; Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, [ July 1769], LP, 1:85. 69. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 29 November 1768, LP, 1:68. 70. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 21 December 1768, LP, 1:69–70. 71. Ibid., 69. 72. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 12 February 1769, LP, 1:71. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 34. 73. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 12 February 1769, LP, 1:71. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 34–35; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 44. 74. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 12 February 1769, LP, 1:71.

Notes to Chapter 5

1. Simon Dixon, Catherine the Great (New York: Ecco, 2009), 183–184. 2. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, [1769 July], LP, 1:84. For a description of Repnin’s personality and a discussion of his tactics, see Adam Zamoyski, The Last King of Poland (London: Phoenix Giant, 1992), 127, 144, 149. 3. Zamoyski, The Last King of Poland, 151. 4. The creation of confederations, which were military associations, was a custom the Polish nobility practiced during periods of crisis. Some confederations were formed to keep order, some to assist the king in carrying out his duties, and others to oppose him. 5. Sir Thomas Wroughton to Charles Lee, 29 April 1767, LP, 1:53. See also Zamoyski, The Last King of Poland, 153–154; and Richard Butterwick, Poland’s Last King and English Culture: Stanislaw August Poniatowski, 1732–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 169. The two confederations of dissenters were established under the protection of Russian troops at Torun in Poland and at Sluck in Lithuania. 6. Zamoyski, The Last King of Poland, 155, 157–158, 167, 169. Butterwick writes, “The confederacy engulfed the entire Commonwealth in anarchy for over four years, and [315 ]

Notes to Chap ter 5 provoked war between Russia and Turkey, setting off an international chain reaction that culminated in the First Partition of Poland”; Butterwick, Poland’s Last King, 169. 7. Alfred John Wrobel, “The American Revolution and the Poland of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1967), 7, 9; Butterwick, Poland’s Last King, 170; and Zamoyski, The Last King of Poland, 168–169, 174–175. The Bar Confederation was led by Count Jozef Pulaski and his son Kazimierz Pulaski, the future Continental Army officer. 8. Zamoyski, The Last King of Poland, 169. See also Robert P. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 300. 9. The Dniester marked the frontier between Poland and the Ottoman Empire and linked several major Ottoman military installations: Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky, Bender (or Tighina), Kamyanets-Poldilsky, and Khotin. 10. Dixon, Catherine the Great, 183; and Zamoyski, The Last King of Poland, 171, 174. The Bar Confederates welcomed the Russo-Turkish conflict because it meant that Russia would be preoccupied with the Ottomans, which would draw more of her troops away from Poland. 11. Zamoyski, The Last King of Poland, 179; and John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 35. 12. The Order of the Knights of St. Stanislaus was established in May 1765 by King Stanislaus as an honor for those who served him. The king also used it to procure allies and maintain the loyalty of his supporters. Members wore a bright red-andwhite-striped ribbon and a Maltese cross embossed with shining white Polish eagles. 13. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, July 1769, LP, 1:84–85. 14. Charles Lee to Lady Blake, 2 May 1769, LP, 1:74. 15. Ibid., 73. 16. Ibid. 17. Charles Lee to Lord Thanet, 4 May 1769, LP, 1:77. 18. Ibid., 77–78. 19. Charles Lee to Lady Blake, 2 May 1769, LP, 1:72. 20. Charles Lee to George Colman, the Elder, 8 May 1769, LP, 1:82. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Charles Lee to George Colman, the Elder, 8 May 1769, LP, 1:82. 24. Charles Lee to Lady Blake, 2 May 1769, LP, 1:72 – 73. 25. Charles Lee to Lady Blake, 2 May 1769, LP, 1:73; Charles Lee to George Colman, the Elder, 8 May 1769, LP, 1:81. 26. Charles Lee to Louisa C., 4 May 1769, LP, 1:75. 27. Ibid., 75–76. 28. Charles Lee to George Colman, the Elder, 8 May 1769, LP, 1:81. 29. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, [1769 July], LP, 1:84. M. S. Anderson notes that campaigning against the Ottomans was particularly attractive to Western European [ 316 ]

Notes to Chapter 5 officers because it held some of the aura and glory of a crusade; Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618–1789 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 86. 30. Lee chose an unusual name for his dog. The word “spado” is derived from the Latin for impotence and was used to describe a castrated person or animal. It was also a term that referred to a spade or a side sword. 31. Virginia H. Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700–1783 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 144–145; and John P. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 93. 32. John W. Hall, “Washington’s Irregulars,” in A Companion to George Washington, edited by Edward G. Lengel (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 323. 33. Charles Lee to George Colman, the Elder, 8 May 1769, LP, 1:82. 34. Charles Lee to Lord Thanet, 4 May 1769, LP, 1:77. 35. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 30 September 1769, LP, 1:86. 36. Charles Lee to George Colman, the Elder, 8 May 1769, LP, 1:81. 37. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 24 December 1769, LP, 1:89. The Tatars were Turkic-speaking peoples who lived mainly in west-central Russia along the central course of the Volga River and its tributary the Kama, thence east to the Ural Mountains. The Crimean Tatar cavalry was indispensable to Ottoman military campaigns in Poland and Hungary. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. The advance corps of the Russian army was comprised of Cossacks and of the elite Polish Hussar troops, cavalry units whose main weapon was the lance and whose primary battle tactic was the charge. Polish troops comprised up to one-third of Golytsin’s army; the remainder were Russian peasant conscripts. 40. Ibid., 89–90. 41. Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace, 145–147. For an excellent discussion of the Ottoman Empire’s eighteenth-century wars, see Virginia H. Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged (Saddle River, NJ: Longman/Pearson, 2007). 42. Charles Lee to King Stanislaus Poniatowski, 16 August 1769, LP, 1:79–80. 43. Ibid.; Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 24 December 1769, LP, 1:90. “Neither the marching without battering cannon, the blockading the place without a resolution to persist in it, nor any blunder committed are so liable to censure, as the neglect to attack them in their camp,” Lee wrote to King Stanislaus. “If success in war can be assured, ours was certainly so.” 44. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 30 September 1769, LP, 1:86. 45. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 94. 46. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 24 December 1769, LP, 1:90. Lee did have some mild praise for the way the Russians conducted their retreat: “At length through want of forage and excessive bad weather, we were obliged to repass the Niester [Dniester], which retreat was disposed and executed in so masterly a manner, that we did not leave a single man, a single horse behind, though our rear was attacked by at least sixty thousand cavalry, and a considerable corps of infantry.” [317 ]

Notes to Chap ter 5 47. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 30 September 1769, LP, 1:86; Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 24 December 1769, LP, 1:91. 48. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 24 December 1769, LP, 1:88, 91; Charles Lee to unknown recipient, 1771, LP, 1: 97. Lee remained in Vienna from December 1769 to March 1770. 49. Charles Lee to George Colman, the Elder, 16 March 1770, LP, 1:93. 50. Ibid., 93–94. 51. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 14 May 1770, LP, 1:96. See also Sir Charles Davers to Horatio Gates, 30 June 1770, Reel #2, Horatio Gates Papers, New-York Historical Society, New York, New York; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 37. 52. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 27 March 1771, LP, 1:99. 53. Lee’s duel with the Italian officer is mentioned in Edward Langworthy’s 1792 edition of the Memoir of Major General Charles Lee, LP, 4:126. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 38; and Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 27 March 1771, LP, 1:99–100. 54. Alden, General Charles Lee, 38. 55. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 9 August [1771], LP, 1:106. 56. Quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 41. 57. John Hale to Horatio Gates, 30 August 1771, Reel #2, Horatio Gates Papers; and Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 9 August [1771], LP, 1:106. 58. Charles Lee to John Hall-Stevenson, 30 July 1771, LP, 1:100–101. 59. Ibid., 101. 60. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 28 March 1772, LP, 1:111. 61. Lee’s political views were similar to those expressed in the Junius Letters, a series of anonymous attacks on the king and his ministers published in London’s Public Advertiser. Many of Lee’s contemporaries assumed that he was the author, but Lee was in Eastern Europe during the most intensive period of the Junius writings, from 1769–1771. Lee fueled speculation in the fall of 1773 when he all but confessed to Delaware revolutionary Thomas Rodney that he was the elusive Junius. Most historians who have studied the Junius controversy believe that the author of the letters was probably Philip Francis, a clerk in the British War Office during the 1760s and the 1770s. See Alden, General Charles Lee, 43–44; James J. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man: Charles Lee and the Politics of Reputation, Masculinity, and Identity during the Revolutionary War, 1755–1783” (PhD diss., University of Toledo, 2006), 109–113; Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 48–51; Alvar Ellegard, Who Was Junius? (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979); and Tony H. Bowyer, “Junius, Philip Francis and Parliamentary Reform,” Albion 27 (Autumn 1995): 397–418. 62. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 9 August [1771], LP, 1:105. 63. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 28 March 1772, LP, 1:110. 64. Charles Lee to Clotworthy Upton, 18 January 1772, LP, 1:106–107. 65. Ibid. 66. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 28 March 1772, LP, 1:110. [ 318 ]

Notes to Chapter 6 67. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 26 March 1772, LP, 1:108. 68. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 28 March 1772, LP, 1:93; Charles Lee to George Colman, the Elder, 16 March 1770, LP, 1:110. 69. Charles Lee to George Colman, the Elder, 16 March 1770, LP, 1:110–111. 70. Alden, General Charles Lee, 46. For a general discussion of the diagnosis and treatment of gout and rheumatism in the eighteenth century, see Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 42–65, 101–114. 71. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 26 March 1772, LP, 1:108. 72. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 1 March 1766, LP, 1:43.

Notes to Chapter 6

1. The Liberty Boys led New York’s protests against the 1765 Stamp Act and the 1767 Townshend Acts and clashed with British troops over the removal of the liberty pole in present-day City Hall Park, an incident that led to the Battle of Golden Hill in January 1770. 2. Thomas Gamble to John Bradstreet, 14 February 1774, in Calendar of the Sparks Manuscripts in Harvard College Library, edited by Justin Winsor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1889), 15. 3. John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 50. 4. Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 36–37. 5. The New-York Gazetteer became known as the New-York Royal Gazette. 6. Quoted in New York Gazeteer, 2 December 1773. 7. Alden, General Charles Lee, 50–51; and Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 57–59. Charles Thomson was known as the “Samuel Adams of Philadelphia.” 8. For the role of Philadelphia’s artisans and mechanics in the resistance movement, see Charles S. Olton, Artisans for Independence: Philadelphia Mechanics and the American Revolution (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1975); Richard A. Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765– 1776 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978); and Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 9. Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 6 May [1774], LP, 1:121. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 51; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 58–62. 10. Edmund Burke to Charles Lee, 1 February 1774, LP, 1:120–121. For a discussion of the Privy Council meeting of January 29, 1774, see Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 189–203; and Rakove, Revolutionaries, 34–36. 11. Alden, General Charles Lee, 51. 12. Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 6 May [1774], LP, 1:122. [319 ]

Notes to Chap ter 6 13. Richard Henry Lee to Samuel Adams, 8 May 1774, in The Letters of Richard Henry Lee, vol. 1, 1762–1778, edited by James C. Ballagh (New York: MacMillan, 1911), 110. 14. Thomas Gamble to Charles Lee, 10 June 1774, LP, 1:123. 15. Horatio Gates to Charles Lee, 1 July 1774, LP, 1:123–126. 16. Ibid., 124–125. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 53; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), xiii–xiv; and John D. Sutton, “Major General Charles Lee,” West Virginia Historical Magazine Quarterly 2 (October 1902): 10. Jacob Hite owed £1600 to a Scottish trader in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Hopewell had initially belonged to Hite’s his father, Jost, an early settler in the Shenandoah Valley. 17. Pennsylvania Journal, 20 July 1774. 18. Ibid. 19. Alden, General Charles Lee, 319n18. 20. Pennsylvania Journal, 20 July, 1774. 21. Entries for 9 August and 29 August 1774, Franklin B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, vol. 1, January 1, 1769–March 13, 1776 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 453, 455. 22. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 28 September 1774, LP, 1:136. 23. Charles Lee to Thomas Gage, [1774], LP, 1:133–134. 24. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 28 September 1774, LP, 1:135. 25. Lee had already composed “Of General Gage” in the Pennsylvania Packet in response to an article that had appeared under the name “Junius Americanus” in the Pennsylvania Journal that criticized Gage as a willing dupe of the British government. Lee might have resented the attack on his former commanding officer or he might have believed that Gage was his exclusive subject for ridicule. Nevertheless, he argued that Gage’s actions as governor of Massachusetts should not tarnish his upstanding character.”Junius Americanus” was the pseudonym used by Arthur Lee, Richard Henry Lee’s brother. See Alden, General Charles Lee, 61, 348n30. 26. Strictures upon “A Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans,” LP, 1:153, 157, 160–161. Lee opened Strictures by asserting that Cooper must be an “Ecclesiastick” because “he bears strongly the characters” of that profession: a “want of candour and truth, the apparent spirit of persecution, the unforgivingness, the deadly hatred to Dissenters, and the zeal for arbitrary power which has distinguished Churchmen in all ages, and more particularly the high part of the Church of England” (153). 27. Ibid., 160–61, Lee reassured the Americans that “Great Britain has . . . the greatest difficulty in keeping the regiments up to any thing near their establishment.” The British army had adopted its training regimen from the Prussian military. 28. Ibid., 162. 29. Ibid., 157, 161–164. 30. Ibid., 164–165. 31. Ibid., 165–166. 32. Quoted in Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 120–121. [ 320 ]

Notes to Chapter 6 33. Samuel Adams to Joseph Warren, 20 June 1775, in Letters of the Delegates to Congress, 25 vols., edited by Paul H. Smith (hereafter cited as LODC) (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1976–1998), 1:519. 34. Schafer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 120. 35. For Lee’s attendance at many meetings and social functions with the delegates, see Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, edited by L. H. Butterfield, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1962), 2:135–136, 140, 147, 151–152, 156–157. Lee was a strong supporter of the strategy of bringing the Canadians into the resistance movement against Britain and helped draft the congress’s Address to the People of Quebec. See Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 2:147; and “Resolved that an Address be prepared to the people of Quebec, and letters to the colonies of St. John’s, Nova-Scotia, Georgia, East and West Florida, who have not deputies to represent them in this Congress,” October 20–25, 1774, Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, 34 vols., edited by Worthington C. Ford, Gaillard Hunt, John Clement Fitzpatrick, Kenneth E. Harris, and Steven D. Tilley (hereafter cited as JCC) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904–1937), 1:101, 103–114. 36. John Adams to James Lloyd, 24 April 1815, in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, 10 vols., edited by Charles F. Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1856), 10:164. 37. William Legge, second Earl of Dartmouth, to Thomas Gage, 17 October 1774, in The Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth (London: Printed for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1887), 365. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 66. 38. General Evening Post quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 66. 39. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 2:147, 157. 40. Charles Lee to Sir Charles Davers, 28 September 1774, LP, 1:135. 41. Charles Lee to the Duke of Northumberland, 29 October 1774, LP, 1:140–141. 42. Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), chapter 1. 43. Ibid. 44. Charles Lee to Edmund Burke, 16 December 1774, LP, 1:145. 45. Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 145–147. It has been said that some of the names of Lee’s other dogs were Miss Sappho, Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. See Sutton, “Major General Charles Lee,” 11; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 251. 46. Helen Bryan, Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 180. 47. John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Diaries of George Washington, 1748–1799, 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1925), 2:175–181. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 69; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 72–73. 48. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 1775, LP, 1:168. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 69; Sutton, “Major General Charles Lee,” 10; and Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 13 [321 ]

Notes to Chap ter 6 May 1775, LP, 1:179. Today this property is part of Leetown, West Virginia, which was named for Charles Lee. 49. Alden, General Charles Lee, 69–70. 50. On a Famous Trial in the Court of Common Pleas, Between General Mostyn, Governor of Minorca, and an Inhabitant of That Island, in LP, 4:112–116. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 70; and Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 127–128. 51. The quote is from Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 74. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 67. 52. “A Breakfast for Rivington,” February 1775, in LP, 4:108–109. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 68. 53. Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 14. See also Diaries of George Washington, 2:191–192; Alden, General Charles Lee, 72; and Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 182. 54. Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition, 12. See also Douglas S. Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, 7 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948–1957), 2:112–113, 119, 127, 377; 5:483. Mark V. Kwasny argues that Washington’s attitude toward the use of militia was more complex than many historians acknowledge; Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 1775–1783 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), 16–17. 55. In September 1774, shortly after George III received the news that the colonists planned to hold a congress, he wrote to Lord North, “The die is now cast, the colonies must either submit or triumph.” Two months later he commented that “blows must decide whether they [the colonies] are to be subject to this country or independent.” See King George III to Frederick Lord North, 11 September 1774; King George III to Frederick Lord North, 18 November 1774, both in The Correspondence of King George the Third from 1760 to December 1783, 6 vols., edited by John Fortescue (London: Macmillan, 1927–1928), 3:131, 153. 56. John R. Galvin, The Minute Men: The First Fight: Myths and Realities of the American Revolution (1967; repr., Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006), 236–237; and Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976), 132. 57. Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 13 May 1775, LP, 1:179. 58. Pennsylvania Journal quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 72. 59. John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 83–84; and Galvin, The Minute Men: The First Fight, 238–243. 60. John Adams to James Warren, 10 June 1775, LODC, 1:467. In addition to Washington and Lee, those considered for the post were Horatio Gates, John Hancock, Artemas Ward, and Richard Montgomery. 61. John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, 18 June 1775, LP, 1:503. 62. John Adams quoted in Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), 87–88. 63. Ibid., 87. [ 322 ]

Notes to Chapter 6 64. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 29 May 1775, LODC, 1:417. See also Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington, 86; and Lengel, General George Washington, 87. 65. Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington, 86. 66. Eliphalet Dyer to Joseph Trumbull, 17 June 1775, LODC, 1:499. 67. Ibid. 68. Entry for 9 November 1775, in Adams, Works of John Adams, 10:418. 69. To the Gentlemen of the Provincial Congress of Virginia, 1775, LP, 1:175, 177. 70. Alden, General Charles Lee, 75; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 78, 80. 71. Elbridge Gerry to the Massachusetts Delegates, 4 June 1775, in James T. Austin, The Life of Elbridge Gerry (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1828), 79; Elbridge Gerry to the Massachusetts Delegates, 20 June 1775, in Papers of John Adams, 6 vols., edited by Robert J. Taylor, Mary-Jo Kline, and Gregg L. Lint (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977–1983), 3:40–41; John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, 18 June 1775, LODC, 1:503. 72. Samuel Adams to James Warren, 28 June 1775, LODC, 1:553. 73. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington, 166; Chernow, Washington, 190–191; and John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), 128. 74. On June 17, 1775, the Continental Congress passed the following resolution: “Resolved unanimously upon the question, Whereas, the delegates of all the colonies, from Nova-Scotia to Georgia, in Congress assembled, have unanimously chosen George Washington, Esq. to be General and commander in chief, of such forces as are, or shall be, raised for the maintenance and preservation of American liberty; this Congress doth now declare, that they will maintain and assist him, and adhere to him, the said George Washington, Esq., with their lives and fortunes in the same cause.” In JCC, 2: 97. Horatio Gates was appointed adjutant general. 75. John Adams to Elbridge Gerry, 18 June 1775, LODC, 1:503; John Adams to James Warren, 20 June 1775, LODC, 1:518. 76. Samuel Adams to Joseph Warren, 20 June 1775, in Warren-Adams Letters, Being Chiefly a Correspondence between John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917–1925), 1:64. 77. Benjamin Rush to Thomas Ruston, 29 October 1775, in Letters of Benjamin Rush, 2 vols., edited by L. H. Butterfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1:92. 78. John Adams to James Warren, 24 July 1775, in Adams-Warren Letters, 1:89. 79. Mercy Otis Warren, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 3 vols. (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1805), 1:292–293. 80. George Washington to John Augustine Washington, 31 March 1776, PGW, 3:570. 81. Alden, General Charles Lee, 75–77; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 80–81. Lee estimated his salary as a half-pay officer to be worth more than £130 per year and the financial potential of his commission in the British army to be worth approximately £4,000. He also included the potential loss of his British properties. [323 ]

Notes to Chap ter 7 82. On June 19, 1775, the Continental Congress passed the motion agreeing to “indemnify General Lee for any loss of property which he may sustain by entering into their [the colonies’] service”; JCC, 2:98–99. See also Alden, General Lee, 75–77; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 80–81; and Longmore, The Invention of George Washington, 166. 83. Warren, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 1:292. Patrick Henry, who had initially favored Lee for a commission, withdrew his support after hearing of his financial demands. Samuel Adams was also disappointed with Lee, but he continued to support him. See William Wirt Henry, Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence and Speeches, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 1:299; and Samuel Adams to Joseph Warren, 20 June 1775, LODC, 1:519. 84. Samuel Adams to James Warren, 28 June 1775, LODC, 1:553. 85. For a similar argument, see Alden, General Charles Lee, 76; and Chernow, Washington, 188. 86. Charles Lee to Lord Barrington, 22 June 1775, LP, 1:185–186. 87. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 83; and Lengel, General George Washington, 103. 88. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 23 June 1775, LODC, 1:537; and Chernow, Washington, 191.

Notes to Chapter 7

1. Quoted in Richard M. Ketchum, Divided Loyalties: How the American Revolution Came to New York (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 347. 2. Ibid., 347–348. See also Paul David Nelson, William Tryon and the Course of Empire: A Life in British Imperial Service (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 128–129; William Howard Adams, Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 52–53; and Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 192. 3. Quoted in Ketchum, Divided Loyalties, 349. 4. Chernow, Washington, 192. 5. John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 79. 6. “Address of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts,” 1 July 1775, in LP, 1:186–187. 7. “General Lee’s Answer to the Address of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts,” 6 July 1775, in LP, 1:187. 8. Putnam, a veteran of the French and Indian War, held the rank of brigadier general in the Connecticut militia and had commanded troops at the Battle of Bunker Hill. The Continental Congress appointed him as a major general in the Continental Army. He was endearingly called “Old Put” by fellow officers and his men. 9. The quote is from Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 19 July 1776, LP, 2:146. 10. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 4 July 1775, LP, 1:188. 11. Quoted in Don Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 19. [ 324 ]

Notes to Chapter 7 12. Mark Lardas, George Washington: Leadership, Strategy, and Conflict (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2011), 6; and Higginbotham, George Washington and the American Military Tradition, 47–51. 13. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 4 July 1775, LP, 1:188. 14. Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 5. 15. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 20 July 1775, LP, 1:196. 16. Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, 9 July 1775, Henry Knox Papers, Gilder Lehrman Collection, New-York Historical Society, New York, New York (hereafter cited as Henry Knox Papers). 17. Terry Golway, Washington’s General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 62. 18. Entry for July 14, 1775, Franklin B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 1:585. 19. Chernow, Washington, 195–196; Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), 107–108; Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789 (1971; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983), 101; and Harry M. Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers: Policing the Continental Army (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 32–33. The Articles of War were adopted by the Continental Congress on June 30, 1775. 20. Charles P. Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 38. 21. Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers, 34; Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, 102–103; and Christopher M. Ward, The War of the Revolution, edited by John R. Alden, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 2:106–107. “General Washington has said he wished they [the riflemen] had never come; General Lee has damned them and wished them all in Boston,” wrote General Artemas Ward; quoted in George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolution through the Eyes of Those Who Fought and Lived It (New York: World Publishing Company, 1957), 86. 22. The quote is from John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 407. See also Ward, The War of the Revolution, 1:107–108; and John A Nagy, Rebellion in the Ranks: Mutinies of the American Revolution (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2007), 3–5. Riflemen from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, announced that they planned to storm the main guardhouse, where a group of their comrades were confined. Washington, Lee, and General Nathanael Greene threatened to arrest them for mutinous behavior. 23. Charles Lee to John Burgoyne, 5 June 1775, LP, 1:181–185. This letter appeared in several newspapers in America and in London. 24. John Burgoyne to Charles Lee, 5 June 1775, in Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, 3 vols. (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1887–1896), 3:337. [325 ]

Notes to Chap ter 7 25. Charles Lee to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, 10 July 1775, LP, 1:193; and Stephen Kemble, The Kemble Papers, vol. 1, 1773–1789. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1884), 46. 26. John Burgoyne to Charles Lee, 9 July 1775, LP, 1:189–192; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 85. 27. Charles Lee to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, 10 July 1775, LP, 1:193; Provincial Congress of Massachusetts to Charles Lee, 10 July 1775, LP, 1:194. 28. Charles Lee to John Burgoyne, 11 July 1775, LP, 1:194–195. See also John Burgoyne to Frederick Lord North, 11 July 1775, in Political and Military Episodes in the Latter Half of the Eighteenth Century Derived from the Life and Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. John Burgoyne, General, Statesman, Dramatist, edited by Edward B. DeFonblanque (London: Macmillan, 1876), 174–179; and Richard J. Hargrove Jr., General John Burgoyne (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), 80. 29. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 20 July 1775, LP, 1:196–197. 30. James Warren to Samuel Adams, 9 July 1775, quoted in William Vincent Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, 3 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1865), 2:316. 31. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 27 July 1775, LP, 1:199. 32. Paul Lunt, “A Journal of Travels from Newburyport to Cambridge and in the Camp,” in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1871–1873 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1873), 199. 33. John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 140; and Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 7 September 1775, LP, 1:205–206. 34. Entry for September 11, 1775, Dexter, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1:611. 35. The Continental Congress mandated that Washington hold councils of war to ask the advice of his senior officers before he made any major tactical decisions. This practice was customary in the British military. 36. Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, 99; and John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 100. 37. Alden, General Charles Lee, 80. By late 1775, Lee had moved his headquarters from the Royall house to the unoccupied Oliver Tufts house in Somerville, Massachusetts, which was closer to his troops and had a better view of Boston harbor. 38. Charles Lee to John Adams, 5 October 1775, LP, 1:209. 39. Ibid., 207–208; Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 19 September 1775, LP, 1: 209. Lee responded to a woman who had made a condescending remark about his fondness for dogs: “Yes madam, I love dogs; but I detest bitches.” See James J. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man: Charles Lee and the Politics of Reputation, Masculinity, and Identity during the Revolutionary War, 1755–1783” (PhD diss., University of Toledo, 2006), 105; and Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 42.

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Notes to Chapter 7 40. Rev. Jeremy Belknap quoted in Richard M. Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 200. 41. Abigail Adams to John Adams, 16 July 1775, in Adams Family Correspondence, 8 vols., edited by L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963–2007), 1:246–247. 42. John Adams to James Warren, 24 July 1775, in Warren-Adams Letters, Being Chiefly a Correspondence between John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917–1925), 1:89. 43. Abigail Adams to John Adams, 10 December 1775, in Butterfield, Adams Family Correspondence, 1:335; and Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York: Free Press, 2009), 96. 44. Charles Lee to John Adams, 5 October 1775, LP, 1:209–210. 45. Ibid., 210. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 77; and Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 104. 46. Entry for January 6, 1776, Dexter, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1:652. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 77. 47. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 19 September 1775, LP, 1:206. 48. John Adams to Charles Lee, 13 October 1775, LODC, 2:175. This letter is incorrectly addressed to James Warren in Warren-Adams Letters, 1:136–139. 49. John Adams diary entry for November 9, 1775, in Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, 10 vols., edited by Charles F. Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1856), 2:419–420. 50. Ibid., 412. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 79. “I do suppose Dickison will be confoundedly piqued at Adams’s attack on his genius,” Lee wrote to Rush. “I am sorry it has been published—alto’ I really think his late proceedings cannot be reconciled to consummate talents or even common sense—but you remember the maxim . . . that the head is always the dupe of the heart—and if I have any observation—the natural constitutional pusillanimity of our Farmer has rendered him totally unfit to tread the stage of public affairs when pieces of bustle and action are to be performed”; Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 19 September 1775, LP, 1:208. 51. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 10 October 1775, LP, 1:211. 52. Quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 79. 53. Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 55. While the Second Continental Congress was holding its first session, militia from Connecticut and Vermont commanded by Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen, respectively, captured Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York, which was controlled by the British, and its large cache of heavy artillery. The next day, the Americans took the British fort at Crown Point, New York. 54. Samuel Adams to James Warren, 3 November 1775, in Warren-Adams Letters, 1:170–171. 55. Charles Lee to John Burgoyne, 1 December 1775, LP, 1:222.

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Notes to Chap ter 8 56. Charles Lee to Alexander McDougall, 26 October 1775, LP, 1:214–215. See also Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 142. 57. Quoted in Ward, The War of the Revolution, 1:120. See also Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 112–113. 58. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 12 December 1775, LP, 1:227. “Un passable homme du plum” translates as “a fair writer.” 59. Ibid. See also Charles Lee to Benjamin Franklin, 10 December 1775, PBF, 22:293. 60. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 3 January 1776, LP, 1:233. 61. Paine quote in Thomas Paine, Common Sense, edited by Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 87. Franklin’s opinion is in Benjamin Franklin to Charles Lee, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:313. 62. Charles Lee to George Washington, 24 January 1776, LP, 1:259. 63. Ibid., 260. 64. Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 12 December 1775, LP, 1:229. See also Charles Lee to Benjamin Franklin, n.d., PBF, 22:292; Patterson, Knight Errant, 100–101; Alden, General Charles Lee, 114; and Alan C. Cate, Founding Fighters: The Battlefield Leaders Who Made American Independence (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 38. 65. Lieutenant General Thomas Gage to Lord Dartmouth, 25 June 1775, in Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, 3:320; and Ward, The War of the Revolution, 1:116. 66. Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 66–67; Ward, The War of the Revolution, 1:116; and Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (1964; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 1993), 80. 67. George Washington to John Hancock, 4 January 1776, PGW, 3:19–20. 68. Entry for December 26, 1775, in Dexter, Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1:646. 69. Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 12 December 1775, LP, 1:229. 70. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 3 January 1776, LP, 1:233. 71. Charles Lee to George Washington, 5 January 1776, LP, 1:235. 72. Charles Lee to George Washington, 5 January 1776, LP, 1:234. 73. Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 12 December 1775, LP, 1:228; Charles Lee to George Washington, 5 January 1776, LP, 1:234–235. 74. John Adams to George Washington, 6 January 1776, PGW, 3:36–38; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 96. 75. George Washington, Instructions to Major General Charles Lee, 8 January 1776, LP, 1:236–237.

Notes to Chapter 8

1. Despite several overtures from the Americans, the Canadians chose to support the Crown. The British governor of Quebec province, General Guy Carleton, had been influential in framing the Quebec Act (1774), which granted French Canadians the right to worship as Catholics and to retain their language, property, and legal practices. The Canadians were leery of joining forces with the American colonists, who had a history of anti-Catholic prejudice. By the summer of 1775, the Continental Congress [ 328 ]

Notes to Chapter 8 had decided to take military action against Canada and ordered the commander of the Northern Department, General Philip Schuyler, to direct an invasion of Montreal and Quebec. The expedition against Canada began in September. An army commanded by General Richard Montgomery captured Montreal in November. Meanwhile, Washington had ordered Colonel Benedict Arnold, who was looking for an opportunity to prove his military skills, to lead a detachment of 1,100 men from the army outside Boston northward across the wilderness of Maine for 350 miles to the city of Quebec. By the time he arrived at Quebec, Arnold had only 675 men. In early December 1775, Montgomery joined Arnold and his troops, which included Daniel Morgan’s Virginia riflemen, outside the heavily defended Quebec. The American commanders decided to assault the city during a blizzard on December 31, 1775, which proved a major disaster. Montgomery was killed, Arnold was severely wounded, and more than 400 Americans were captured. See Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice: 1763–1789 (1971; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983), 108–115; Brendan Morrissey, Quebec, 1775: The American Invasion of Canada (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003); Arthur S. Lefkowitz, Benedict Arnold’s Army: The 1775 American Invasion of Canada during the Revolutionary War (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2008); and Thomas A. Desjardin, Through a Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold’s March to Quebec, 1775 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006). 2. Jonathan Trumbull to Charles Lee, 12 January 1776, LP, 1:238. 3. Charles Lee to George Washington, 16 January 1776, LP, 1:240. 4. Continental Congress resolution dated October 6, 1775, recommending that “provincial Assemblies or Conventions, and councils and committees of safety . . . arrest and secure every person in their respective colonies, whose going at large may, in their opinion, endanger the safety of the colony, or the liberties of America”; in JCC, 3:280. See also Barnet Schecter, The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution (New York: Walker & Company, 2002), 65. 5. Charles Lee to George Washington, 16 January 1776, LP, 1:240. 6. John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 99. 7. Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2011), 46. See also Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 12, 14; and Schecter, The Battle for New York, 69. 8. New York Committee of Safety to Charles Lee, 21 January 1776, LP, 1:242–244. 9. Charles Lee to the New York Committee of Safety, 23 January 1776, LP, 1:256–258. 10. Schecter, The Battle for New York, 71. 11. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 22 January 1776, LP, 1:247–249. 12. John Hancock to Charles Lee, 26 January 1776, LP, 1:262. See also New York Delegates to the New York Committee of Safety, 27 January 1776, in LODC, 3:159. 13. Charles Lee to the Committee of Congress, 31 January 1776, LP, 1:268. [329 ]

Notes to Chap ter 8 14. Schecter, The Battle for New York, 71. 15. George Washington to Charles Lee, 23 January 1776, PGW, 3:171. See also George Washington to Charles Lee, 23 January 1776, LP, 1:254. 16. Charles Lee to George Washington, 5 February 1776, LP, 1:271. 17. John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 41. 18. Schecter, The Battle for New York, 72. See also William Tryon to Lord Dartmouth, 8 February 1776, E. B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, 15 vols. (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1853–1887), 8:667. 19. Extract of a letter dated 15 February 1776, author unknown in American Archives: Fourth Series: A Documentary History of the United States, edited by Peter Force (Washington, DC: M. St. Clair Clark and Peter Force, 1837–1846), 4:1153. 20. Charles Lee to George Washington, 5 February 1776, LP, 1:271. 21. Bruce Bliven Jr., Under the Guns: New York, 1775–1776 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 122, 148. See also New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, 19 February 1776. 22. Charles Lee to George Washington, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:309. 23. King’s Bridge, built in 1693, spanned the turbulent, Duyvil Creek, a channel that connects the Hudson River to the Harlem River. It was the first bridge to link Manhattan Island to the mainland. 24. Schecter, The Battle for New York, 75. Lee placed chevaux de frise, sunken hulls, and tree trunks in the rivers as obstacles to navigation. The commons were located at what is today City Hall Park. 25. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 25 February 1776, LP, 1:326. 26. [Charles Lee], “Report on the Defence of New York,” March 1776, LP, 1:354, 356. 27. Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion, 45; and Mark V. Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 1775–1783 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), 36. 28. Charles Lee to Joseph Reed, 28 February 1776, LP, 1:335. 29. George Washington to Charles Lee, 23 January 1776, LP, 1:253. 30. Joseph S. Tiedemann, “Queens County,” in The Other New York: The American Revolution beyond New York City, 1763–1789, edited by Joseph S. Tiedemann and Eugene R. Fingerhut (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 47–48. 31. Charles Lee to the president of the New York Provincial Congress, 4 March 1776, LP, 1:345. 32. Charles Lee to the president of Congress, 5 March 1776, LP, 1:348. 33. For Lee’s confidence in Isaac Sears see Charles Lee to George Washington, 14 February 1776, LP, 1:296; George Washington to Charles Lee, 22 February 1776, LP, 1:326. 34. Charles Lee to Isaac Sears, 5 March 1776, LP, 1:346. 35. Charles Lee to the Provincial Congress of New York, 6 March 1775, LP, 1:352. 36. Isaac Sears to Charles Lee, 17 March 1776, LP, 1:359. 37. Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion, 45; Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 36. See also Roger J. Champagne, Alexander McDougall and the American Revolution in New York (Schenectady, NY: Union College Press, 1975), 103–104. [ 330 ]

Notes to Chapter 8 38. Tiedemann, “Queens County,” 48. 39. Charles Lee to George Washington, 14 February 1776; Charles Lee, draft of letter to Captain Parker, LP, 1:295–296, 341. See also Schecter, The Battle for New York, 75. 40. Provincial Congress of New York to Charles Lee, 6 March 1776, LP, 1:349–350. 41. Resolution rejecting oaths for citizens, 9 March 1776, JCC, 4:195. See also New York Delegates to the New York Provincial Convention, 15 March 1776, LODC, 3:382. 42. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 21 March 1776, LP, 1:360–361. 43. Richard Henry Lee to Charles Lee, 25 March 1776, LODC, 3:439. 44. Resolution about measuring depth of water in waterways near New York City, 9 January 1776, JCC, 4: 44–45. 45. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 20 February 1776, LP, 1:319. See also Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 37. Although the New York Provincial Congress had raised four battalions of militia for the city’s defense, Lee knew that these troops would not be ready for several months. 46. Charles Lee to George Washington, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:309. 47. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 5 March 1776, LP, 1:348. 48. Charles Lee, “Report on the Defence of New York,” March 1776, LP, 1:357. 49. William Alexander (Lord Stirling) to Samuel Tucker, president of the Congress of New Jersey, 5 March 1776, in American Archives: Fourth Series: A Documentary History of the United States, edited by Peter Force (Washington, DC: M. St. Clair Clark and Peter Force, 1837–1846), 5:133. See also Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 36; and Philip Ranlet, New York Loyalists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 155. 50. New York Committee of Safety to the Provincial Congress of New Jersey, 10 February 1776, in Force, American Archives: Fourth Series, 4:1120; New York Committee of Safety to the Elizabethtown Committee of Safety, 11 February 1776, in ibid., 4:1121. 51. Phillip Papas, That Ever Loyal Island: Staten Island and the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 46–48. 52. President of the Provincial Congress of New York (Nathaniel Woodhull) to Charles Lee, 20 February 1776, LP, 1:315. 53. Charles Lee to the president of the Provincial Congress of New York (Nathaniel Woodhull), 16 February 1776, LP, 1:301. See also Joseph S. Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Independence, 1763–1776 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 242. 54. Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries, 242. 55. Schecter, The Battle for New York, 75. See also Provincial Congress of New York to Charles Lee, 6 March 1776, LP, 1:350. 56. Charles Lee to the president of the Provincial Congress of New York (Nathaniel Woodhull), 6 March 1776, LP, 1:350–351. 57. Charles Lee to Joseph Reed, 28 February 1776, LP, 1:333–334. 58. Charles Lee to the president of the Provincial Congress of New York (Nathaniel Woodhull), 4 March 1776, LP, 1:345. [331 ]

Notes to Chap ter 8 59. Charles Lee to George Washington, 29 February 1776, LP, 1:335. “The Congress have as yet, not taken the least step for the security of this place,” Lee informed Washington. “I have written letters till I am tired on the subject.” 60. Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries, 242. 61. John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 142. 62. Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion, 45; and Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 142. 63. John Adams to Charles Lee, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:312. 64. Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, 106–108. 65. Alden, General Charles Lee, 106; Michael P. Gabriel, Major General Richard Montgomery: The Making of an American Hero (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 134, 141, 151; Hal Shelton, General Richard Montgomery and the American Revolution: From Redcoat to Rebel (New York: New York University Press, 1996); and James Kirby Martin, Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 183. 66. Horatio Gates to Charles Lee, 22 January 1776, LP, 1:251. 67. George Washington to Charles Lee, 30 January 1776, LP, 1:265. 68. Charles Lee to George Washington, 14 February 1776, LP, 1:297; Charles Lee to George Washington, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:308. 69. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 11 February 1776, LP, 1:283; Charles Lee to George Washington, 14 February 1776, LP, 1:297. 70. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 9 February 1776, LP, 1:280; Robert Morris to Charles Lee, 9 February 1776, LP, 1:304; and John Hancock to Charles Lee, 19 February 1776, LODC, 3:282. 71. John Adams to Charles Lee, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:312; Benjamin Franklin to Charles Lee, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:313; Benjamin Rush to Charles Lee, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:313–314. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 107; and Alan C. Cate, Founding Fighters: The Battlefield Leaders Who Made American Independence (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 40. 72. Charles Lee to George Washington, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:308; Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 20 February 1776, LP, 1:317; Charles Lee to John Hancock, 22 February 1776, LP, 1:321–322. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 108. 73. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 27 February 1776, LP, 1:332; John Hancock to Charles Lee, 28 February 1776, LP, 1:333. See also the 28 February 1776 resolution asking Lee not to leave for Canada without further orders from Congress JCC, 4:175; and Cate, Founding Fighters, 40. 74. John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 126; John E. Shelby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988), 86; and Hugh F. Rankin, North Carolina in the American Revolution (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1959), 11–12. Many of these reports originated with Josiah Martin, the royal governor of

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Notes to Chapter 9 North Carolina, who, like Tryon, had been exiled to a British warship. Martin had declared that there were thousands of Loyalists in North Carolina who were willing to help the British restore royal authority and that he could recruit many of them for the British war effort. 75. Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 127. See also Rankin, North Carolina in the American Revolution, 11.

Notes to Chapter 9

1. Charles E. Bennett and Donald R. Lennon, A Quest for Glory: Major General Robert Howe and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 36. 2. “Richard Smith’s Diary,” 27 February 1776, LODC, 3:310. See also James Haw, John and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 77–78; John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 108–109; and resolution giving Lee command of the Continental Army in the Southern Department, 1 March 1776, JCC, 4:180–181. The Continental Congress appointed General John Thomas of Massachusetts to command the Continental Army in Canada. 3. John Hancock to Charles Lee, 1 March 1776, LP, 1:342; Charles Lee to George Washington, 3 March 1776, LP, 1:343. 4. George Washington to Charles Lee, 14 March 1776, LP, 1:358. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 108–110; and Bennett and Lennon, A Quest for Glory, 36. Washington alerted his brother John Augustine, who was a member of the convention, to Lee’s violent temper and moodiness. However, he qualified his remarks: “I congratulate my countrymen upon his appointment.” See George Washington to John Augustine Washington, 31 March 1776, PGW, 3:570. 5. Charles Lee to George Washington, 3 March 1776, LP, 1:343. 6. Charles Lee to Benjamin Franklin, 10 December 1775, PBF, 22:292. 7. John Adams to Charles Lee, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:312. 8. Benjamin Franklin to Charles Lee, 19 February 1776, LP, 1:313; Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, LP, 1:325. 9. Quoted in Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 127. 10. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 27 February 1776, LP, 1:332. 11. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 127; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 104–105. See also John Eustace to Charles Lee, 21 March 1776, LP, 1:361. 12. Thomas Jones, History of New York during the Revolutionary War and of the Leading Events in the Other Colonies at That Period, 2 vols., edited by Edward F. De Lancey (New York: New York Historical Society, 1879), 1:82. 13. Alden, General Charles Lee, 110; and resolution appointing a committee of three to confer with Lee about defense of New York, 11 March 1776, JCC, 4:196, 201–204. 14. Ibid.

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Notes to Chap ter 9 15. Resolution dispatching Richard Henry Lee and Benjamin Franklin to direct Lee to take command of the Southern Department, 15 March 1776, JCC, 4:206. See also Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 128. 16. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 21 March 1776, LP, 1:360. Lee described Massenbach as “a sufficient master of his business.” 17. Ibid. 18. Richard Henry Lee to Charles Lee, 25 March 1776, LP, 1:362–363. 19. Charles Lee to George Washington, 5 April 1776, LP, 1:376. 20. Charles Lee to George Washington, 5 April 1776, LP, 1:376. In early March 1776, the heavy artillery that had been captured at Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point in northern New York were brought to the Continental lines outside Boston by an expedition commanded by Washington’s chief artillery officer, Colonel Henry Knox. The artillery was placed on Dorchester Heights, overlooking the city, making the British position untenable. “Capitol Rock” is a reference to Capitoline Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome. 21. Address of Virginia Officers to His Excellency Major General Lee, 29 March 1776, LP, 1:364. 22. Robert Morris to Horatio Gates, 6 April 1776, LP, 1:388. 23. Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 5, 9–11. See also Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), xvii, xix, 95–99, 165. 24. Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 68–69. 25. Quoted in ibid., 69 26. Ibid., 70. The quote is from McDonnell, The Politics of War, 134. 27. Egerton, Death or Liberty, 70; and Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 28. Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment was commanded by Thomas Taylor Byrd, the son of William Byrd III and the brother of one of Lee’s aides, Francis Otway Byrd. 28. Shelby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1988), 67. Woody Holton writes, “Afro-Virginians were most often the victims, not the perpetrators, of interracial violence. But they struck back often enough to maintain a permanent undercurrent of fear in the minds of most whites in the Chesapeake”; Holton, Forced Founders, 137. Similar slave uprisings occurred in New York in 1712 and 1741; in Maryland in 1740; in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in 1772; and throughout the British West Indies. The black revolts of the past and the rumor of slave insurrections provoked by British military policy heightened white Americans’ fears of racial violence during the Revolution. See Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5, 10. 29. McDonnell, The Politics of War, 131–134; and Shelby, Revolution in Virginia, 58–66. [ 334 ]

Notes to Chapter 9 30. Michael A. McDonnell, “‘The Spirit of Levelling’: James Cleveland, Edward Wright, and the Militiamen’s Struggle for Equality in Revolutionary Virginia,” in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, edited by Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 138. 31. Holton, Forced Founders, 168–169. 32. McDonnell, “‘The Spirit of Levelling,’” 138. 33. Charles Lee to Francis Eppes, 30 March 1776, LP, 1:364–365. 34. Charles Lee to George Washington, 5 April 1776, LP, 1:377. See also Bennett and Lennon, A Quest for Glory, 40. 35. William Peachy to Charles Lee, 3 April 1776, LP, 1:371. 36. Isaac Read to Charles Lee, 7 April 1776, LP, 1:390–391. 37. James Innes to Charles Lee, 7 April 1776, LP, 1:389; Isaac Read to Charles Lee, 7 April 1776, LP, 1:390; and Hugh Mercer to Charles Lee, 16 April 1776, LP, 1:430. 38. Charles Lee to David Grier, 8 April 1776, LP, 1:392; Alexander Skinner to Charles Lee, 11 April 1776, LP, 1:413. 39. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 7 May 1776, LP, 1:480. 40. Charles Lee to Benjamin Franklin, 10 December 1775, PBF, 22:292. See also Harlow Giles Unger, Lion of Liberty: Patrick Henry and the Call to a New Nation (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2010), 111–113. Henry resigned his military commission in protest. Although the mutiny never occurred, Henry’s resignation did have an adverse effect on troop morale. 41. Charles Lee to George Washington, 10 May 1776, LP, 2:19; Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, 24 May 1776, LP, 2:34–36. 42. Orders to the Commanders of the Several Battalions, 22 April 1776, LP, 1:440. See also Charles P. Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 38. 43. Charles Lee to Benjamin Franklin, n.d., PBF, 22:293. 44. Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 12 April 1776, LP, 1:417. 45. Charles Lee to Edward Rutledge, 3 April 1776, LP, 1:372. 46. Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 5 April 1776, LP, 1:379. 47. Charles Lee to Edward Rutledge, 3 April 1776, LP, 1:372. 48. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 16 April 1776, LP, 1:425. 49. McDonnell, The Politics of War, 135–137; and Bennett and Lennon, A Quest for Glory, 38. 50. Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists, 6. 51. “Address to the Young Gentlemen of Virginia,” April 1776, LP, 1:435–436; Charles Lee to Isaac Read, 9 April 1776, LP, 1:395; Charles Lee to John Page, 21 April 1776, LP, 1: 398–399; Robert Howe to Charles Lee, 10 April 1776, LP, 1: 435–436; Alexander Skinner to Charles Lee, 21 April 1776, LP, 1: 436–437; Richard Henry Lee to Charles Lee, 22 April 1776, LP, 1:441; Andrew Lewis to Charles Lee, 26 April 1776, LP, 1:453. 52. Francis Eppes to Charles Lee, 6 April 1776, LP, 1:384. 53. The Committee of Gloucester County to Charles Lee, 22 April 1776, LP, 1:444. [335 ]

Notes to Chap ter 9 54. The Committee of Safety of Virginia to Charles Lee, 10 April 1776, LP, 1:405; Charles Lee to George Washington, 1 July 1776, LP, 2:202. 55. Edmund Pendleton to Charles Lee, 25 April 1776, LP, 1:452. 56. Charles Lee to George Washington, 5 April 1776, LP, 1:377. 57. Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 5 April 1776, LP, 1:379. 58. Charles Lee to Edward Rutledge, 3 April 1776, LP, 1:372–373. 59. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 16 April 1776, LP, 1:426. 60. Charles Lee to Patrick Henry, 7 May 1776, LP, 2:1. 61. Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 5 April 1776, LP, 1:380; Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 10 May 1776, LP, 2:20. 62. Charles Lee to George Washington, 10 May 1776, LP, 2:19. 63. Richard Henry Lee to Thomas Ludwell Lee, 28 May 1776, LP, 2:47. 64. Charles Lee to the president of the Committee of Safety of Virginia (Edmund Pendleton), 8 April 1776, LP, 1:393. 65. Ibid., 394. For the decision of the Council of War, see “Proceedings at a Council of Officers Held at Head Quarters, Williamsburg, by Order of His Excellency Major General Charles Lee,” April 6, 1776, LP, 1:387. 66. Robert J. Brugger, Maryland, A Middle Temperament: 1634–1980 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 117–119; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 111. 67. Shelby, The Revolution in Virginia, 93. 68. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 6 April 1776, LP, 1:382. 69. Charles Lee to Samuel Purviance, 6 April 1776, LP, 1:381. 70. Brugger, Maryland, 119; Alden, General Charles Lee, 111–112. See also Thomas Johnson to the Maryland Council of Safety, 17 April 1776, LODC, 3:550. Governor Eden departed for Britain on June 21, 1776. 71. Charles Lee to George Washington, 10 May 1776, LP, 2:19. 72. Charles Lee to Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, 6 May 1776, LP, 1:472–474. 73. John Hancock to the Maryland Committee of Safety, 16 April 1776, LODC, 3:541–542. 74. Charles Lee to Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, 6 May 1776, LP, 1:473. 75. “Proceedings of the Committee of Safety at Williamsburg,” 10 April 1776, LP, 1:407–408. 76. Charles Lee to the president of the Committee of Safety of Virginia (Edmund Pendleton), 8 April 1776, LP, 1:394. 77. Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, 4 May 1776, LP, 1:468.. 78. Ibid. 79. Charles Lee to Peter Muhlenberg, 23 April 1776, LP, 1:444–445. 80. Edmund Pendleton to Charles Lee, 5 May 1776, LP, 1:470–471. 81. Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, 8 May 1776, LP, 2:7; Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, 10 May 1776, LP, 2:21; Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, 11 May 1776, LP, 2:23. 82. John Page to Charles Lee, 28 April, 1776, LP, 1:455–457; William Woodford to Charles Lee, 2 May 1776, LP, 1:462–463; Resolves of the Committee of Safety, 3 [ 336 ]

Notes to Chap ter 10 May 1776, LP, 1:464–465; Charles Lee to William Woodford, 11 May 1776, LP, 2:23–24. See also Shelby, The Revolution in Virginia, 93. 83. Robert Howe to Charles Lee, 10 April 1776, LP, 1:399; Robert Howe to Charles Lee, 14 April 1776, LP, 1:420. 84. Thomas Burke to Charles Lee, 22 April 1776, LP, 1:438. 85. North Carolina’s white revolutionaries were concerned that the British encampment on Battery Island, the presence of Dunmore’s regiment in Virginia, and royal governor Josiah Martin’s attempt to raise a Loyalist army would incite a slave rebellion in the colony. 86. Charles Lee to James Moore, 23 April 1776, LP, 1:445. 87. Alden, General Charles Lee, 119. The 8th Virginia was known as the “German” regiment. 88. Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, 9 May 1776, LP, 2:15–16. 89. Richard Henry Lee to Charles Lee, 11 May 1776, LP, 2:25.

Notes to Chapter 10

1. Charles Lee to James Moore, 20 May 1776, LP, 2:30–31. 2. Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, 24 May 1776, LP, 2:34–35. 3. Ibid., 38. 4. Ibid., 35. 5. Ibid., 37; and John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 119–120. 6. James Moore to Charles Lee, 26 May 1776, LP, 2:40. 7. Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, 1 June 1776, LP, 2:50–51. 8. Ibid. 9. William Moultrie to John Rutledge, 3 June 1776, in William B. Clark and William J. Morgan, eds. Naval Documents of the American Revolution, 10 vols. (hereafter NDAR) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964–1996), 5:365; “John Wells’ Account of the British Attack on Charleston,” 1 June to 4 June 1776, NDAR, 5:373. 10. “John Wells’ Account of the British Attack on Charleston,” 1 June to 4 June 1776, NDAR, 5:373. See also Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 76–77, 82; and Sally E. Haddon, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 154–155. 11. Edward Rutledge to Charles Lee, 4 June 1776, LP, 2:53–54; and “John Wells’ Account of the British Attack on Charleston,” 1 June to 4 June 1776, NDAR, 5:373. 12. Alden, General Charles Lee, 120–121; and James Haw, John & Edward Rutledge of South Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 86. 13. “A Proclamation by Major General Clinton, Commander of His Majesty’s Forces in the Southern Provinces of N America, &c. &c,” 6 June 1776, in NDAR, 5:407; Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice: 1763–1789 (1971; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983), 136; [337 ]

Notes to Chap ter 10 and John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 128. 14. John Rutledge to William Moultrie, 9 June 1776, LP, 2:57. 15. Charles Lee to Edward Rutledge, 22 June 1776, LP, 2:80. 16. John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution: From Its Commencement to the Year 1776, 2 vols. (1821; repr., Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1976), 2:282. 17. Richard Hutson to Isaac Hayne, 24 June 1776, NDAR, 5:722. 18. Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 8 June 1776, LP, 2:55–57. 19. Alden, General Charles Lee, 122–123. The quote is from David Lee Russell, Victory on Sullivan’s Island: The British Cape Fear/Charles Town Expedition of 1776 (Haverford, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2002), 177. 20. Quoted in Russell, Victory on Sullivan’s Island, 177. 21. Quoted in Keith Krawczymski, William Henry Drayton: South Carolina Revolutionary Patriot (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 229. See also Charles E. Bennett and Donald R. Lennon, A Quest for Glory: Major General Robert Howe and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 43. 22. Richard Hutson to Isaac Hayne, 24 June 1776, NDAR, 5:721. The 58-year-old Armstrong was a native of Ireland, where he received his education and became a surveyor. He settled in the Kittanning area of the Susquehanna River Valley in Pennsylvania in the mid-1740s and was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly. He subsequently laid out the first plan for the town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and served as a colonel in the Pennsylvania militia during the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s Rebellion. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Armstrong was appointed a brigadier general in the Pennsylvania militia. In March 1776, he was appointed to the same rank in the Continental Army and was immediately sent to Charleston to help prepare the city’s defenses. 23. Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 8 June 1776, LP, 2:55–56. 24. Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 11 June 1776, LP, 2:59–60; Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 28 June 1776, LP, 2:91. 25. Quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 134. 26. Krawczymski, William Henry Drayton, 229; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 135. 27. Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 21 June 1776, LP, 2:79. 28. Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 8 June 1776, LP, 2:55; Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 21 June 1776, LP, 2:77–78; Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 25 June 1776, LP, 2:82. 29. Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution, 2:282–283. Rutledge declared that he would “never give his sanction” to the abandonment of Fort Sullivan. Rutledge quoted in Haw, John & Edward Rutledge, 87. 30. Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 11 June 1776, LP, 2:60; Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 21 June 1776, LP, 2:78–79; Charles Lee to Edward Rutledge, 25 June 1776, LP, 2:82–83. 31. Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 28 June 1776, LP, 2:91. [ 338 ]

Notes to Chap ter 10 32. Ibid., 91–92. 33. Quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 328. 34. Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 136. 35. Walter Edgar, Partisans & Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 2001), 35; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 129; and Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 29 June 1776, LP, 2:95. The British lost the 28-gun frigate HMS Actaeon. 36. Charles Lee to John Rutledge, 1 July 1776, LP, 2:105. 37. Ibid. 38. Charles Lee to William Moultrie, 1 July 1776, LP, 2:104–105. 39. Charles Lee to the president of the Convention of Virginia (Edmund Pendleton), 29 June 1776, LP, 2:93; Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 29 June 1776, LP, 2:95; Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 29 June 1776, LP, 2:96; Charles Lee to George Washington, 1 July 1776, LP, 2:100–101; Charles Lee to John Hancock, 2 July 1776, LP, 2:108. See also John Rutledge to William Moultrie, 29 June 1776, NDAR, 5:823; Alden, General Charles Lee, 130; Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, 137; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 128–129; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 136; and Haw, John & Edward Rutledge, 88. 40. For a discussion of Lee’s tactical decisions and his eventual efforts to strengthen Fort Sullivan, see Alden, General Charles Lee, 129; Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, 137; and Haw, John & Edward Rutledge, 88. 41. Quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 129. 42. John Rutledge to Samuel Adams and Stephen Hopkins, 4 July 1776, LP, 4:369. 43. Henry Laurens to John Laurens, 14 August 1776, LP, 2:221. 44. John Hancock to Charles Lee, 20 July 1776, LP, 2:154. 45. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 24 August 1776, LP, 2:239. 46. Charles Lee to Patrick Henry, 29 July 1776, LP, 2:177–179. 47. Alden, General Charles Lee, 130–131. 48. Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 354; John E. Shelby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1988), 186; and Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 68–69. 49. Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 69; and Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 249. 50. Alden, General Charles Lee, 131. 51. “Conference with the Georgia Deputies,” n.d., in LP, 2:115. 52. Ibid. 53. Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, 7 July 1776, LP, 2:127–128; Charles Lee to the president of the Congress of North Carolina, 7 July 1776, LP, 2:129. 54. Alden, General Charles Lee, 131–132; Shelby, The Revolution in Virginia, 187–188; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 72; Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, 321; and Edgar, Partisans & Redcoats, 36–37. The Virginia Convention ordered a battalion of [339 ]

Notes to Chap ter 11 riflemen into the North Carolina backcountry to reinforce a unit of rangers who were patrolling the region. Colonel Peter Muhlenberg’s 8th Virginia Regiment and several South Carolina companies were sent against the Cherokee in Georgia. 55. Samuel Elbert to Charles Lee, 28 May 1776, LP, 2:48; Archibald Bullock to Charles Lee, 2 July 1776, LP, 2:106. 56. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 2 July 1776, LP, 2:110. 57. Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 74. Lee’s invasion plan was enthusiastically endorsed by Georgia’s Council of Safety. 58. Haw, John & Edward Rutledge, 98; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 131–132. 59. Charles Lee to John Rutledge, 19 July 1776, LP, 2:149. 60. Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, 20 July 1776, LP, 2:152. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 132. 61. Charles Lee to John Rutledge, 22 July 1776, LP, 2:156. 62. Alden, General Charles Lee, 132. 63. Arthur Middleton to William Henry Drayton, 14 September 1776, LODC, 5:166. 64. Charles Lee to John Rutledge, 13 August 1776, LP, 2:211. 65. Charles Lee to John Armstrong, 27 August 1776, LP, 2:246. 66. Charles Lee to John Rutledge, 20 August 1776, LP, 2:236. 67. Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 86. 68. For the British landing on Staten Island see Phillip Papas, That Ever Loyal Island: Staten Island and the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2007), chapter 4.

Notes to Chapter 11

1. James Smith to Eleanor Smith, 7 October 1776, LODC, 5:315. 2. John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 138. 3. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 7 October 1776, LODC, 5:311; James Smith to Eleanor Smith, 7 October 1776, LODC, 5:315. 4. Alden, General Charles Lee, 138; Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 143; and congressional resolution of 7 October 1776 advancing Lee $30,000 in exchange for his English estate, JCC, 5:851. 5. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 10 October 1776, LP, 2:260. 6. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina was the younger brother of South Carolina’s chief executive, John Rutledge. 7. For the Staten Island conference, see Phillip Papas, That Ever Loyal Island: Staten Island and the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 82; Ernest Schimizzi and Gregory Schimizzi, The Staten Island Peace Conference: September 11, 1776 (Albany: New York State American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, 1976); Ira D. Gruber, The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (New York: Atheneum, 1972); David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon [ 340 ]

Notes to Chap ter 11 & Schuster, 2001), 154–158; and David McCullough, 1776 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 208. 8. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 10 October 1776, LP, 2:259. 9. The “flying camp” served as a mobile strategic reserve force. Its members were militiamen from Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. 10. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 12 October 1776, LP, 2:260–261. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 140–141; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 144. 11. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 12 October 1776, LP, 2:261. 12. This bluff, which overlooks the west bank of the Hudson River, was known as Mount Constitution. Today it is part of Fort Lee Historic Park. 13. Alden, General Charles Lee, 141–142; and Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 254–256. Throg’s Neck is located in the present-day borough of the Bronx. 14. Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 14 October 1776, LP, 2:261–262. 15. The 130-acre estate was known as Mount Morris and stretched from the Hudson River to the Harlem River. Washington made his headquarters in the present-day Morris-Jumel Mansion, which was built in 1765 for the owner of the estate, Colonel Roger Morris, and his wife, Mary Philipse. 16. Quoted in Thomas Fleming, 1776: Year of Illusions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 369. 17. Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, 7 September 1776, Henry Knox Papers. 18. Quoted in John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 145. 19. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 145; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 142. 20. Valentine’s Hill is located in the present-day Inwood section of the borough of Manhattan. 21. Alden, General Charles Lee, 141, 144; Chernow, Washington, 257; and McCullough, 1776, 230. 22. McCullough, 1776, 230–231. 23. Terry Golway, Washington’s General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 99. 24. George F. Scheer, ed., Private Yankee Doodle: Being a Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Eastern Acorn Press, 1988), 51. 25. Pell’s Point is located in the present-day Eastchester section of the Bronx. 26. Entry for 29 November 1776, in The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, edited by Franklin B. Dexter, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 2:87. 27. Harry M. Dunkak, Still All around Us: An Illustrated Guide to the American Revolution in Westchester County (Mt. Vernon, NY: St. Paul’s Church National Historic Site, 2001), 5. The estimated total of British and Hessian casualties at the Battle of Pell’s Point varies from 150 to 1,000 men. 28. Dunkak, Still All around Us, 5. [341 ]

Notes to Chap ter 11 29. Entry for 29 November 1776, in Dexter, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 2:87. 30. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 2 November 1776, LP, 2:262. 31. Gerald M. Carbone, Washington: Lessons in Leadership (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 98. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 99. 34. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 2 November 1776, LP, 2:262. 35. Ibid. 36. Charles Lee to Benjamin Franklin, 6 November 1776, LP, 2:266. 37. George Washington to Nathanael Greene, 8 November 1776, in The Papers of Nathanael Greene, 13 vols., edited by Dennis M. Conrad, Richard K. Showman, Dennis Michael Conrad, and Roger N. Parks (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976–2006), 1:342–343. See also Golway, Washington’s General, 99–100; Gerald M. Carbone, Nathanael Greene: A Biography of the American Revolution (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 42; and Chernow, Washington, 259–260. 38. Fleming, 1776, 376. See also McCullough, 1776, 236; and Chernow, Washington, 260. 39. George Washington, Instructions to Charles Lee, 10 November 1776, LP, 2:267–270; Alden, General Charles Lee, 145; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 153; McCullough, 1776, 236; and Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 146. 40. For the meeting between Washington and Greene on November 13, 1776, see Chernow, Washington, 260; McCullough, 1776, 236; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 146. 41. Charles Lee to Joseph Reed, 16 November 1776, LP, 2:283. 42. Charles Lee to Nathanael Greene, 11 November 1776, LP, 2:270. A sulky was a lightweight two-wheeled cart that seated only the driver and was pulled by horses or dogs. 43. Chernow, Washington, 20. 44. Samuel Shaw to Rev. John Eliot, 18 November 1776, in Samuel Shaw, The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw: First American Consul at Canton, edited by Josiah Quincy (Cambridge, MA: Metcalf and Company, 1847), 27. 45. “Letter of Lambert Cadwalader to Timothy Pickering on the Capture of Fort Washington, May 1822,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 25 (1901): 261. 46. Charles Lee to George Washington, 19 November 1776, LP, 2:288. 47. Samuel Shaw to Rev. John Eliot, 18 November 1776, in Shaw, The Journals of Major Samuel Shaw, 27–28. 48. Charles Lee, Address to the Militia from Massachusetts, 16 November 1776, in LP, 2:282; Charles Lee to James Bowdoin, 21 November 1776, LP, 2:292. 49. Arthur S. Lefkowitz, The Long Retreat: The Calamitous American Defense of New Jersey, 1776 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 40–53; and David Bonk, Trenton and Princeton, 1776–77: Washington Crosses the Delaware (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2009), 6–8. 50. Bonk, Trenton and Princeton, 6. [ 342 ]

Notes to Chap ter 12 51. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 20 November 1776, LP, 2:288–289; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 147. 52. David R. Palmer, George Washington’s Military Genius (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2012), 145. 53. George Washington to Charles Lee, 21 November 1776, LP, 2:295–296. 54. Palmer, Washington’s Military Genius, 141–142. 55. William Grayson to Charles Lee, 20 November 1776, LP, 2:290; Charles Lee to Joseph Reed, 24 November 1776, LP, 2:306; Charles Lee to George Washington, 24 November 1776, LP, 2:307. Lee was determined to clear Westchester of Loyalist partisans. The most notorious of these were Major Robert Rogers’s Queen’s Rangers, who eluded Lee on numerous occasions. During the French and Indian War, Lee had admired Rogers’s use of guerrilla tactics against the French and their Native American allies. In 1776, they found themselves on opposite sides of the AngloAmerican conflict. 56. George Washington to Charles Lee, 21 November 1776, LP, 2:296. 57. William Heath to Charles Lee, 21 November 1776, LP, 2:299; Charles Lee to Joseph Reed, 21 November 1776, LP, 2:301. 58. William Heath to Charles Lee, 21 November 1776, LP, 2:299–300. 59. Charles Lee to William Heath, 23 November 1776, LP, 2:304. 60. William Heath to Charles Lee, 24 November 1776, LP, 2:305. 61. Charles Lee to William Heath, 26 November 1776, LP, 2:313–314. 62. Ibid., 314. 63. Charles Lee to James Bowdoin, 22 November 1776, LP, 2:304; Charles Lee to George Washington, 26 November 1776 LP, 2:315; Charles Lee to the New England Governors, 27 November 1776, LP, 2:318–319. See also Fleming, 1776, 415. 64. Alden, General Charles Lee, 152. 65. Fleming, 1776, 415. 66. Charles Lee to James Bowdoin, 21 November 1776, LP, 2:291. 67. Charles Lee to George Washington, 30 November 1776, LP, 2:322–323. 68. Quoted in Lefkowitz, The Long Retreat, 108. 69. Ibid., 91. 70. George Washington to Charles Lee, 1 December 1776, LP, 2:326.

Notes to Chapter 12

1. Charles Lee to Joseph Reed, 24 November 1776, LP, 2:305–306. 2. Arthur S. Lefkowitz, The Long Retreat: The Calamitous American Defense of New Jersey, 1776 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 91. 3. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 266; and John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 149–150. 4. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 20 November 1776, LP, 2:288; Charles Lee to James Bowdoin, 21 November 1776, LP, 2:291. 5. Lefkowitz, The Long Retreat, 97. [343 ]

Notes to Chap ter 12 6. Ibid., 93. 7. For the 2 December 1776 resolution directing the Committee for Establishing Expresses to “send Colonel [William] Stewart, or any other officer expresses to General Lee, to know where and in what situation he and the army with him are,” see JCC, 6:1000. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 152–153. 8. Charles Lee to George Washington, 30 November 1776, LP, 2:322–323. See also Lefkowitz, The Long Retreat, 107. 9. Charles Lee to George Washington, 8 December 1776, LP, 2:337. 10. Quoted in Thomas Fleming, 1776: Year of Illusions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 424. 11. Charles Lee to George Washington, 4 December 1776, LP, 2:330. 12. Fleming, 1776, 424. 13. Charles Lee to George Washington, 30 November 1776, LP, 2:322. 14. Charles Lee to George Washington, 8 December 1776, LP, 2:337. 15. Charles Lee to George Washington, 4 December 1776, LP, 2:330. 16. Shy, People Numerous and Armed, 149. 17. Charles Lee to George Washington, 11 December 1776, LP, 2:345. 18. John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 161. 19. Don Higginbotham, “Reflections on the War of Independence, Modern Guerrilla Warfare, and the War in Vietnam,” in Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution, edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), 7–8. 20. Charles Lee to James Bowdoin, 22 November 1776, LP, 2:304. Lee wrote to General William Heath: “I am in hopes here to reconquer (if I may so express myself ) the Jerseys. It was really in the hands of the enemy before my arrival”; Charles Lee to William Heath, 9 December 1776, LP, 2:340. 21. Charles Lee to James Bowdoin, 30 November 1776, LP, 2:323–324. See also Charles P. Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York: New York University Press, 1996), xiii. 22. Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 150–151. 23. Charles Lee to George Washington, 8 December 1776, LP, 2:338; George Washington to Charles Lee, 11 December 1776, LP, 2:343. See also Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 150. 24. George Washington to Charles Lee, 10 December 1776, LP, 2:341. 25. Shy, People Numerous and Armed, 150. 26. Lefkowitz, The Long Retreat, 119–120. 27. David R. Palmer, George Washington’s Military Genius (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2012), 142–143. 28. Charles Lee to George Washington, 8 December 1776, LP, 2:337; Charles Lee to a committee of Congress, 8 December 1776, LP, 2:338. 29. Charles Lee to a committee of Congress, 8 December 1776, LP, 2:338–339.

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Notes to Chap ter 12 30. Charles Lee to George Washington, 8 December 1776, LP, 2:337; Charles Lee to a committee of Congress, 8 December 1776, LP, 2:339. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 153–154. 31. Theodore Thayer, Colonial and Revolutionary Morris County (Morristown, NJ: Morris County Heritage Commission, 1975), 162. 32. George Washington to Charles Lee, 14 December 1776, LP, 2:349. 33. Charles Lee to George Washington, 11 December 1776, LP, 2:345. 34. Thayer, Colonial and Revolutionary Morris County, 131. 35. Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 12/13 December 1776, LP, 2:348. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 157; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 165; and Lefkowitz, The Long Retreat, 131–132. 36. Entry for 18 January 1777, in Diary of Captain Thomas Rodney, 1776–1777, edited by Caesar A. Rodney (Wilmington: Historical Society of Delaware, 1888), 47. 37. Alden, General Charles Lee, 156–157. See also Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 216–217; and Andrew D. Mellick Jr., The Story of an Old Farm, or Life in New Jersey in the Eighteenth Century (Somerville, NJ: The Unionist-Gazette, 1889), 344–345. The elder’s name was Muklewrath. 38. Entry for 1 January 1777, in The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 2 vols., edited by Franklin B. Dexter (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 2:106. See also General James Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Printed by Abraham Small, 1816), 1:105. 39. Ibid., 106. 40. Quoted in Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers, 218. 41. Alden, General Charles Lee, 158. The quotes are from entry for 18 January 1777, in Rodney, Diary of Captain Thomas Rodney, 46. 42. Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times, 1:105. See also entry for 1 January 1777, in Dexter, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 2:106. 43. Quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 160. 44. John Sullivan to George Washington, 13 December 1776, PGW, 9:328. 45. Lefkowitz, The Long Retreat, 135. 46. Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, 15 December 1776, Henry Knox Papers. 47. Quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 159. 48. Quoted in ibid. 49. George Washington to John Hancock, 15 December 1776, PGW, 9:344. 50. George Washington to Lund Washington, 10–17 December 1776, PGW, 9:290. In his diary entry for December 22, 1776, Captain Thomas Rodney of Delaware noted that Lee’s capture had “damped the spirit of the [Continental] army very much, and everything looked very gloomy.” Rodney, Diary of Captain Thomas Rodney, 19. 51. Robert Morris to Silas Deane, 20 December 1776, LODC, 5:621. 52. Benjamin Rush to Richard Henry Lee, 21 December 1776, LODC, 5:640. 53. John Hancock to Robert Morris, 23 December 1776, LODC, 5:642.

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Notes to Chap ter 13 54. General James Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Printed by Abraham Small, 1816), 1:106; Henry M. Muhlenberg, Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. 3 vols., trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: The Muhlenberg Press, 1942), 2:765. 55. Hannah Winthrop to Mercy Otis Warren, 14 January 1777, in Warren-Adams Letters, Being Chiefly a Correspondence between John Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Warren, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917–1925), 1:283. 56. Phillis Wheatley, “On the Capture of General Lee” [30 December 1776], in The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, edited by John C. Shields (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 147–148. For an analysis of Wheatley’s poem, see John C. Shields, The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 229–230; and Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 158. 57. William Whipple to Josiah Bartlett, 23 December 1776, LODC, 5:653. 58. Samuel Adams to James Warren, 1 January 1777, Warren-Adams Letters, 1:282. In his diary entry for December 22, 1776, Captain Thomas Rodney of Delaware wrote that he “was sorry for Gen. Lee because I knew him personally and had a regard for him, but I did not view his capture as unfavorable but as an advantage; that too much confidence had been put in General Lee, that this must have greatly embarrassed the commander in chief [George Washington], as he was afraid to do anything without consulting Gen. Lee, but now he would be at liberty to exert his own talents.” Rodney, Diary of Captain Thomas Rodney, 19. 59. Captain John Bowater to Basil Fielding (Earl of Denbigh), 9 January 1777, in The Lost War: Letters from British Officers during the American Revolution, edited by Marian Balderston and David Syrett (New York: Horizon Press, 1975), 118. See also Stephen Kemble, The Kemble Papers, vol. 1, 1773–1789 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1883), 1:103. 60. Major Mungo Campbell to Robert Campbell, January 1777, GLC03154, Gilder Lehrman Collection, New York, New York. 61. Samuel Stelle Smith, ed., At General Howe’s Side: 1776–1778, translated by Ernst Kipping (Monmouth Beach, NJ: Philip Freneau Press, 1974), 7. 62. Alden, General Charles Lee, 160–161; and James J. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man: Charles Lee and the Politics of Reputation, Masculinity, and Identity during the Revolutionary War, 1755–1783” (PhD diss., University of Toledo, 2006), 142–143.

Notes to Chapter 13

1. Quoted in John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 164. 2. Quoted in James J. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man: Charles Lee and the Politics of Reputation, Masculinity, and Identity during the Revolutionary War, 1755–1783” (PhD diss., University of Toledo, 2006), 145. 3. Major Mungo Campbell to Robert Campbell, January 1777, GLC03154, Gilder Lehrman Collection, New York, New York.

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Notes to Chap ter 13

4. Quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 160. 5. Charles Lee to Primrose Kennedy, n.d., LP, 2:356. 6. Robert Morris to George Washington, 26 December 1776, PGW, 9:447. 7. For the 21 February 1777 resolution directing Washington to tell Lee that Congress was pursuing “every means in their power to provide for his personal safety, and to obtain his liberty,” see JCC, 7:140–141. 8. John Hancock to George Washington, 23 December 1776, LODC, 5:643. 9. John Hancock to Robert Morris, 23 December 1776, LODC, 5:642. See also John Hancock to George Washington, 23 December 1776, LODC, 5:643. Congress appropriated “one Hundred Half Johannes,” a Portuguese gold coin, for Lee’s use while in British custody. 10. Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 77. 11. Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell was a Member of Parliament and commanded the 71st Regiment of Foot, Fraser’s Highlanders. He was captured near Boston in July 1776. 12. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 77. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 78. Although Washington was not opposed in principle to a retaliatory policy, he believed that Congress had made a mistake by putting Lee’s safety ahead of that of other American prisoners, whose suffering would surely increase should the British respond in the same way. 15. William Heath to George Washington, 21 December 1776, PGW, 9:399. 16. Thomas Jones, History of New York during the Revolutionary War and of the Leading Events in the Other Colonies at That Period, 2 vols., edited by Edward F. De Lancey (New York: New York Historical Society, 1879), 1:173–175. Howe allowed Giuseppe Minghini and Lee’s dogs to come to New York to stay with him. See Charles Lee to George Washington, 9 February 1777, LP, 2:358; Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 4 April 1777, LP, 2:367; Charles Lee to Giuseppe Minghini, 4 April 1777, LP, 2:367–368. See also Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 171–172; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 167, 169. 17. Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 73–74. 18. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 155–156. 19. Quoted in ibid., 157. 20. Alden, General Charles Lee, 164; and Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 159. 21. Ira D. Gruber, The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 194–196. 22. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 10 February 1777, LP, 2:358–359. See also Edward H. Tatum Jr., ed., The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, Secretary to Lord Howe, 1776–1778 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1940), 208.

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Notes to Chap ter 13 23. Robert Morris and Richard Henry Lee gave serious thought to meeting with Lee. “His request must be complied with,” Morris informed Benjamin Rush. “I dont know who the Congress will send. It will be very inconvenient should they think of me, but their commands must be obeyed”; Robert Morris to Benjamin Rush, 17 February 1777, LODC, 6:310. See also Richard Henry Lee to Charles Lee, 11 February 1777, in The Letters of Richard Henry Lee, vol. 1, 1762–1778, edited by James C. Ballagh (New York: MacMillan, 1911), 1:256. 24. Benjamin Rush’s Notes of Debates, 21 February 1777, LODC, 6:340–341; and Gruber, The Howe Brothers, 195. “The Congress have concluded . . . not to send a deputation of their body to General Lee,” Benjamin Rush told Robert Morris, for it would “suspend our military operations, and . . . divide and deceive the States. . . . This suspicion was rendered the more probable from the circumstances . . . [that] our Commissioners at the Court of France will urge the necessity of a speedy declaration in our favor, and which can only be prevented by the news that we are negociating with Great Britain.” See Benjamin Rush to Robert Morris, 22 February 1777, LODC, 6:346. 25. Nathanael Greene to John Adams, 3 March 1777, in Papers of John Adams, vol. 5, available at MHS Digital Editions, http://www.masshist.org/publications/apde/ portia.php?mode=p&id=PJA05p99, accessed 7 October 2013. 26. John Hancock to George Washington, 26 March 1777, LODC, 6:496. 27. Charles Lee to John Hancock, 19 March 1777, LP, 2:360. 28. George Washington to Charles Lee, 1 April 1777, LP, 2:366. 29. Alden, General Charles Lee, 173–174. 30. John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 191. 31. Alden, General Charles Lee, 174. 32. Charles Lee, Scheme for Putting an End to the War, 29 March 1777, LP, 2:361–363. 33. Ibid., 363–365. 34. Alden, General Charles Lee, 175; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 175; Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 79; and John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 153. 35. “Extract of a Letter from an Officer on Board the Eagle, off New York,” 9 June 1777, NDAR, 9:78. 36. John Bowater to Basil Fielding (Earl of Denbigh), 5 and 11 June 1777, in The Lost War: Letters from British Officers during the American Revolution, edited by Marian Balderston and David Syrett (New York: Horizon Press, 1975), 130. 37. Richard Henry Lee to John Page, 17 August 1777, LODC, 7:498. 38. Alden, General Charles Lee, 182–183; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 182; and Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 78. 39. John Bowater to Basil Fielding, 5 and 11 June 1777, 130–131. 40. Lincoln MacVeagh, ed., The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777 (New York: Dial Press, 1924), 246.

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Notes to Chap ter 13 41. Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (1964; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 121; and Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice: 1763–1789 (1971; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983), 182. 42. Gruber, The Howe Brothers, 228–229; Mackesy, The War for America, 124–125; and Stephen Kemble, The Kemble Papers, vol. 1, 1773–1789 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1883), 1:121–123. 43. Higginbotham, The War of American Independence, 182–183. 44. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 20 July 1777, LODC, 7:354; John Hancock to William Barton, 26 July 1777, LODC, 7:377; John Hancock to George Washington, 26 July 1777, LODC, 7:379. This was the second time that Prescott had been captured by the Americans. The first time was in November 1775. Prescott was eventually exchanged and released in September 1776 for General John Sullivan. 45. Henry Laurens to John Lewis Gervais, 5 August 1777, LODC, 7:419. See also Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 188; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 183–184. 46. Alden, General Charles Lee, 183–184. 47. Quoted in Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 182. 48. Alden, General Charles Lee; and Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 120. 49. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 15 December 1777, LP, 2:375. 50. Charles Lee to George Washington, 30 December 1777, LP, 2:376. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 185; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 186; and Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies, 73. 51. George Washington to Charles Lee, 27 January 1778, LP, 2:378. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 185. 52. Elias Boudinot, Journal or Historical Recollections of American Events during the Revolutionary War (Philadelphia: Frederick Bourquin, 1894), 74. 53. George Washington to Charles Lee, 27 January 1778, LP, 2:378. 54. Alden, General Charles Lee, 186. 55. Thomas Fleming, Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2005), 300. 56. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 188–189; Alden, General Charles Lee, 185; and S. DeWitt Bloodgood, A Sketch of the Olden Times; or General Lee’s Farewell Dinner, at New-York. Founded on Fact. Being the First of a Series of Revolutionary Tales by an Antiquary (New York: G. and C. Carvill, 1829). 57. Alden, General Charles Lee, 187; and Boudinot, Journal or Historical Recollections, 76. See also Joshua Loring to Elias Boudinot, 18 March 1778, LP, 2:380. 58. Boudinot, Journal or Historical Recollections, 79–80; Alden, General Charles Lee, 187–188; Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 4 June 1778, LP, 2:398; and Charles Lee’s parole document, 5 April 1778, LP, 2:382. 59. Alexander Hamilton to General Nathanael Greene, 3 April 1778, LP, 2:381–382; Alden, General Charles Lee, 189–190; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 190; and Boudinot, Journal or Historical Recollections, 78.

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Notes to Chap ter 14 60. Boudinot, Journal or Historical Recollections, 77–78; Alden, General Charles Lee, 189–190; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 190–191. 61. Boudinot, Journal or Historical Recollections, 75. See also Plan for the Formation of the American Army, 1778, LP, 2:383–384. Shy writes that Lee advocated “the need for American warfare to fit the American genius”; Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, 154. I am in agreement with Shy. 62. Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 19. 63. Higginbotham, “Reflections on the War of Independence, Modern Guerrilla Warfare, and the War in Vietnam,” in Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution, edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1984), 9. 64. Paul Lockhart, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2008), 131–133. 65. Higginbotham, “Reflections on the War of Independence,” 15. 66. Boudinot, Journal or Historical Recollections, 79; and Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 338–339. 67. Alden, General Charles Lee, 188–189; and Chernow, Washington, 321. See also Theodore Thayer, The Making of a Scapegoat: Washington and Lee at Monmouth (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1976), 5. 68. Alden, General Charles Lee, 190. See also Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 191; and Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), 290. 69. Henry Laurens to James Duane, 17 April 1778, LODC, 9:430. 70. Charles Lee to Henry Laurens, 17 April 1778, LP, 2:389–390. 71. George Washington to Charles Lee, 22 April 1778, LP, 2:391. 72. Charles Lee to George Washington, 28 April 1778, LP, 2:391–392.

Notes to Chapter 14

1. Charles Lee to Henry Laurens, 13 May 1778, LP, 2:392–393. See also Charles Carroll to Charles Carroll Sr., 17 May 1778, LODC, 9:691. 2. Derived from the Italian word for medley. 3. Paul Lockhart, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army (Washington, D C: Smithsonian Books, 2008), 123–124. 4. John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 201–202; Wayne Bodle, The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 228–229; Thomas Fleming, Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2005), 301; Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 198; and James R. Gaines, For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette, and Their Revolutions (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 112–113. [ 350 ]

Notes to Chap ter 14 5. Fleming, Washington’s Secret War, 301. Alden argues that it was Lee’s way of taking a stand against the congress’s “absolute right to deprive him of his freedom of opinion and of action on pain of abandoning his commission”; Alden, General Charles Lee, 202. For a similar interpretation see Theodore Thayer, The Making of a Scapegoat: Washington and Lee at Monmouth (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1976), 20–21. 6. Lockhart, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge, 132–133; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 198. See also Alexander Hamilton to Elias Boudinot, 26 July 1778, in The Works of Alexander Hamilton, 12 vols., edited by Henry Cabot Lodge (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 9:148. 7. Charles Lee to George Washington, 15 June 1778, LP, 2:399–400; Alden, General Charles Lee, 199; and Bodle, The Valley Forge Winter, 240. 8. Charles Lee, memorandum to George Washington, n.d., LP, 2:394–395. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 198. 9. George Washington to Charles Lee, 15 June 1778, LP, 2:402–405. See also Bodle, The Valley Forge Winter, 240; Alden, General Charles Lee, 199; and Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 339. 10. Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), 291–292; and Chernow, Washington, 338. 11. Alden, General Charles Lee, 205; Fleming, Washington’s Secret War, 308. 12. Bodle, The Valley Forge Winter, 242; John G. Bilby and Katherine Bilby Jenkins, Monmouth Court House: The Battle That Made the American Army (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2010), 93; Lengel, General George Washington, 291; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 205–207. 13. Chernow, Washington, 339; Lengel, General George Washington, 292; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 124–125; and Brendan Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 1778: The Last Great Battle in the North (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2004), 39. 14. George Washington to Charles Lee, 30 May [18 June], 1778, LP, 2:407. 15. Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 125. Lee’s division was followed by the divisions commanded by Anthony Wayne, the Marquis de Lafayette, Baron Johann DeKalb, Henry Knox (artillery), and William Alexander, Lord Stirling. Washington directed General Benedict Arnold, who was recovering from a leg wound suffered at Saratoga, to take a regiment of Massachusetts Continentals and several hundred Pennsylvania militiamen to secure Philadelphia. He also ordered a regiment of convalescents to remain at Valley Forge. 16. John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 300; and Chernow, Washington, 339. 17. Charles Lee to George Washington, 22 June 1778, LP, 2:411; Governor William Livingston to Charles Lee, 22 June 1778, LP, 2:412. See also Thayer, The Making of a Scapegoat, 25. 18. Lengel, General George Washington, 292; and Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 40. 19. Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 127; and Stephen R. Taaffe, The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777–1778 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 209. [351 ]

Notes to Chap ter 14 20. Alden, General Charles Lee, 208–209. 21. Ibid. See also Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 300; Thayer, The Making of a Scapegoat, 29; William S. Stryker, The Battle of Monmouth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1927), 76; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 128; and Lockhart, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge, 146–147. 22. Quoted in Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2005), 113. 23. Quoted in Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 301. 24. Lafayette quoted in Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 128, and in Gaines, For Liberty and Glory, 113. See also David A. Clary, Adopted Son: Washington, Lafayette, and the Friendship That Saved the Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 2007), 189–190. 25. Paul David Nelson, Anthony Wayne: Soldier of the Early Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 77; Alden, General Charles Lee, 208–209; and Thayer, The Making of a Scapegoat, 29. 26. Present-day Freehold, New Jersey. 27. Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 129. 28. Ibid., 210; Chernow, Washington, 340; Lockhart, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge, 148; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 40; and Taaffe, The Philadelphia Campaign, 210. The quote is from Charles Lee to George Washington, 25 June 1778, LP, 2:417. 29. Alden, General Charles Lee, 210; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 204; Gaines, For Liberty and Glory, 113–114; Chernow, Washington, 340; and Lengel, General George Washington, 294. See also Alexander Hamilton to Elias Boudinot, 26 July 1778, in The Works of Alexander Hamilton, 12 vols., edited by Henry Cabot Lodge (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 9:141. 30. Charles Lee to General Washington, 25 June 1778, LP, 2:417–418. See also Lengel, General George Washington, 294. 31. General Lafayette to George Washington, 26 June 1778, LP, 2:419. 32. Alden, General Charles Lee, 210; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 301, 303; Taaffe, The Philadelphia Campaign, 210; Gaines, For Liberty and Glory, 114; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 41; and Lengel, General George Washington, 294–295. See also General Washington to Charles Lee, 26 June 1778, LP, 2:421; General Washington to General Lafayette, 26 June 1778, 2:422. 33. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 41. 34. Lengel, General George Washington, 298. 35. Alden, General Charles Lee, 212; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 185; Lengel, General George Washington, 298; and Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 303. 36. Nelson, Anthony Wayne, 78. 37. Lengel, General George Washington, 295; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 37; and Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 123. 38. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 41, 44. 39. Ibid., 37; Lengel, General George Washington, 298; and Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 190.

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Notes to Chap ter 14 40. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 44, 46. See also Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 186; and George Washington to the president of Congress, 28 June 1778, LP, 3:427. 41. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 44, 46. See also Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 186. 42. Alan C. Cate, Founding Fighters: The Battlefield Leaders Who Made American Independence (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 46. 43. Alden, General Charles Lee, 214; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 193; and Taaffe, The Philadelphia Campaign, 213. 44. Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 190. 45. Ibid., 194–196. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 215; and Nelson, Anthony Wayne, 78. 46. George F. Scheer, ed., Private Yankee Doodle: Being a Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier (New York: Eastern Acorn Press, 1988), 127. 47. Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 194; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 49, 52; Lengel, General George Washington, 298; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 215. 48. Alden, General Charles Lee, 216; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 194–195; and Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 44. 49. Ibid. See also Lengel, General George Washington, 299; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 195–196; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 48–49; and Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 304. 50. Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 198–199; and Lengel, General George Washington, 299. 51. Ibid., 198. See also Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 49. 52. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 49, 52. 53. Alden, General Charles Lee, 217; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 52; and Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 199. 54. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 52–53; and Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 199–200. Cate writes, “It often happens in battle, especially when communication and understanding of the commander’s intent are poor that the retirement of one or several elements can precipitate a more general pullback”; Cate, The Founding Fighters, 47. 55. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 53; Cate, The Founding Fighters, 47; and Lengel, General George Washington, 299. 56. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 53, 57; and Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 200–201. 57. Alden, General Charles Lee, 220; and Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 57. 58. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 57, 60; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 202; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 221. 59. Lengel, General George Washington, 300; Alden, General Charles Lee, 222; and Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 60.

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Notes to Chap ter 15 60. Alden, General Charles Lee, 222; Chernow, Washington, 341; Lengel, General George Washington, 300; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 60; and Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 202. 61. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 61. 62. Ibid. See also Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 215. 63. Generals Scott and Lafayette are quoted in Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 204–205. See also Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 305. 64. Scheer, Private Yankee Doodle, 127. 65. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 79; and Barbara J. Mitnick, “Picturing Revolutionary New Jersey: The Arts,” in New Jersey in the American Revolution, edited by Barbara J. Mitnick (New Brunswick, NJ: Rivergate Books, 2005), 70. Leutze did a good job on the details of the uniforms worn by Washington and his troops at Monmouth, but he incorrectly portrayed Washington as riding a brown horse. 66. Alden, General Charles Lee, 222–223; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 215; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 206; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 61–65; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 305; and Taaffe, The Philadelphia Campaign, 217–218. 67. Alden, General Charles Lee, 223–224. See also Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 65; and Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 206. Lee is quoted in Lengel, General George Washington, 301. 68. Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 206–207, 210. 69. Alden, General Charles Lee, 224; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 210, 212; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 65, 69–70; and Lengel, General George Washington, 301. 70. Alden, General Charles Lee, 224; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 305; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 70–71; and Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 213–215. 71. Lengel, General George Washington, 302; and Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 70. 72. Alden, General Charles Lee, 224–226; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 213–220; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 70–74; Lengel, General George Washington, 302; Chernow, Washington, 343–344; and Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 305–306. 73. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 216–217; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 224–225. 74. Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 74–75; Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 220–221; Lengel, General George Washington, 304; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 218. 75. Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth Court House, 221; and Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 76–77. 76. Lengel, General George Washington, 306; and Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 75. 77. Bodle, The Valley Forge Winter, 247.

Notes to Chapter 15

1. Quoted in Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), 306. 2. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 345. [ 354 ]

Notes to Chap ter 15 3. Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 28 [29] June 1778, LP, 2:430. 4. Thomas Fleming, Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2005), 327. 5. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 3 July 1778, LP, 2:457–459. See also Fleming, Washington’s Secret War, 327. 6. Wayne Bodle, The Valley Forge Winter: Civilians and Soldiers in War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 248; and Gregory D. Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), 110. Hamilton was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, in the Leeward Islands. His father, James A. Hamilton, was a successful Scottish merchant. Shortly after his birth, Hamilton’s mother, Rachel Faucette Buck, took him to St. Croix. Lafayette was two years old when his father, Michel Louis Christophe Roch Gilbert Paulette du Motier, a colonel of French Grenadiers, was killed at the Battle of Minden in 1759. 7. Quoted in David A. Clary, Adopted Son: Washington, Lafayette, and the Friendship That Saved the Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 2007), 197. 8. John Laurens to Henry Laurens, 2 July 1778, LP, 2:451. 9. Alexander Hamilton to Elias Boudinot, 5 July 1778, in The Works of Alexander Hamilton, 12 vols., edited by Henry Cabot Lodge (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 9:142; Alexander Hamilton to Elias Boudinot, 5 July 1778, LP, 2:467–468. 10. Charles Lee to George Washington, 1 July [30 June] 1778, LP, 2:435–436. 11. George Washington to Charles Lee, 30 June 1778, LP, 2:437. 12. Quoted in Chernow, Washington, 345. 13. Charles Lee to George Washington, 28 [30] June, 1778, LP, 2:437. 14. For the difference between a court of inquiry and a court-martial, see Fleming, Washington’s Secret War, 326. 15. Charles Lee to George Washington, 30 June 1778, LP, 2:438. 16. Cate writes, “Washington normally displayed greatness of spirit and had Lee let the episode pass, Washington might have done likewise”; Alan C. Cate, Founding Fighters: The Battlefield Leaders Who Made American Independence (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 48. 17. Charles Lee to Isaac Collins, 3 July 1778, LP, 2:452–453. See also Fleming, Washington’s Secret War, 326–327; and Theodore Thayer, The Making of a Scapegoat: Washington and Lee at Monmouth (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1976), 75. 18. Joseph Reed to Charles Lee, July 1778, LP, 2:475–477. 19. Charles Lee to Joseph Reed, 22 July 1778, LP, 2:478–480. 20. Fleming, Washington’s Secret War, 327. 21. John Penn to Richard Caswell, 15 July 1778, LODC, 10:287–288. 22. Generals Jedediah Huntington, Enoch Poor, William Smallwood, and William Woodford. 23. Colonels Israel Angel, Thomas Clark, Christian Febiger, William Irvine, William Shepard, Herman Swift, Edward Wigglesworth, and Otho H. Williams. [355 ]

Notes to Chap ter 15 24. James J. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man: Charles Lee and the Politics of Reputation, Masculinity, and Identity during the Revolutionary War, 1755–1783” (PhD diss., University of Toledo, 2006), 175; and Brendan Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 1778: The Last Great Battle in the North (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2004), 79. 25. Charles Lee to Joseph Reed, 22 July 1778, LP, 2:479. 26. Testimony of Brigadier-General Charles Scott, 4 July 1778, LP, 3:2–3; testimony of Brigadier-General Anthony Wayne, 4 July 1778, LP, 3:3–5; and testimony of the Marquis de Lafayette, 5 July 1778, LP, 3:11, 13. See also Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 179; and Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 79. 27. Testimony of Lieutenant-Colonel John Fitzgerald, 4 July 1778, LP, 3:6; testimony of Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Kidder Meade, 4 July 1778, LP, 3:7; and testimony of Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Hamilton, 4 July 1778, LP, 3:10. 28. Testimony of Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Hamilton, 4 July 1778, LP, 3:10. 29. Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution, 111–112. 30. Bilby and Jenkins, Monmouth, 228. 31. Testimony of Lieutenant-Colonel John Laurens, 13 July 1778, LP, 3:51–57; and Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution, 111. 32. Testimony of Lieutenant-Colonel John Laurens, 13 July 1778, LP, 3:56. 33. Testimony of Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Hamilton, 13 July 1778, LP, 3:60. 34. Ibid., 62. See also Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution, 112. 35. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 179–180. 36. Testimony of Captain John Francis Mercer, 21 July 1778, LP, 3:116–120; testimony of Captain Evan Edwards, 25 July 1778, LP, 3:161–168. See also Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 183–184; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 79; and Thayer, The Making of a Scapegoat, 77. 37. Testimony of Lieutenant-Colonel Eleazer Oswald, 22 July 1778, LP, 3:130–139. 38. Testimony of Brigadier-General Henry Knox, 24 July 1778, LP, 3:156–158. See also Thayer, Washington’s Scapegoat, 78; and Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, 29 June 1778, GLC0243700713; Henry Knox to William Knox, 3 July 1778, GLC02437.00714; and Henry Knox to William Knox, 5 July 1778, GLC02437.00715, all three in Gilder Lehrman Collection, New York, New York. Henry Knox wrote to his brother William on 3 July 1778, “General Lee instead of finding a Covering party as was expected, found the whole army or the greater part of it, after some manoeuvring, Cannonading & some other circumstances which are not yet sufficiently explained it was thought proper by Genl Lee to retire . . . without much loss . . . about two miles distance in the rear.” 39. Testimony of Lieutenant-Colonel John Brooks, 23 July 1778, LP, 3:149–150. See also Thayer, Washington’s Scapegoat, 77–78. 40. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 184–185. 41. Ibid., 185–186. 42. Sworn Deposition of Mr. Peter Wikoff, 9 August 1778, LP, 3:172. 43. Major-General Lee’s Defense Statement, 9 August 1778, LP, 3:174–207. 44. Ibid. [ 356 ]

Notes to Chap ter 15 45. Thayer, Washington’s Scapegoat, 78; Morrissey, Monmouth Courthouse, 79. Thayer believed the court’s verdict was “a travesty of justice,” while Morrissey described it as “a gross miscarriage.” 46. Cate, Founding Fighters, 49. 47. Henry Knox to William Knox, 6 September 1778, GLC02437.00725, Gilder Lehrman Collection, New York, New York. 48. Charles Lee to Aaron Burr, October 1778, LP, 3:238. 49. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 13 August 1778, LP, 3:228–229. 50. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 29 September 1778, LP, 3:237. See also Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 189. 51. Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 29 September 1778, LP, 3:237–238. 52. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 188. 53. Charles Stedman, The History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the author, 1794), 2:22. 54. Quoted in Henry Clinton, The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775–1782, edited by William B. Willcox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 96n19. 55. Charles Lee to Colonel Aaron Burr, October 1778, LP, 3:238. See also Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 46. 56. Evan Edwards to Charles Lee, 30 August 1778, LP, 3:229. 57. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 190. 58. John Clark to Charles Lee, 3 September 1778, LP, 3:230–231; Major John Clark’s Statement, 3 September 1778, LP, 3:231–232; and Charles Lee to Henry Laurens, 4 September 1778, LP, 3:233. 59. Henry Laurens to Charles Lee, 7 September 1778, LODC, 10:598. For the refusal of Congress to read Lee’s letter enclosing Clark’s evidence, see JCC, 12:887. 60. John Laurens to Alexander Hamilton, December 1778, LP, 3:273. 61. William Henry Drayton to George Washington, 5 July 1778, LODC, 10:223. 62. Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution, 113. 63. Quoted in Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 198. 64. Gouverneur Morris to George Washington, 26 October 1778, LODC, 11:127. 65. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 198. 66. Thayer, Washington’s Scapegoat, 81. 67. “General Lee’s Vindication to the Public,” 3 December 1778, LP, 3:255–265. 68. Alden, General Charles Lee, 255–256. 69. Ibid., 255–256; and John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 307. 70. George Washington to Joseph Reed, 12 December 1778, LP, 3:274. 71. Alden, General Charles Lee, 264. 72. John Laurens to Alexander Hamilton, December 1778, LP, 3:273; Charles Lee to John Laurens, 22 December 1778, LP, 3:283. 73. Resolution to carry out sentence of Lee’s court-martial, 5 December 1778, JCC, 12:1195. See also Henry Laurens to the Marquis de Lafayette, 6 December 1778, [357 ]

Notes to Chap ter 15 LODC, 11:293; Henry Laurens to George Washington, 6 December 1778, LODC, 11:295. Sixteen delegates voted to uphold the verdict and seven voted against it. 74. Quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 254. 75. “Extract from Rivington’s New-York Royal Gazette,” 17 February 1779, LP, 3:309–310. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 258; and Thayer, Washington’s Scapegoat, 81. 76. All three are quoted in Thayer, Washington’s Scapegoat, 81. 77. Evan Edwards to Charles Lee, 21 October 1781, LP, 3:463. 78. Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution, 125; Alden, General Charles Lee, 262; and Isenberg, Fallen Founder, 47. 79. Charles Lee to John Laurens, 22 December 1778, LP, 3:283. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 262; Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution, 124–125; and Thayer, Washington’s Scapegoat, 82. 80. Alden, General Charles Lee, 262–263; Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution, 125–126; Thayer, Washington’s Scapegoat, 82; and “Narrative of a Duel between General Lee and Colonel Laurens,” 24 December 1778, LP, 3:283–285. 81. “Narrative of a Duel between General Lee and Colonel Laurens,” 24 December 1778, in LP, 3:283–284. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 263–264; Massey, John Laurens and the American Revolution, 126; and Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 204–206. Lee quoted in Thayer, Washington’s Scapegoat, 82. 82. Paul Lockhart, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army (Washington, D C: Smithsonian Books, 2008), 188–189; Alden, General Charles Lee, 260–262; Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 204; and Thayer, Washington’s Scapegoat, 82. See also Baron von Steuben to Charles Lee, 2 December 1778, LP, 3:253; and Alexander Hamilton to Baron von Steuben, 19 December 1778, LP, 3:254. 83. Anthony Wayne to Charles Lee, 7 January 1779, LP, 3:291. See also Paul David Nelson, Anthony Wayne: Soldier of the Early Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 87. 84. Charles Lee to Anthony Wayne, 7 January 1779, LP, 3:292–293. 85. Anthony Wayne to Charles Lee, 7 January 1779, LP, 3:293–294; Charles Lee to Anthony Wayne, 11 August 1779, LP, 3:356–357. See also Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 228–229; and Nelson, Anthony Wayne, 88. 86. William Henry Drayton to Charles Lee, 3 February 1779, LP, 3:305–306; William Henry Drayton to Charles Lee, 8 February 1779, LP, 3:308–309; Charles Lee to William Henry Drayton, 5 February 1779, LP, 3:307–308; Charles Lee to William Henry Drayton, 15 March 1779, LP, 3:317–318.See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 266–269; and Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man,” 230–232. 87. Rebecca Franks was also the cousin of David Salisbury Franks, one of General Benedict Arnold’s aides-de-camp. 88. Charles Lee to Miss Rebecca Franks, 20 December 1778, LP, 3:278–281. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 270–273; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 245–246.

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Notes to Chap ter 16 89. Charles Lee to Miss Rebecca Franks, 28 January 1779, LP, 3:302; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 273. 90. Alden, General Charles Lee, 274.

Notes to Chapter 16

1. Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 29 March 1779, LP, 3:320. 2. Charles Lee to the president of Congress, John Jay, 26 February 1779, LP, 3:312. 3. Ibid., 312–313. See also John R. Alden, General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot? (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 259. 4. Charles Lee to John Jay, 27 February 1779, LP, 3:315. See also Samuel W. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty: The Triumph and Tragedy of General Charles Lee (New York: Lantern Press, 1958), 251–252; and Alden, General Charles Lee, 259. 5. Charles Lee to John Jay, 27 February 1779, LP, 3:316. See also Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 252. 6. Alden, General Charles Lee, 259. 7. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 252. 8. Alden, General Charles Lee, 259–260; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 252. 9. David R. Palmer, George Washington and Benedict Arnold: A Tale of Two Patriots (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2006), 286. 10. Quote is from Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 247. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 274. The story is retold in Horace W. Smith, ed., Nuts for Future Historians to Crack (Philadelphia: Published by the author, 1856), 74. 11. Quoted in Alden, General Charles Lee, 279. “The Americans had formerly idolised general Lee, but some of them now . . . pronounced him treacherous or deficient in courage, though there was no foundation for either of these suspicions. His temper was violent, and his impatience of subordination had led him often to quarrel with those with whom he was bound to respect and obey; but his courage and fidelity could not be questioned”; David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (Trenton, NJ: James J. Wilson, 1811), 2:115–116. 12. Alden, General Charles Lee, 279. 13. [Charles Lee], “Some Queries, Political and Military, Humbly Offered to the Consideration of the Public,” in LP, 3:341–345. 14. Alden, General Charles Lee, 282. See also Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 254–255. 15. Alden, General Charles Lee, 283–284. 16. George Washington to Joseph Reed, 29 July 1779, in The Writings of George Washington, 39 vols., edited by John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931–1944) 16:7–8. 17. Charles Lee to William Goddard, (editor of the Maryland Journal), 14 July 1779, LP, 3:345–346. 18. Alden, General Charles Lee, 285. 19. Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 4 April 1779, LP, 3:322. 20. Alden, General Charles Lee, 275; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 251.

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Notes to Chap ter 16 21. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 253. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 278. 22. Ibid. See also John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 160. 23. Alden, General Charles Lee, 276, 293. See also Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 4 April 1779, LP, 3:322; Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 26 September 1779, LP, 3:373. 24. A Sketch of a Plan for the Formation of a Military Colony was first published in Britain in 1792. 25. Charles Lee, A Sketch of a Plan for the Formation of a Military Colony, 1779, in LP, 3:330. 26. Ibid., 324, 327. 27. Ibid., 324. 28. Ibid., 323. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 276; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 248; and James J. Schaefer, “The Whole Duty of Man: Charles Lee and the Politics of Reputation, Masculinity, and Identity during the Revolutionary War, 1755–1783” (PhD diss., University of Toledo, 2006), 238–239. 29. Lee, A Sketch of a Plan for the Formation of a Military Colony, 325. 30. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 53. 31. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 24 September 1779, LP, 3:366; Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 26 September 1779, LP, 3:372; and Charles Lee, To the People of America, n.d. [1775], LP, 4:439–440. 32. Charles Lee to Horatio Gates, 19 December 1779, LP, 3:401. 33. Joseph Nourse to Horatio Gates, 12 August 1779, LP, 3:358. 34. For Congress’s decision on 4 December 1779 to inform Lee that he was no longer needed in the army, see JCC, 15:1348–1349. 35. Six state delegations voted in favor of Forbes’s resolution, three voted against it, one delegation was divided, and three delegations did not participate in the vote. The individual vote count was close: twelve delegates supported the resolution and nine voted against it. For the tally of the 4 December 1779 vote on Lee’s dismissal from the Continental Army, see JCC, 15:1348; for a second motion, on 10 January 1780, to inform Lee that his services were no longer needed (in response to Lee’s letter to the president of Congress, Henry Laurens), 16:33–34; see Charles Lee to the president of Congress [Laurens], n.d., LP, 3:405. See also Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 260. 36. Charles Lee to Samuel Huntington, 30 January 1780, LP, 3:407–409. 37. Charles Lee, Draft—To the President of Congress, 22 April 1780, LP, 3:418, 420–421. 38. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 30 April 1780, LP, 3:426–427. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 288. 39. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 30 April 1780, LP, 3:427. 40. Ibid. [ 360 ]

Notes to Chap ter 16 41. Alden, General Charles Lee, 294. 42. Charles Lee to the president of Congress (Henry Laurens), 3 October 1780, LP, 3:445–447; Charles Lee to the president of Congress (Henry Laurens), 8 October 1780, LP, 3:447–448. 43. For Congress’s decision on 10 October 1780 to refer Lee’s letter to a committee of three, see JCC, 18:914. 44. Ibid., 1190. 45. Alden, General Charles Lee, 294–295; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 263. Evan Edwards to Charles Lee, 8 February 1782, LP, 4:1; Charles Lee to James Monroe, 18 July [1780], LP, 3:429; Charles Lee to James Monroe, n.d., LP, 3:432. 46. Charles Lee quoted in George A. Billias, “Horatio Gates: Professional Soldier,” in George Washington’s Generals, edited by George A. Billias (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1964), 99. 47. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 16 June 1781, LP, 3:458. 48. Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 265. 49. Quoted in Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Times, 1:111n. 50. Alden, General Charles Lee, 291; and Paterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 265–266. See also Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 16 June 1781, LP, 3:455–459. 51. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 11 December 1781, LP, 3:464–465. 52. Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 26 September 1779, LP, 3:372. 53. Charles Lee to James Monroe, n.d., LP, 3:431–432; Charles Lee to Benjamin Rush, 19 December 1781, LP, 3:467–468. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 290–291. 54. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 20 July 1782, LP, 4:23. 55. Charles Lee to Sidney Lee, 22–24 June 1782, LP, 4:9. 56. Charles Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 12 April 1782, LP, 4:3–4. 57. For the symptoms of tuberculosis, see Carol A. Dyer, Biographies of Disease: Tuberculosis (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), chapter 2; and Diane Yancey, Tuberculosis (Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century Books, 2001), chapter 3. 58. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 15 August 1782, LP, 4:25. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 296; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 275. 59. Charles Lee to Robert Morris, 19 August 1782, LP, 4:28. 60. Copy of General Lee’s Will, 1782, LP, 4:31. See also Alden, General Charles Lee, 298, 300; and Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 276. Lee made bequeaths to Francis Otway Byrd; John Francis Mercer; Colonel William Grayson; William Steptoe; Thomas Ludwell Lee; Alice Lee Shippen, the wife of William Shippen Jr., the surgeon general of the Continental Army; Thomas Shippen; and Colonel Charles Minn Thurston. He left his book collection to Colonel Thurston’s son Buckner. 61. Copy of General Lee’s Will, 1782, LP, 4:32. 62. Alden, General Charles Lee, 299. 63. Charles Lee to Nathanael Greene, 12 September 1782, LP, 4:34–35. 64. James Madison to Edmund Randolph, 8 October 1782, LODC, 19:240. [361 ]

Notes to Chap ter 16 65. Quoted in Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 279. See also Douglas S. Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, 7 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948–1957), 5:424. 66. Alden, General Charles Lee, 298–299, 354n21; Patterson, Knight Errant of Liberty, 279–280; and Edward L. Clark, A Record of the Inscriptions on the Tablets and GraveStones in the Burial Grounds of Christ Church, Philadelphia, Compiled and Arranged at the Request of the Vestry (Philadelphia: Collins, 1864), 13.

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Index

Abercromby, James, 42, 308n18; Fort Carilgeopolitical potential of, 49–50; Comlon’s frontal assault by, 44–46; intense mon Sense nudging, 128–30; jurisdicscrutiny of, 45–46; Rattlesnake Hill tional authority in, 138–39, 161; Lee, ignored by, 44; replacement of, 46 C., leaving, 53–54; Lee, C., supporting Actaeon (British frigate), 339n35 independence in, 1, 36, 55, 82; loyalists Adams, Abigail, 123, 124 causing security risks in, 162; potential Adams, John, 6, 98, 108, 183; commander’s of, 285; Stamp Act protests in, 75–76; authority comments of, 134; hospitality stretches forth her capacious arms, 92; shown to, 125; Howe, Richard, meeting warfare style different in, 33. See also with, 184; Lee, C., comments of, 108–10; Britain; Canada; France letter about Lee, C., by, 124; print American colonies: Britain and steps depicting bust of, 122 toward war of, 107; Britain’s relationAdams, Samuel, 9, 97, 98, 100, 103, 176; ship with, 72; Declaratory Act and, arrest orders for, 106; on congressional 314n55; free and independent states and, committee, 283; Continental Army 160; George III comments on, 322n55; capabilities and, 213; as Continental political debates happening in, 94–95; Congress delegate, 268; Lee, C., oppotour of, 101; warfare means lacking in, sition puzzling, 110 159. See also Anglo-American colonists Advice to the People with Respect to Their American Revolution: army adopted for, Health (Avis au Peuple sur la Santé) 7–10; Burgoyne’s comments on, 120; (Tissot), 91 Continental Army key to, 11; demorAlbany, NY: as crossroads of empire, 35; alizing and wearing down enemy in, 44th regiment winter quarters in, 36; 10–11; Lee, C., critique of, 280–81; Lee, intercolonial cooperation delegates C., strategy for, 12; military strategy in, 36 debate of, 13–14. See also Anglo-AmeriAlbany Congress, 306n33 can crisis; Continental Army Alden, John R., 294n7, 297n4, 351n5 Americans: divided public opinion of, 114; Alexander, William, 134, 262, 284 Lee, C., and opinions of, 359n11; Lee, Allen, Andrew, 139 C., capture influencing, 212; Lee, C., Allen, Ethan, 219, 222, 288, 327n53 contributions forgotten by, 291; liberty America: Arnold commanding Canadian and human rights fight of, 177; liberty expedition for, 137; British expeditionprotection challenge to, 100; military ary forces sent to, 29–30; British fleet basic training for, 102; prison ships and headed to, 161; commercial and suffering of, 217 [ 385 ]

index Amherst, Jeffrey, 46, 47; Fort Lévis captured by, 53; leadership critiqued of, 56–57 Ancient classics, 21–22 Anderson, Fred, 43, 302n3 Anderson, M. S., 316n29 Anglo-American colonists: Braddock’s defeat and chaos of, 33, 36; militias formed by, 32–33 Anglo-American crisis, 72–75; Britain’s indifference to, 76; Cherokee neutrality treaties and, 179; conciliatory stance on, 161; peace negotiations desire in, 218; Virginia radicals discussing, 104–5 Anglo-Portuguese expedition, 58–59 Arbitrary rule, 73 Armed self-defense, 127 Armiger, Robert, 17, 45 Armstrong, John, 172, 338n22 Army of Observation, 106, 107 Arnold, Benedict, 283, 328n1; American expedition against Canada with, 137; Lee, C., relationship with, 275; Lee, C., unpopularity comments of, 267; militias commanded by, 327n53 Articles of War, 117, 267 Asia (British warship), 114 Atheist, 288 Augustine, John, 5, 333n4 Augustus, George. See Howe, Lord Avis au Peuple sur la Santé (Advice to the People with Respect to Their Health) (Tissort), 91 Bache, Richard, 94 Baggage train, 240–41 Baltimore, 277 Baltimore Committee of Safety, 153, 161 Bar Confederates, 81–82, 84, 316n10 Barrington, Lord, 111 Bartlett, Josiah, 213 Battery Island, 164 Battle of Monmouth, 13

Beckwith, John, 46 Belknap, Jeremy, 2, 123 Bellesiles, Michael A., 295n15 Bible, 279 Bilby, Joseph G., 246 Bipolar disorder, 18 Blake, Annabella Bunbury, 77, 315n64 Blasphemy, 288 Bluestocking circles, 297n13 Bodle, Wayne, 255 Bonwick, Colin, 298n30 Boston, 139–40 Boston Tea Party, 94 Boudinot, Elias, 225, 226–27, 269 Bowater, John, 222 Bowdoin, James, 194, 198 Brackenridge, Hugh, 272 Braddock, Edward, 29, 302n3; AngloAmerican chaos after defeat by, 33, 36; Washington, G., aide-de-camp to, 30 Bradford, William, 107 Bradford, William, Jr., 207, 209 Bradstreet, John, 43, 93 Brant, Joseph, 306n37 Brant, Mary “Molly,” 306n37 Britain: American colonies relationship with, 72; American colonies steps toward war with, 107; Anglo-American crisis indifference in, 76; bluestocking circles of, 297n13; Canada supporting, 328n1; citizens rights and liberties undermined in, 83; conflicts loss of support in, 11; constitution guaranteed supremacy in, 120; disregard for liberty in, 71, 77–78; East Florida controlled by, 177–78; governmental reform in, 76; international reputation damaged of, 82–83; La Belle Famille victory of, 49; Lee, C., arrives in, 74–75, 92; Lee, C., capture celebrated by, 214; Lee, C., treated fairly by, 217; liberty and rights undermined in, 83; Native Americans being incited by, 177–78;

[ 386 ]

index Native Americans’ lives changed by, 56; Native Americans offering support to, 48; natural rights tradition in, 24; New France controlled by, 53; peace commission rumors and, 159; peacetime regiment disestablishment in, 27; Portugal with troops from, 58–59; in position to conquer New France, 42; radical political members in, 314n49; rights and liberties threatened in, 77–78; Stamp Act repealed by, 75–76; virtue and honor discarded in, 70–71 British advance corps: Cornwallis commanding, 206; Monmouth Court House destination of, 242–44 British army: America and arrival of, 29–30; Bunker Hill victory of, 115; Burgoyne commander in defeat of, 10; Canada and brink of failure of, 40–41; casualties suffered by, 303n11; Clinton withdrawing forces of, 254–55; coastal towns raided by, 127; Continental Army ambushing, 205–6; Continental Army unprepared for, 117; councils of war held by, 326n35; criminals and prisoners in, 300n43; defeat of, 10; eligibility for, 300n45; European Plan used by, 102; expansion of, 26; flogging in, 301n47; Fort Carillon attacked by, 42–44; Fort Carillon retreat of, 45–46; Fort Washington attacked by, 193–94; French-allied Indians fighting, 30; hit-and-run attacks on, 13; Lee, C., officially resigning from, 111–12, 215; Lee, C., path to, 25–28; Lee, C., receiving tactical information about, 220; loyalists emboldened by advances of, 196; Monmouth battle and placement of, 254; Monmouth Court House destination of, 242–44; Native Americans and fear of death of, 303n12; New England guarded against, 192–93; New Jersey invaded by, 194–95; New

Jersey withdrawal of, 223; New York attack decision of, 130–32; officer corps of, 299n38; peacetime strength reversion of, 59; Philadelphia abandoned by, 238; Philadelphia captured by, 223; promotions in, 27; Prussian step taught to, 301n46; rank-and-file of, 300n42; Rhode Island militia raiding headquarters of, 223; slave freedom behind lines of, 154, 157; slave revolt instigated by, 157; St. Augustine posts of, 179; training regiment of, 320n27; two establishments of, 26; volunteer reliance of, 27–28. See also Loyalists British fleet: America destination of, 161; Clinton commanding, 139–40; Fort Sullivan attacked by, 173–74; Fort Sullivan attacked called off of, 175; landing on Sullivan’s Island, 174; leaving Boston, 139–40; Long Island Sound entered by, 185; provincial congress allowing provisions for, 147; Throg’s Neck departure of, 185–86; visitor passes stopped for, 148; warships ran aground of, 174 British Light Dragoons, 208–9, 210, 252–53 Brooks, John, 264 Brumwell, Stephen, 300n42, 301n2 Brutality, 85–86 Buck, Rachel Faucette, 355n6 Bunbury, Henry, 17 Bunbury, Thomas Charles, 17, 21 Bunbury, William, 17, 21, 53, 315n64 Bunker Hill, 7, 113, 115, 324n8 Burgoyne, John, 96, 120; Anglo-Portuguese expedition of, 58–59; British army defeat of, 10; Lee, C., correspondence with, 119; portrait of, 60 Burke, Edmund, 74, 94, 104 Burke, Thomas, 164 Burr, Aaron, 254, 267 Burrow, Edwin G., 216 Butler, William, 21, 93, 224, 274 Byrd, Francis Otway, 153, 175

[ 387 ]

index Byrd, Thomas Taylor, 334n27 Byrd, William, III, 153 Cadwalader, John, 211 Caesar, Julius, 83 Cambridge army camp, 115 Campbell, Archibald, 216 Campbell, John. See Loudoun, Lord Campbell, Mungo, 214, 215 Canada: Arnold commanding expedition against, 137; Britain supported by, 328n1; British army on brink of failure and, 40–41; Continental Congress wanting commander for, 148–49; expeditions defeat in, 137 Canada-Guadeloupe controversy, 54, 55 Cape Fear River, 149, 166 Carlisle Commission, 238 Carlyle, Alexander, 59 Carnot, Lazare, 7 Cate, Alan C., 246, 266 Catherine, Grand Duchess, 68 Catherine, Russian empress, 80–81 Centurion (British warship), 222 “The Character of the Present Emperor of Germany,” 90 Charles II (king of Britain), 17 Charles Lee, Esq’r. Major General in the Continental Army in America, 112 Charleston, SC: Clinton’s main objective of, 167; command and authority disputes in, 168; Continental Army’s victory factors in, 176; fortifications constructed in, 171; successful defense of, 175–76 Charleston Harbor, 174 Chartrand, René, 308n18 Chatterton’s Hill, 190 Cherokee, 179 Chester (Roman fortress), 296n3 Chief military advisor, 84 Child rearing, 77 Christ Church, 291

Church Alley, 290 Citizenship, 6 Citizen-soldiers: professional army and militias of, 6, 8–9; views on, 7–8; Washington, G., views on, 7, 116 City Tavern, 94, 275, 290 Civil war, in Poland, 79, 81 Clarissa (Richardson), 72 Clerk, Matthew, 44, 308n18 Cliffe, Loftus, 215 Clinton, Henry, 119, 238, 267, 283; almost killed, 253; baggage train slowing down, 240–41; Battery Island encampment of, 164; British fleet command of, 139–40; at Cape Fear River, 166; Charleston main objective of, 167; Continental Army pounding, 253–54; Continental Congress rejoice defeat of, 176–77; forces being moved by, 246; forces withdrawn by, 254–55; Lee, C., retreat defended by, 273; Long Island landing of, 170–71; Monmouth and attack by, 253–54; Monmouth defensive line arranged by, 244–45; in New York Bay, 140; retreating Continentals pursued by, 249–50; troops sailing from New Jersey of, 255 Close-order drill system, 11 Code duello, 89, 271 Coercive Acts, 94, 97, 103 Colden, Cadwallader, 37 College of William and Mary, 158 Colley, Linda, 26 Collins, Isaac, 260 Colman, George, 79 Colonial militia, 303n18 Commander-in-chief nomination, 107–8 Commercial potential, 49–50 Commission purchase system, 26–27, 52, 299n33 Committee for Establishing Expresses, 344n7 Common law, 279

[ 388 ]

index Common Sense (Paine), 100, 102, 127, 128–30 Commonwealth ideology, 298n30 Commonwealth of Oceana (Harrington), 6 Conestoga Wagon Inn, 289 Confederations, 315n4, 315n5 Conspiracy rumor, 229 Constantinople: earthquake in, 74; tour of, 73–74 Continental Army, 11; Adams, Samuel, capabilities of, 213; British army and preparedness of, 117; British foraging parties ambushed by, 205–6; Cambridge army camp reached by, 115; camp reform and discipline for, 117–18; Charleston victory factors of, 176; Clinton pursuing retreating, 249–50; Clinton’s forces pounded by, 253–54; commander of, 107; critical shortages facing, 116; enlistment and desperate situation of, 128–29; establishment of, 107; jurisdictional authority and, 138–39, 161; Lafayette heading advanced corps of, 243; Lafayette’s troops exhausted and disoriented of, 247–48; laws governing militias compared to, 204; Lee, C., capture and, 345n50, 346n58; Lee, C., capture shocking, 211; Lee, C., dismissal from, 281–82, 360n35; Lee, C., helping save, 273; major general of, 110, 163; Monmouth battle and placement of, 254; New York needing, 137–38; oath of loyalty to officers of, 237; officer corps staffed of, 110; parade for initial departure of, 113; as professional fighting force, 229; skilled engineers lacking in, 120–21; strategies for, 10–11; Sullivan as brigadier general in, 118; Upper Manhattan retreat of, 189; Valley Forge left by, 239–40; Washington, G., unsure of authority over, 134; Washington, G., vision for, 11–12. See also British army; Military; Revolutionaries; Russian army

Continental Congress, 11, 107; Adams, Samuel, delegate of, 268; armed selfdefense issue of, 127; armies converge orders of, 201; Articles of War from, 117; Canada commander wanted by, 148–49; Clinton’s defeat rejoiced by, 176–77; committee sent by, 139; courtmartial decision appeal to, 267–68; court-martial upheld by, 269–70; Eden seizure decision of, 162; financial compensation discussions of, 111; Howe, Richard, meeting with committee of, 184; inaugural session of, 101, 103–4; Lee, C., admonished by, 145, 275; Lee, C., capture view of, 211–12; Lee, C., demanding reparation from, 282, 283; Lee, C., indemnified by, 324n82; Lee, C., lobbying, 268; Lee, C., receiving funds from, 275; Lee, C., requesting meeting with, 218–19; Lee, C., rights deprived by, 351n5; Lee, C., treatment in captivity and, 216; loyalists arrest ordered by, 138; military situation reassessment by, 149–50; officer corps staffed by, 110; prisoner retaliation threatened by, 222; requesting oath of allegiance from loyalists, 133, 139, 143; resolution passed by, 323n74, 329n4; Virginia departure instructions from, 152–53 Conway, Stephen, 26, 299n38 Conway, Thomas, 229, 269 Conway Cabal, 96, 229, 285 Cooper, Myles, 101 Coriolanus, Gaius Marcius, 103 Cornell, Saul, 6, 296n24 Cornwallis, Charles, 10, 149, 157, 194; British advance corps commanded by, 206; Gates, H., routed by, 284; independence assured by surrender of, 285–86; invasion plan prepared by, 173; Lee, C., general retreat in battle against, 248–49; Lee, C., presented to, 210; New Brunswick occupied by, 201; surrender of, 270

[ 389 ]

index Corsican rebellion, 79 Coryell’s Ferry, 240 Cossack troops, 85 Councils of war, 326n35 Court-martial, 13, 251–52, 256; Continental Congress and appeal of, 267–68; Continental Congress upholding, 269–70; deliberation record of, 266–67; disobeying orders testimony at, 262–63; Hamilton, A., testimony at, 263–64; insubordination and confusion testimony at, 264; Lee, C., closing remarks at, 265–66; Lee, C., confident of vindication in, 265; Lee, C., demanding, 259; Lee, C., guilty verdict at, 266; Lee, C., verdict reaction of, 266; of Lee, C., 262; retreat focus in, 263–64 Court of inquiry, 259 Covenant Chain, 306n33 Cox, Caroline, 11, 300n45 Crazy Tales (Hall-Stevenson), 57, 59 Cresswell, Nicholas, 222 Crimean Tatar cavalry, 86, 317n37 Cromwell, Oliver, 71 Crossroads of empire, 35 Crown Point, 327n53, 334n20 “Crude Reveries,” 278–79 Czartoryski, Adam Casmir (Prince), 68, 79 Davers, Charles, 21, 91, 101, 104, 298n19 Davers, Jermyn, 298n19 Declaration of Independence, 9, 159–60, 177, 256 Declaratory Act, 314n55 Deism, 22 Delaware river, 212–13 Democracy, 6 Demoniacs, 57 Depression, 283 Desertion, 166–67 Dickinson, John, 125, 126, 290 Dickinson, Philemon, 239, 246 Diderot, Denis, 89

Disney, Daniel, 224 Dissenters, political equality of, 80–81 Dniester river, 316n9 Dobbs Ferry, 192 Dogs, 122–25, 326n39 Dogs of War, 127 Dolman, Everett C., 7 Drayton, William Henry, 171, 172, 180, 268, 271 Duchess of Gordon (British merchant ship), 137, 147 Duer, William, 186 Dunbar, Thomas, 31 Dunbar, William, 46, 93 Dunmore, Lord, 97, 154–55, 158 Dunn, Elizabeth, 278, 288 Duportail, Louis Lebègue, 249 Dyer, Eliphalet, 108 Earthquake, 74 Eastern Europe: map of, 88; Ottoman resistance in, 86; unconventional warfare methods in, 80; wretched conditions in, 73 East Florida: Britain controlling, 177–78; foregoing seizure of, 181; land grants in, 78 East India Tea Company, 93, 97 East River, 181–82 Eden, Robert, 153, 161, 162 Education, 20–22 Edwards, Evan, 264, 267, 270, 287 8th Virginia Regiment, 156, 166–67 English tories, 313n42 Enlightenment, 22–24, 298n23 Eppes, Francis, 158 Essays, 276–77; George III portrayals in, 90; Goddard not publishing followup, 278; Lee, C., publishing follow-up, 277–78 Ethiopian Regiment, 154, 334n27 Ethnic diversity, 66–68 Ethnic pluralism, 34–35

[ 390 ]

index European linear style, 11–12; warfare using, 33; Washington, G., supporting professional, 203–4 European Plan, 102, 227 Fabian strategy, 10–11, 295n19, 295n21 Fables for Grown Gentlemen (Hall-Stevenson), 57 Ferdinand, Charles William, 65–66 Ferdinand, Lady Augusta, 66 5th Virginia Regiment, 156 Financial compensation, 111 Firearms, 295n15, 296n24 Fitzgerald, John, 262 Fleming, Thomas, 237 Flogging, 301n47 Flying camp, 184, 341n9 Forbes, John, 281 Fort Carillon, 42–43; Abercromby’s frontal assault on, 44–46; British army attacking, 42–44; British army retreat from, 45–46; Clerk killed at, 308n18 Fort Constitution, 185, 187 Fort Duquesne, 29–30, 48 Fort Frontenac, 46 4th Virginia Regiment, 156 Fort Johnson, 169 Fort Lee, 5, 187; evacuation of, 194–95; Washington, G., arriving at, 193 Fort Lévis, 53 Fort Niagara: capture of, 49, 50; Prideaux began expedition against, 48–49 Fort Pitt, 50 Fort Sullivan: battered but viable, 175; British fleet attack called off of, 175; British fleet attacking, 173–74; defense debate of, 169–70, 173; defense preparations of, 171 Fort Ticonderoga, 219–20, 260, 334n20 Fort Washington: British artillery attacking, 193–94; defending, 193; devastating defeat at, 194; Greene not abandoning, 192; maintaining garrison at, 187;

Washington, G., hurt by incident at, 200–201 Fort William Henry, 41 44th regiment, 301n2; Albany winter quarters of, 36; La Belle Famille victory of, 49 48th regiment, 301n2 Fowey (British warship), 154 France: Lee, C., fear about growing power of, 286; military plans of, 40–41; Native American relations with, 56; Native American warriors fighting for, 49; war entered by, 224 Franco-American alliance, 235 Franco-Indian relations, 50 Franklin, Benjamin, 4, 36, 55, 152, 334n15; Boston Tea Party accusation against, 94; Howe, R., meeting with, 184; pamphlet by, 54; swimming promoted by, 19 Franks, David, 51–52, 271–72 Franks, Rebecca, 52, 271–72 Frederick II (of Prussia), 4, 66, 80 Frederick the Great, 301n46 Frederick William, Prince, 66 Freedom, 154 Freeman, Joanne B., 310n61 Free society, 71 Free veto, (Liberum veto), 70 French-allied Indians, 30, 49 French Revolution, 12 Frey, Sylvia, 27 Funeral arrangements, 290 Gage, Thomas, 30, 33, 42; engraving of, 34; Fort Pitt expedition ordered by, 50; lead column commanded by, 44–45; Lee, C., article on, 105, 320n25; letter to, 101; as Massachusetts governor, 97; New England militiamen besieging, 106–7; reinforcements sent for, 106 Gamble, Thomas, 93, 97 Gates, Elizabeth, 94 Gates, Horatio, 94, 186, 202, 223, 229, 260; Canadian command comments of, 148;

[ 391 ]

index Gates, Horatio (continued): Cornwallis routing, 284; Lee, C., ruptured friendship with, 284–85; painting of, 96; Traveller’s Rest meeting with, 97–98 General Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot (Alden), 294n7 Geneva, 91–92 Gentility, 293n4 Gentlemen: classical education of, 20–21; commission purchase system access of, 52; standard of conduct of, 52, 310n61 Gentry status, 293n4 Geopolitical potential, 49–50 George II (king of Britain), 17 George III (king of Britain), 9, 24; American colonists comments about, 322n55; Armiger aides-de-camp to, 45; beginning reign of, 54–55; engraving of, 54; essay portrayals of, 90; Lee, C., petitioning, 57–58, 75, 78; Lee, C., plan and, 221; speaking out against, 83; tyranny direction of, 70–71; venom channeled against, 90 Georgia, 178 Germain, George, 161 Gerry, Elbridge, 108 Gift giving practice, 56 Glorious Revolution (1688-1690), 57 Glover, John, 188 Goddard, William, 276, 287, 288; followup essay not published by, 278; mobs destroying print shop of, 277 Golway, Terry, 187 Golytsin, Alexander M., 84, 86 Gontaut, Armand Louis de, 290 Gout, 18–19, 79, 139–40, 278, 283 Governmental reform, in Britain, 76 Governor’s Palace headquarters, 153 Graham, Eleanor, 315n64 Grand Tour, 298n27 Grayson, William, 245 Greene, Nathanael, 10, 117, 118, 149, 194, 198; engraving of, 119; Fort Washington not

abandoned by, 192; guerrilla strategies adopted by, 204; Lee, C., capture comments of, 211; Lee, C., held in highest esteem by, 284; support thank you letter to, 288 Grenville, George, 74 Guerrilla warfare (Petite guerre strategy), 9–10, 13–14; Greene adopting strategies of, 204; Lee, C., promoting, 227; New Jersey militia ambushes using, 205; New Jersey militia coordinated with, 203 Haddrell’s Point: defenses on, 171–72; fortifications rebuilt for, 172 Half-pay officers, 27, 59, 323n81 Halkett, Peter, 29, 34, 302n10 Hall-Stevenson, John, 57, 59, 90 Halsey, Francis Whiting, 38 Hamilton, Alexander, 227, 228, 355n6; court-martial testimony of, 263–64; Lee, C., admonishing, 252; White Plains command of, 190–91 Hamilton, James A., 355n6 Hancock, John, 138–39, 149, 176; arrest orders for, 106; Lee, C., capture fears of, 212 Hanmer, Thomas, 296n2 Hanoverian succession (1714), 57 Hanson, John, 290 Hapsburg Empire, 88, 89 Harcourt, William, 208–9 Harrington, James, 6 Harrison, Benjamin, 139, 219 Hayes, Mary Ludwig, 253, 255 Heard, Nathaniel, 138, 146 Heath, William, 192, 196–98 Hell Gate, 141, 185 Henry, Patrick, 156, 177; Declaration of Independence and, 159–60; Lee, C., support withdrawn by, 324n83; resignation of, 335n40; Virginia’s military forces command of, 152 Herbert, Henry, 53

[ 392 ]

index Hessian troops, 193 Higginbotham, Don, 13–14, 203, 227 The History of England from the Accession of James I to That of the Brunswick Line (Macaulay), 90 The History of England under the House of Stuart (Hume), 90 History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New York in America (Colden), 37 Hite, Jacob, 99, 320n16 Hobgoblin Hall, 121, 124 Holburne, Francis, 41 Holton, Woody, 334 Homeric arête, 21 Hopewell, 99, 183–84, 241, 320n16 Hopkins, Stephen, 176 Howe, Lord, 33, 42, 43 Howe, Richard, 57, 153, 181, 184 Howe, William, 119, 130, 132, 150, 225; command resigned by, 224; excessive caution of, 205; hesitancy and retreat of, 190–91; New Brunswick arrival of, 222–23; Philadelphia capture assistance for, 220–21; Staten Island and troops of, 181; Washington, G., dealing only with, 216–17; White Plains attack of, 190–91 Hull’s Tavern, 115 Human goodness, 22–23 Hume, David, 90 Huntington, Samuel, 281 Hutchinson, Thomas, 161 Hypersexuality, 4 Idol of Officers, 212 The Importance of Canada Considered in Two Letters to a Noble Lord (Lee, C.), 55 Independence: Common Sense nudging America toward, 128–30; Cornwallis’ surrender assuring, 285–86; Lee, C., supporting American, 1, 36, 55, 82; time to declare, 127 Infantry regiment, 299n33, 299n37

Insubordination, 264 Intellectual curiosity, 19–20 Intercolonial cooperation, 36 The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to her Colonies and the Acquisition of Canada and Guadeloupe (Franklin), 54, 55 Intolerable Acts, 94 Invasion plan, 173 Ireland, 28 Iroquois League, 35–37, 39 Irregulars, 85–86 Italy, 89 James II (king of Britain), 25 Jay, John, 359n2, 359n4, 359n5 Jefferson, Thomas, 9, 177 Jenkins, Katherine Bilby, 246 Jersey (British prison ship), 217 Johnson, Samuel, 74 Johnson, Thomas, 161 Johnson, William, 37, 38, 48, 61 Jones, Thomas, 152 Joseph II (of Austria), 4, 89, 90 Juliana (ship), 114 Julie (Rousseau), 72 Junius controversy, 318n61 Jurisdictional authority, 138–39, 161 Kemble, Stephen, 214 Kennedy, Primrose, 215 Khotin, 87, 88 King Edward VI Free Grammar School, 21 King’s Bridge, 141, 330n23 Knox, Henry, 186, 211, 264, 334n20, 356n38 Knyphausen, Wilhelm von, 245, 246 La Belle Famille, 49 Lafayette, Marquis de, 235, 236, 242, 355n6; advanced corps commanded by, 243; troops exhausted and disoriented of, 247–48 Lake Champlain-Hudson River, 221

[ 393 ]

index Land grants, 61, 78 Languages, 21 Last will, 287–88, 361n60 Laurens, Henry, 176, 258, 263, 267, 268, 270–71 Laurens, John, 257, 258 Lauzun, Duc de, 290 Lawrence, John, 256, 265 Lee, Charles, 55; ad hoc battle plan of, 247; as American independence supporter, 1, 36, 55, 82; Americans forgetting contributions of, 291; army and battle strategies of, 7–11; arrest and legal problems of, 52; articles written by, 268–69; background of, 17–18; battle information lacking for, 245, 247; bold maneuver of, 206–7; burial of, 290–91; captaincy purchased by, 36–37; captivity of, 223–25; capture of, 211–14, 345n50, 346n58; character and contentious nature of, 108, 172; code duello of, 89; command abdicated of, 254; command rejected by, 243–44; conflicting intelligence bewildering, 246–47, 251, 257, 264; “crude Reveries” of, 278–79; death of, 289; debt at death of, 290; delaying actions crucial to battle of, 253; descriptions of, 2–3; dismissed from services of army, 281–82; disobeying orders testimony against, 262–63; education of, 20–22; emotional stress of war felt by, 50–51, 86; engraving of, 3; Enlightenment ideas and, 22–23; essays anonymously published for, 276–77; first American active service of, 29–41; follow-up essay anonymously published for, 277–78; grave error in judgment of, 207; guerrilla warfare promoted by, 227; guilty verdict of, 266; as hero of liberty, 12–13; honor and reputation defended by, 272–723, 276; Hopewell estate purchase of, 183–84; king and country rejected by, 217; king petitioned for promotion by, 57–58, 75, 78; last will

of, 287–88, 361n60; Laurens duel with, 270–71; leaving Poland, 84–85; Louisa proposal of, 83–84; mental health of, 4, 18, 281, 287; method concerns of, 164–65; military experience of, 5–6, 108–10; mothers death of, 74, 231; musket ball hitting, 45, 46; Native American children of, 39–40; new proposal from, 225; official release of, 226, 231; panic and death haunting, 31; physical health issues of, 18–19, 79, 87–88, 91, 139–40, 278, 283–84, 287; as Polish army major general, 81; political acumen lacking in, 46; political radicalism of, 71–72, 75, 80, 99–100; political views of, 318n61; as Poniatowski’s aide-de-camp, 69–70, 74; portrait of, 112; print of, 131; reasons for actions at Monmouth, 257–59; reasons for retreat of, 257, 263–64, 269; religions influence on, 23; replacing Washington, G., desire of, 206; retired with half-pay status, 59; revolutionaries trusting leadership of, 199–200; Russian retreat comments of, 317n46; salary at half-pay of, 323n81; scholars view of, 4–5; selfdestructive behavior of, 13; successful tactics applied by, 59; war as glorious adventure, 79; woman’s dog remark, response to, 326n39 Lee, Henry (Light-Horse Harry), 103 Lee, Isabella Bunbury (mother), 17–18, 74, 297n4 Lee, John (father), 17–18, 20, 25–26 Lee, Richard Henry, 97, 99, 145, 160, 257, 334n15 Lee, Robert E., 103 Lee, Sidney (sister), 20, 78, 286, 288, 290, 314n50 Lee, William “Billy,” 113 Lee-Brackenridge affair, 272 Lefkowitz, Arthur S., 198, 201 Legge, William, 103 Lengel, Edward G., 245, 295n21

[ 394 ]

index Lennox, Sarah, 17, 298n18 Leslie, Alexander, 274 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (Dickinson), 125 Letters of recommendation, 312n6 Leutze, Emanuel, 213, 251, 354n65 Liberty, 20, 75, 347n7; Americans challenged to protect, 100; American’s fight for, 177; Britain’s disregard for, 71, 77–78; Britain undermining rights of, 83; Lee, C., hero of, 12–13; Paine’s notion of last asylum of, 99–100; releasing enemies to, 148; to slaves, 154. See also Independence Liberty Boys, 93–94, 319n1 Liberum veto (free veto), 70 Ligonier, John, 53 Lincoln, Benjamin, 284, 290 Lispenard, Leonard, 115 Livestock, 146 Livingston, William, 260 Lom d’ Arce, Louis Armand, 37 London (brig), 93 Loneliness, 4 Long Island (South Carolina), 170–71 Long Island Sound, 185 Loring, Joshua, 225 Loudoun, Lord, 40–41, 58 Louisa (identity unknown), 83–84 Louisbourg (Canadian maritime region), 40, 46 Louis de Fleury, Francois, 270 Lovell, James, 268 Loyalists: apprehending, 162–63; British advances emboldening, 196; committee backpedaling on issue of, 163; Continental Congress oath of allegiance from, 133, 139, 143; Continental Congress ordering arrest of, 138; Dunmore assembling army of, 154; harsh measures needed against, 146–47; Lee, C., apprehending, 202; Lee, C., tryng to clear out, 343n55; in New York, 141–43, 224–25; in North Carolina,

332n74; oath of allegiance refusal by, 143–44; provincial congress pardoning, 147–48, 160; Queen’s Rangers of, 247; as security risks, 162; in Virginia, 154, 157, 160, 162–65 Luzerne, Chevalier de la, 290 Lynch, Thomas, 139 Macaulay, Catharine, 24–25, 74, 90 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 6 Madison, James, 289 Magaw, Robert, 194 Magnates, 70 The Making of a Scapegoat: Washington and Lee at Monmouth (Thayer), 294n7 Manalapan Bridge, 244 Manhattan, Upper, 189 Manhattan Island, 186, 187 Manic-depressive disorder, 2 Manners, John, 53 Marmion (poem), 121 Marriage, 78 Martin, Joseph Plumb, 188, 247, 250 Martin, Josiah, 332n74 Maryland, 161 Mason, George, 9 Massachusetts, 96–97 Massie, Thomas, 249 Mathews, John, 283 Mawhood, Charles, 210 Maxwell, William “Scotch Willie,” 239, 252 McCandless, Peter, 181 McDonnell, Michael A., 154 McDougall, Alexander, 93, 190 Meade, Richard Kidder, 226 Mental health, 4, 18, 231, 287 Mercer, Hugh, 50 Mercer, John Francis, 252, 264 Mercury (frigate), 140 Merrell, James, 33 Middleton, Arthur, 180, 218 Mifflin, Sarah, 123 Mifflin, Thomas, 108, 123

[ 395 ]

index Military: Americans training for, 102; authority, 165; British posts for, 179; Continental Congress reassessing, 149–50; France’s plans for, 40–41; Henry commanding Virginia’s, 152; offensive against Cherokee, 179; strategy, 13–14 Military service: citizenship’s obligation to, 6; of Lee, C., 5–6, 108–10; Russian army chief advisor during, 84; Washington, G., leadership in, 195, 199 Militias: able-bodied adult males serving in, 280; Anglo-American colonists forming, 32–33; Arnold commanding, 327n53; citizen-soldiers in, 6, 8–9; colonial, 303n18; Fort Ticonderoga captured by, 327n53; laws governing Continental Army compared to, 204; New England, 106–7; New Jersey, 203, 205; New York Provincial Congress raising, 331n45; North Carolina, 164; Philadelphia secured by, 351n15; Rhode Island, 223; South Carolina, 168; as valuable assets, 204; Virginia, 155, 156. See also Citizen-soldiers Minghini, Giuseppe, 152; personal belongings bequeathed to, 287–88; personal valet hiring of, 89, 93, 278, 289 Moderation, 100 Mohawk tribe, 307n44 Molly Pitcher. See Hayes, Mary Ludwig Monarchy, 5; arbitrary rule and, 73; representative government and, 77 Monmouth Court House: both sides claiming victories from, 255; British army headed toward, 242–44; Clinton arranging defensive line at, 244–45; Clinton attacking Perrine Ridge at, 253–54; Lee, C., reasons for actions at, 257–59; revolutionaries victory at, 261–62; troop placements at battle of, 254; Washington, G., at, 250; Washington, G., official account of, 261–62 Monroe, James, 284 Montcalm-Grozon, Louis-Joseph de, 43

Montgomery, Richard, 137, 328n1 Moore, James, 167 Morgan, Daniel, 10, 242, 247–49 Morris, Jacob, 287, 290 Morris, Robert, 51, 116, 284; faulty intelligence explanation to, 257; finances assistance from, 287; funeral and respects paid by, 290; Lee, C., borrowing money from, 183; Lee, C., capture comments of, 211; as Lee, C., financial advisor, 52 Moultrie, William, 170, 171, 172–73 Mount Constitution, 341n12 Mount Morris, 341n15 Moylan, Stephen, 94 Moyney (Major), 210 Mud rounds, 205–6 Muenchhausen, Friedrich Ernst von, 214 Muhlenberg, Henry Melchior, 212 Murray, John. See Dunmore, Lord Mustafa III, 73, 81 National conscription, 7 National security, 8 Native Americans: Albany Congress narrative by, 306n33; Britain offered support from, 48; British control changing lives of, 56; British fear of death at hands of, 303n12; British inciting rebellion by, 177–78; culture of, 37; France’s relations with, 56; France with warriors of, 49; gift giving practice of, 56; Lee, C., having children with, 39–40; natural virtues of, 37–39; petite guerre of, 32; psychological warfare of, 303n17; rules of engagement by, 32; sophisticated sexual attitudes of, 39, 40; South Carolina settlements raided by, 178; way of war, 31 Natural rights, 20, 24 Neiberg, Michael S., 7 Netherlands, 65 New Brunswick: Cornwallis occupying, 201; Howe, W., arriving in, 222–23; Lee,

[ 396 ]

index C., imprisoned at, 215; Washington, G., moving troops to, 255 New England: British movements against, 192–93; militia, 106–7 New France, 40, 47; Britain’s firm control of, 53; British in position to conquer, 42 New Héloise (Rousseau), 72 New Jersey: British invasion of, 194–95; British withdrawal from, 223; Clinton’s troops sailing from, 255; defenses of, 184; Lee, C., remaining in, 202–3; Washington, G., retreating across, 195–96 New Jersey militia: guerrilla operations coordinated with, 203; guerrilla-style ambushes of, 205 New York, 114; arrival in, 93; British army decision to attack, 130–32; British capturing, 182; Clinton in Bay of, 140; Continental troops needed in, 137–38; defense of, 134, 141, 142; Lee, C., land grant failed in, 61; Lee, C., transferred to, 217; loyalists in, 141–43, 224–25; men and artillery shortages for, 146; provincial congress raising militias in, 331n45; strategic burdens in, 140–41; strategic importance of, 133–34; Washington, G., requesting troops in, 133 New York Committee of Safety, 138, 146 North, Frederick Lord, 92, 94, 119 North Carolina: loyalists in, 332n74; militia, 164; riflemen in, 339n54; slave rebellion concerns in, 337n85 Nourse, Joseph, 281, 291 Oath of allegiance, 133, 139, 143–44, 154 Oath of loyalty, 237 Ohio Country, 30 The Old New York Frontier (Halsey), 38 “On a Famous Trial in the Court of Common Pleas, between General Mostyn, Governor of Minorca, and an Inhabitant of That Island” (Lee, C.), 105 103rd Regiment of Foot, 58

“On the Capture of General Lee,” 212 Oppression, 127 Order of the Knights of St. Stanislaus, 81, 316n12 Oswald, Eleazar, 248, 276, 287, 289 Ottoman Empire, 73, 81, 84, 316n29; Eastern Europe resistance of, 86; Russian Army attacked by infantry of, 86–87; Russian army incompetence and, 87 Paine, Thomas, 149, 288; Common Sense by, 102, 127, 128–30; last asylum of liberty notion of, 99–100; Lee, C., impressed by, 152; portrait of, 129 Palfrey, William, 186 Palmer, Dave R., 195, 205 Pamela (Richardson), 72 Parallel Lives (Plutarch), 21 Paranoia, 281 Parker, Peter, 173 Partisan maneuvers, 270 Patriotic Society, 94 Peace commission rumors, 159 Peace negotiations, 218 Peacetime strength, 59 Peekskill, 198 Pell’s Point, 188, 341n27 Pendleton, Edmund, 158, 160, 166, 178 Penny Town, 209, 210 Percy, Hugh, 104 Permissive sexual atmosphere, 35 Perrine Ridge, 249, 253 Personal valet, 89, 93, 278, 289 Perth Amboy, 184–85 Petite guerre strategy. See Guerrilla warfare Pets, 122 Philadelphia: British army abandoning, 238; British army capturing, 223; Carlisle Commission in, 238; First Continental Congress session in, 101, 103–4; Howe, William, capturing, 220–21; as largest urban center, 33–34; Lee, C., death in, 289; Lee, C., departure from, 274–75;

[ 397 ]

index Philadelphia (continued): Lee, C., in, 50–52; Print shop, 277 militias sent to secure, 351n15; permissive Prisoner exchange, 215, 225, 231 sexual atmosphere of, 35; religion and Prisoner-of-war issue, 231 ethnic pluralism in, 34–35 Prisoner retaliation, 222 Physical exercise, 19 Prison ships, 217 Physical health issues, 287; extreme pain Professional army, 8–9 with, 91; of gout, 18–19, 79, 139–40, 278, Prostitution, 35 283–84; quest for cure of, 19; rheumatic Provincial congress, 331n45; British warship fever as, 87–88; of rheumatism, 18–19 provisions allowed by, 147; Lee, C., Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 172 overstepping authority from, 144–45; Pitt, William, 40 loyalists pardoned by, 147–48, 160 Ploughed Hill, 121 Prussian step, 301n46 Plutarch, 21 Psychological warfare, 303n17 Poland, 315n6; civil war in, 79, 81; dissenter’s Publishing economy, 22 political equality in, 80–81; ethnic Purviance, Samuel, Jr., 161 diversity in, 66–68; irregulars’ death and Putnam, Israel, 115, 324n8 destruction in, 85–86; Lee, C., finding employment in, 61, 65; Lee, C., leaving, Quebec Act (1774), 328n1 84–85; major general in army of, 81; Queen’s Rangers, 247, 343n55 map of, 88; power elite of, 68; reform “Queries Proposed to General Gage” (Lee, obstacles in, 70; Russian army withC.), 105 drawing to, 87; unconventional warfare in, 85. See also Warsaw, Poland Radical Whigs, 57 Politics: American colonies debates Ramapo, NY, 201–2 on, 94–95; Britain’s radical members Ramsay, David, 276 in, 314n49; dissenters and equality of, Randolph, Edmund, 289 80–81; Lee, C., radicalism in, 71–72, 75, Rapin de Thoyras, Paul de, 24 80, 99–100; Lee, C., views on, 318n61; Rattlesnake Hill, 44 Lee, C. acumen lacking in, 46 Real Whigs, 24 Poniatowski, Stanislaus II Augustus, 4, 66, Reed, Joseph, 260–61, 269, 275–76, 277; 67; good qualities of, 69–70; Lee, C., engraving of, 200; as Washington, G., aide-de-camp to, 69–70, 74 aide-de-camp, 141, 193, 199–200 Pontiac (Ottawa chief ), 56 Regiment disestablishment, 27 Pontiac’s Rebellion, 56 Religion, 23; critic of, 279–80; in PhiladelPortugal, 58–59 phia, 34–35 Pouchot, Pierre, 48 Repnin, Nikolay, 80–81, 84, 86 Power elite, 68 “Report on the Defence of New York” (Lee, Prato Rio, 183, 279, 287; Lee, C., leaving for, C.), 146, 152 278; preparations for returning to, 274 Representative government, 77 Prescott, Richard, 223, 349n44 Republicanism, 6, 24, 285 Prescott, Samuel, 231 Revolutionaries: dispatches to Eden disPrideaux, John, 48–49 covered by, 161; Dunmore’s army raiding Princeton, 213, 214 plantations of, 154–55, 158; Lee, C., capture [ 398 ]

index dispiriting, 212–13; Lee, C., leadership Schaumburg-Lippe, Wilhelm of, 58, 65 trusted by, 199–200; Monmouth Court “Scheme for Putting an End to the War” House victory of, 261–62; slavery and, 154; (Lee, C.), 220, 221, 250 society preservation goal of, 203–4 Schuyler, Philip, 113, 115, 260, 328n1 Rheumatic fever, 87–88 Scott, Charles, 241, 250 Rheumatism, 18–19 Scott, Walter, 121 Rhode Island: fortifications of, 133; militia, Sears, Isaac, 93, 137, 143–45 223 Secondat, Charles-Louis de, 6 Richardson, Samuel, 72 Secret societies, 23 Riflemen, 325n21, 325n22, 339n54 Self-destructive behavior, 13 Rivington, James, 94, 101, 105, 270 Seneca society, 39 Robertson, James, 224 Seven Years War (1756-1763), 5 Rockingham, Lord, 79 Sex trade, 35 Rodney, Thomas, 318n61, 345n50, 346n58 Sexual attitudes, 4, 35, 39, 40 Rogers, Robert, 42, 343n55 Shadwell, Thomas, 21 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 72, 92; as Sharpe, William, 283 Enlightenment thinker, 23–24; Lee, C., Shelburne, Earl of, 57 admiring writings of, 37–39 Shy, John, 12, 148, 203, 205, 294n7, 303n18 Royal Artillery, 300n39 Silver, Peter, 303n12, 303n17 Royall, Isaac, 121 A Sketch of a Plan for the Formation of a Royster, Charles, 116 Military Colony (Lee, C.), 278–79 Rules of engagement: Native American Skilled engineers, 120–21 warriors and, 32; for warfare, 31 Slaves, 72, 334n28; British army instigating Rush, Benjamin, 94, 120, 122, 129, 152; Lee, revolt of, 157; freedom behind British C., capture impact comments of, 211–12; lines for, 154, 157; liberty to, 154; North Lee, C., oddities overlooked by, 110; Carolina rebellion concerns of, 337n85; portrait of, 95; reparation letter not forrebellion threat of, 155–56, 164; revoluwarded by, 282; Washington, G., tactical tionaries and, 154; South Carolina fears skills condemned by, 195 of revolting, 167–68 Russian army, 78, 317n39; Bar ConfederSmith, James, 183 ates engaging, 81; chief military advisor Social clubs, 23 to, 84; Khotin captured by, 87; Lee, C., Society, common law in, 279 comments on retreat of, 317n46; OttoSociety preservation, 203–4 man fortress and incompetence of, 87; Solar eclipse, 241 Ottoman infantry attacking, 86–87; “Some Queries, Political and Military, Poland and withdrawal of, 87 Humbly Offered to the Consideration Russo-Turkish War (1768-1774), 5, 78, of the Public” (Lee, C.), 276 316n10 Sons of Liberty, 75 Rutledge, Edward, 151, 157, 159, 184 South Carolina: Lee, C., leaving, 180–81; Rutledge, John, 168, 169, 176, 180 militia, 168; Native Americans raiding settlements in, 178; slave insurrection Sandy Hook, 255 feared in, 167–68 Schaefer, James J., 266, 268 South Carolina Council of Safety, 180 [ 399 ]

index Southern Department: Lee, C., to comSullivan’s Island, 174 mand, 149–50; purpose of, 151; WashSwimming, 19 ington, G., comments on, 151–52 Southern frontier, 178–79 Tarleton, Coronet Banastre, 209, 210 Spado (dog), 3, 84, 89, 93, 113, 124, 269, Tea Act of May 1773, 93 315n30 Test oath, 143–45 Spain, 58 Thatcher, James, 270 Spa resorts, 297n8 Thayer, Theodore, 294n7, 357n45 Spears, thirteen-foot, 156 Thomas, John, 333n2 Stamford, Connecticut, 138 Thomson, Charles, 94 Stamp Act, 75–76, 319n1 Thomson, Janice E., 65 Stamp tax, 72 Thomson, William, 172 Standard of conduct, 52 Throg’s Neck, 185–86, 341n13 Standing armies, 9, 24 Tilghman, Tench, 186 Stanislaus. See Poniatowski, Stanislaus II Tissot, Samuel Auguste André David, 91 Augustus “To the Citizens of Philadelphia” (Lee, C.), Starkey, Armstrong, 32 100 Staten Island: defense of, 145–46; Howe, Townshend Acts, 319n1 W., landing troops on, 181 Training regiment: American’s military, St. Augustine, FL, 178; British military 102; of British army, 320n27; of Wilposts at, 179; limited expedition against, helm von Steuben, 237–39 181 Travel: intellectual curiosity fed by, 19–20; Stephen, Adam, 164 Virginia and Maryland, 283 Sterne, Laurence, 57 Traveller’s Rest, 97–98, 104 Steuben’s Regulations for the Order and Trenton, 213–14 Discipline of the Troops of the United Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 57 States, 229 Trumbull, Jonathan, 137 Stewart, William, 344n7 Tryon, William, 114–15, 133, 137, 148, 161 St. George’s Fields “massacre,” 76 Tuberculosis, 287 Stiles, Ezra, 100, 117, 121, 124, 133 Tyranny, 70–71 St. Johns Island, 78 Strachey, Henry, 218 Unconventional warfare, 85 Strictures upon “A Friendly Address to All Upton, Clotworthy, 91 Reasonable Americans” (Lee, C.), 101–2, Utopia concept, 279–80 103, 320n26 St. Thomas Jenifer, Daniel of, 161–62 Valencia de Alcántara, 58 Stuart, Charles Edward, 25 Valley Forge, 239–40 Subordinate withdrawal, 257 Van Buskirk, Judith L., 217 Sulky, 342n42 Vaughan, John, 287 Sullivan, John, 117, 121, 149, 207; as ContiVenereal disease, 35 nental Army brigadier general, 118; Lee, Verrucosus, Quintus Fabius Maximus, C., rescue party sent by, 210–11; Lee, C., 295n19 troops commanded by, 211 Vienna, 88–89 [ 400 ]

index Village Inn, 254 Violence, 178–79 Virginia: civilian rule displacement fears in, 165; colonies defense of, 158; commanders dire situation in, 156; Continental Congress departure instructions to, 152–53; deplorable condition of defenses in, 155–56; Henry in charge of military forces from, 152; internal crisis in, 154; loyalists in, 154, 157, 160, 162–65; radicals, 104–5; regiments of, 156, 166–67; Stephen commanding defenses of, 164; troops, 30–31; Yorktown, 285, 288 Virginia Committee of Safety, 158, 160, 162, 163 Virginia Convention, 155, 160, 178 Virginia militia: arms and equipment lacking for, 155; disciplinary issues in, 156 Voltaire, 89 Volunteers, 27–28 Ward, Artemas, 110, 115, 163 Ward, Matthew C., 303n17 Warfare: America’s different style of, 33; colonies lacking means for conducting, 159; European linear style used in, 33; Lee, C., feeling stress of, 50–51, 86; prisoner exchange in, 215; psychological, 303n17; rules of engagement for, 31; unconventional methods of, 80, 85. See also Guerrilla warfare (Petite guerre strategy); Rules of engagement Warren, James, 120, 124, 125 Warren, Mercy Otis, 2, 110, 212 Warsaw, Poland: arts and sciences in, 69; Bar Confederates laying siege to, 81–82, 84; Lee, C., proposing to Louisa in, 83–84; paranoia gripping, 82 Washington, George, 28; active general comments of, 148; army strategy of, 12; as Braddock’s aides-de-camp, 30; citizensoldier views of, 7, 116; commander-inchief nomination of, 107–8; conspiracy [ 401 ]

rumor against, 229; Continental Army authority and, 134; Continental Army vision of, 11–12; Conway Cabal plot against, 96; councils of war mandated to, 326n35; court supporting, 266; crossing Delaware, 212–13; European-style professional army desired by, 203–4; Fort Lee arrival of, 193; Fort Washington issue and, 200–201; Glover saving troops of, 188; Hopewell arrival of, 241; Howe, W., dealing only with, 216–17; integrity of, 5; Lee, C., and no apology from, 257–58; Lee, C., clarifying criticism of, 277–78; Lee, C., communications with, 245; Lee, C., continuing attacks on, 286–87; Lee, C., desire to replace, 206; Lee, C., famous confrontation with, 250–52; Lee, C., given detailed instructions by, 240; Lee, C., meeting with, 104, 106, 186–87; Lee, C., not following directives of, 196– 98; Lee, C., not relaying information to, 256–57; Lee, C., rebuked by, 259; Lee, C., requested to join, 206; Lee, C., safety and liberty conveyed by, 347n7; Lee, C., tolerated by, 229; Lee, C., welcomed back by, 226–27; Lee, S., assisted by, 290; letter stunning, 199–200; Manhattan Island retreat of, 186, 187; military leadership questioned of, 195, 199; at Monmouth, 250; Monmouth official account from, 261–62; New Brunswick arrival of, 255; New Jersey retreat of, 195–96; partisan maneuvers protecting, 270; portrait of, 109; professional army and, 8–9; Reed aide-de-camp to, 141, 193, 199–200; Rush condemning tactical skills of, 195; salary refused by, 108; second-in-command to, 1; Southern Department comments of, 151–52; Trenton and Princeton successes of, 213; troop deployment request of, 133; troops narrow escape of, 181–82; vague and discretionary orders of, 192, 244–45, 272; White Plains arrival of, 190

index Washington, John Augustine, 5 Washington, Lund, 211, 345n50 Washington, Martha, 104 Washington, William, 283 Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), 250–51 Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth, 250, 251 Waterbury, David, 138 Watson-Wentworth, Charles, 74 Wayne, Anthony, 239, 242 Wedderburn, Alexander, 55, 94 Weisenberg, Catharine, 306n37 West Ravine, 252 Wheatley, Phillis, 212, 213 Whipple, William, 213 White, Alexander, 105, 290 White Plains, 188; fortifications built around, 190; Hamilton, A., command of, 190–91; Howe, W., attacking at, 190–91; Washington, G., advanced corps arriving in, 190

White Thunder (Seneca chief ), 39–40 Widow White’s Tavern, 208 Wikoff, Peter, 249, 265 Wilhelm von Steuben, Friedrich, 11, 227, 230, 231; Lee, C., apologizing to, 271; training regimen of, 237–39 Wilkes, John, 74, 76 Wilkinson, James, 212 Will, last, 287–88, 361n60 Williamsburg: Governor’s Palace headquarters in, 153; Lee, C., arriving in, 153; Lee, C., sent to, 150 Winthrop, Hannah, 212 Winthrop, John, 21 Wolfe, James, 33 Women, 77 Wood, Gordon S., 280 Woodhull, Nathaniel, 143, 147 Wroughton, Thomas, 65, 68, 75, 80 Yorke, Joseph, 65 Yorktown, Virginia, 285, 288

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About the Author

Phillip Papas received his BA and MA degrees in history from Hunter College (CUNY) and his PhD in history from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is currently Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Economics, Government, and History Department at Union County College in Cranford, New Jersey. Papas is also the author of That Ever Loyal Island: Staten Island and the American Revolution (New York University Press, 2007).

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