49. The End of the War in the North

After the Battle of Saratoga and French entry into the war, British war strategy changed. No longer was a quick victory looked for. Instead, Clinton was to base himself at New York City and nearby areas; from there, he and the navy were to conduct a war of harassment and terror raids, blockading, burning, raiding. An open and direct confrontation with Washington’s army was to be sought, but not counted upon. In the West, the British were to lead Indian terror raids on the frontier and try to capture the land west of the Appalachians. But the main theatre of war was to shift to the South. Lightly populated and filled with Tories and restive slaves, the South was now seen as the Achilles heel of the United States. Starting with southernmost Georgia, the plan was to roll north, attracting new governments by resurgent Tories as they went. New England and other northern states would thereby be isolated, cut off from the great export staples of the South, blockaded, starved out, and forced into surrender or at least subordination to Great Britain. As in the earlier years of the war, the plan relied on an overestimation of Tory strength and effectiveness, but with this difference: whereas Britain had previously overlooked the need to organize Tories because of overconfidence, now they relied excessively on Tory forces as against their own. In doing this, the British found that since the masses support the Revolution, as in other battles against revolution, that counter-revolution must reduce to sporadic raids against the people and rely increasingly on naked terror against their persons and property.

The remainder of the Revolutionary War in the north followed essentially this pattern of indecisive skirmishes and sorties. The most important thrust occurred after a cessation of fighting of almost two years. Clinton moved up the Hudson with 6,000 men at the end of May 1779 to capture forts at Stony Point and Verplanck’s Point. Washington was stationed in a ring around New York City, and Clinton tried to draw him into a general action or else into leaving his camp exposed. He sent expeditions on terror raids into Connecticut to burn the coastal towns, specifically New Haven, East Haven, Fairfield, Greens Farms, and Norwalk. Particularly exuberant in inflicting terror and devastation was the former New York Royal Governor William Tryon. But in all this Washington was not lured into coming to Connecticut’s defense. Instead, he cleverly decided upon a surprise attack to retake Stony Point. Washington sent on the expedition a newly formed elite corps of riflemen and light infantry, the American Light Infantry. Headed by General “Mad Anthony” Wayne, these 1,200 men boldly and successfully stormed Stony Point on July 15. Although Wayne had to withdraw from Stony Point when Clinton approached, Clinton soon had to conserve men by evacuating the two forts.

Giving the command of the light infantry unit to Wayne was eloquent evidence of the shabby way in which Washington treated his best officers. Lee, broken, court-martialled, disgraced; Gates, the victor of Saratoga, vindictively given petty assignments and sent into virtual retirement after 1778; Arnold, confined during 1778 to the inactivity and petty administrative duties of military commandant of reoccupied Philadelphia; even the inferior Schuyler thrown to the wolves for his conduct of the campaign against Burgoyne and forced out of the army. And now the guerrilla fighter, Dan Morgan. The obvious choice for commander of the light infantry, he was deliberately passed over by Washington for the post he wanted so much. Despite his enormous services to the Revolution, Morgan, too, was forced into virtual retirement during 1779 when Washington summarily removed him from the Continental Army and sent him down to the mere colonelcy of a Virginia infantry regiment.

No important military battles took place in the North after Monmouth, even the Stony Point fracas being a minor skirmish of little importance. The British captured and held the port of Castine, Maine; Newport changed hands when Clinton evacuated the town in late 1779 to release more men for the southern campaign. The French under Comte de Rochambeau occupied Newport in July 1780; Washington hoped to unite with him in an assault upon New York, but the superior British fleet bottled up the French at Newport indefinitely.

More important were the British terror raids, such as the burning and destruction of the Connecticut towns, the burning of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and the murder of unarmed men in a night raid on Little Egg Harbor in New Jersey. The main effect of these raids was to embitter the Americans further and stiffen their resolve for victory.

Actually, the worst problem facing the American cause in the North was the progressive disintegration of Washington’s Continental Army. The Americans, as a nation of revolutionaries, were not equipped to linger on for years like a conventional army in enforced idleness, yet this was what Washington was demanding. But the main source of the soldiers’ distress was the mammoth and increasingly runaway inflation caused by the indiscriminate printing of Continental paper money. This cascade of new money caused the paper to depreciate at an accelerated pace against specie, engendering cries of a “scarcity of money” and pressure for even greater use of the printing press. Since the Continental soldiers were paid in Continentals, they were being paid in increasingly worthless paper. Their hardships were greatly aggravated, furthermore, by the attempts of the states to enforce maximum price controls to check the runaway rise in prices. By attacking the symptoms (prices) rather than the cause (the money supply) the governments did not halt the inflation, but only disrupted market supplies more by shutting off the flow of supplies to areas where maximum control was enforced. This was particularly true in an economy where farmers and artisan-manufacturers could easily consume their own produce or engage in local barter when price controls discouraged them from participating in the market economy at all. This combination of inflation, depreciation, price controls, and continued idleness caused a massive and increasing hardship, resentment, and a diminishing of the Continental Army.

Thus the winter camp of 1779–80 at Morristown, New Jersey, far surpassed the winter at Valley Forge for misery and adversity among the American soldiers. In mid-December, an empty commissary led Washington to despair of a total breakup of the army within a fortnight. The soldiers were forced to loot local farmyards, and supplies were increasingly confiscated from the populace. Their problem was not a shortage of food in the area, but rather that the New Jersey farmers were understandably reluctant to sell their produce for near-worthless Continental currency.

Angry over lack of food, clothing, and arrears in salary that would be paid in worthless paper, two Connecticut regiments mutinied at the end of May 1780, demanding food or permission to go home. They were only subdued with the arrest of the ringleaders by a veteran Pennsylvania brigade.

Washington’s army had now been reduced from 27,000 the previous autumn to 10,000 men, of whom fewer than 4,000 were fit for duty—and these chronically hungry, cold, and embittered. Into this disintegration on June 6, Clinton sent Gen. Wilhelm von Knyphausen with 5,000 men from Staten Island to Elizabethtown in New Jersey. Here the British showed that they still failed to comprehend that revolutionary warfare is waged by a people in arms. They could not understand that the real power of the American force lay not in the visible nucleus of the Continental Army, which was truly in bad straits, but rather in the “invisible” hordes of the armed American people, the “rabble in arms.” Resorting to brutal terror on the New Jersey march, the burning and plundering of villages ordered by General Tryon, only served to harden the American resolve. Even as Burgoyne, in his march, found himself eventually surrounded by erupting and rapidly gathering militia, so Knyphausen was soon confronted by large bodies of suddenly materializing militia which forced him to turn back at Springfield.

Later in June, Knyphausen again tried to march toward Springfield. But the highly able Nathanael Greene, with fewer than 2,000 men, stopped him cold at Springfield. Realizing that “every mile of his future march... would be no less obstinately resisted,” Knyphausen withdrew from New Jersey, pausing only to burn Springfield to the ground. This was the end of New Jersey operations by the British.

Greene’s victory at Springfield marked the return to the field of yet another brilliant commander whose talents had been wasted for two years in the post of quartermaster general. Throughout the year 1779, the Americans had been deprived by Washington’s mismanagement and personal pique of the services of their best military officers, and Greene was one of them. Moreover, Greene was now returned to his quartermaster post from which he resigned but was reinstated in a dispute with the Continental Congress.

An understandably severe blow to the morale of the American troops was the discovery of the treason of Benedict Arnold in the fall of 1780. Soon after taking up his post as military commandant of Philadelphia in 1779, the embittered Arnold married the aristocratic Tory belle, Peggy Shippen. Finding it difficult amid the pleasures of Philadelphia to support a way of life to which he and his bride were becoming accustomed, and encouraged by her, Arnold decided to make a deal with the British. Maneuvering to obtain the command of the fort at West Point, Arnold agreed to sell its surrender to the British for the munificent sum of 10,000 pounds. However, the British liaison with Arnold, Maj. John André, a friend of Peggy Arnold’s, was captured with incriminating documents on September 23. Arnold himself was barely able to escape to New York City, where he was handsomely rewarded by the British and made a general on the British side. So shocking a blow was this to the Americans that “Benedict Arnold” became a veritable synonym for “traitor.” For his part, Major André was hanged by Washington as a spy.

Disliked and distrusted by the British, Arnold ironically found the same complaint in their ranks he had suffered at home: he did not receive a command at all worthy of his military talents. Although he was permitted to launch only a few raids he was nevertheless fated to conduct the last engagement of the war in the North—and against his old birthplace in southeastern Connecticut. In early September 1781, Arnold organized a large terror raid against the port of New London, Connecticut, a base for privateers that contained a large quantity of military stores. On capturing the garrison, his men slaughtered almost the entire body of 150 prisoners and systematically burned the towns of Groton and New London.

Conditions in Washington’s winter camp of 1780–81 were as bad, and for basically the same reasons, as the previous winter. Most aggrieved were the Pennsylvania soldiers. The three years of duty for which they had enlisted were now up, and yet the military authorities insisted that they must stay until the end of the war. Especially outraged was the brigade of Pennsylvanians stationed near Morristown under the command of General Wayne. On the night of January 1, 1781, the men of the Pennsylvania Line mutinied, killed one officer and wounded two others and captured the artillery. The men were now determined to run their own lives, and unlike the Connecticut mutineers of the year before, they refused to be awed by higher authority. Led by Sgt. William Bonzar, six full regiments of Pennsylvanians demanded discharges for all who had served for their three years, as well as payment of the wages in arrears. They set out to march on Congress in Philadelphia to present their grievances there, thus placing justice and their liberty higher than the fetish of military subordination and obedience.

Congress was wiser than to try to treat these men as traitors and mutineers. A committee headed by Pennsylvanian Joseph Reed, now president of the Congress, was sent to Princeton to negotiate with the mutineers. There an agreement was hammered out by the end of January that yielded to the demands of the Pennsylvania Line. Congress agreed to discharge all those who had served for three years and to pay the arrears of wages, with an allowance made for the inflationary loss in value of the paper dollar.

While negotiations were in progress, General Clinton saw an opportunity to profit from this discord and sent two Tory emissaries to Princeton to offer back pay and full pardon if the mutineers would join the British cause. The incensed mutineers seized the messengers and turned them over to General Wayne, who promptly hanged them as spies. Remarkably, when Wayne offered the mutineers a reward in gold for their fidelity, Sergeant Bonzar nobly spoke for his men in declining the offer; the men, he argued, were “not entitled to any other reward but the love of our country.”

Pennsylvania’s example inspired the New Jersey regiments of the Continental Army, stationed at Pompton, New Jersey, to do the same thing. On January 20, parts of three New Jersey regiments began to march toward Trenton. But this time, Washington, who had wanted to crush the Pennsylvanians but was wary of fighting eight regiments, treated the men as his authoritarian instincts commanded. General Robert Howe was sent with a unit of New England Continentals to surround and disarm the New Jersey units; he selected mutinous leaders from each of the regiments, tried several at court-martial, and had two shot by a firing squad made up of other rebel leaders. As Washington snarled: “Unless this dangerous spirit can be suppressed by force, there is an end to all subordination in the Army....”