Alexander Hamilton (16 page)

After Boston fell to the Continental Army in March—a shock for the British and a tonic to patriotic spirits—New York loomed as the next battlefront, and the city braced for impending invasion. Hamilton had already informed his distant St. Croix readers, “This city is at present evacuated by above one half of its inhabitants under the influence of a general panic.”
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Starting in March, Lord Stirling had supervised four thousand men who sealed off major streets and strung a network of batteries and earthworks across Manhattan from the Hudson to the East River. Hamilton’s company constructed a small fort with twelve cannon on the high ground of Bayard’s Hill, near the present-day intersection of Canal and Mulberry Streets.

In April, Washington came down from New England to oversee military preparations in New York and employed as his headquarters a Hudson River mansion called Richmond Hill, later the home of Aaron Burr. By a curious coincidence, Burr, fresh from the failed patriot assault on Quebec, visited Washington in June and accepted his offer to serve on his military staff, or “family,” as it was known. By some accounts, the aristocratic young Burr had grandiose expectations and imagined that Washington would confer with him on grand matters of strategy. When he realized that he would be relegated to more prosaic duties, he quickly quit in disgust and sent a letter to Washington protesting that less-qualified men had been promoted ahead of him. He then went to work for Major General Israel Putnam. Something about Aaron Burr—his penchant for intrigue, a lack of sufficient deference, perhaps his insatiable chasing after women—grated on George Washington. Much of Burr’s political future was shaped by his decidedly cool wartime relations with Washington, while other contemporaries, Hamilton being the prime example, profited from the general’s approbation.

During this period, Washington was at least marginally aware of Hamilton. An exacting captain, Hamilton ordered the arrest of a sergeant, two corporals, and a private for “mutiny,” and they received mild punishments in a court-martial. Washington pardoned the two principal offenders before issuing general orders for Hamilton to assemble his company on May 15, 1776, “at ten o’clock next Sunday morning upon the Common.”
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A month later, as we learn from the
Royal Danish American Gazette,
Hamilton gallantly led a nighttime attack of one hundred men against the Sandy Hook lighthouse outside New York harbor. “I continued the attack for two hours with fieldpieces and small arms,” the war correspondent– cum–artillery captain reported, “being all that time between two smart fires from the shipping and the lighthouse, but could make no impression on the walls.”
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Hamilton did not lose any men and said the raid miscarried because he lacked sufficient munitions and because the enemy had been tipped off to the attack. With the speed of youthful dreams, Hamilton had moved from the fantasy to the reality of combat leadership.

Back in Manhattan, the young captain found a city engaged in a spree of wanton violence against Tory sympathizers. Many Loyalists were subjected to a harrowing ritual known as “riding the rail,” in which they were carried through the streets sitting astride a sharp rail borne by two tall, strong men. The prisoners’ names were proclaimed at each street corner as spectators lustily cheered their humiliation. One bystander reported, “We had some grand Tory rides in the city this week....Several of them were handled very roughly, being carried through the streets on rails, their clothes torn off their backs and their bodies pretty well mingled with the dust....There is hardly a Tory face to be seen this morning.”
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Because New York had been a citadel of Tory sentiment, there was a pervasive fear of clandestine plots being hatched against Washington, whose capture or assassination would have been an inestimable prize to the British. Indeed, the former New York governor, William Tryon, tried to orchestrate just such a plan. On June 21, as Hamilton returned from Sandy Hook, a cabal to murder General Washington and recruit a Loyalist force to aid the British was laid bare. New York’s Tory mayor, David Mathews, was charged “with dangerous designs and treasonable conspiracies against the rights and liberties of the United Colonies of America.”
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Others implicated in this shocking plot included several members of Washington’s personal guard, especially Sergeant Thomas Hickey. Mayor Mathews admitted to having contact with the British and was imprisoned in Connecticut, but a defiant Hickey produced no witnesses at his court-martial and was sentenced to death.

Hamilton regaled his St. Croix readers with these dramatic events, telling them that “a most barbarous and infernal plot has been discovered among our Tories.” He sketched a widespread conspiracy, the goal of which was to “murder all the staff officers, blow up the magazines, and secure the passes of the town.”
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On June 28, nearly twenty thousand spectators—virtually every person still in town, Hamilton included—turned out in a meadow near the Bowery to watch Thomas Hickey mount the gallows. The prisoner had remained unrepentant, and Washington decided to make an example of him. Hickey waived the presence of a chaplain, explaining that “they are all cutthroats.”
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He kept up his air of bravado until the hangman slipped the noose and blindfold over his head, at which point he briefly wiped away tears. Moments later, his body hung slack from the gallows. In his second dispatch on this sensational event, Hamilton applauded Washington’s swift justice. “It is hoped the remainder of those miscreants now in our possession will meet with a punishment adequate to their crimes.”
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Hamilton might have ended his dispatch there. Instead, in a curious non sequitur, the future treasury secretary reported rumors that copper coins made with base metal alloys would be called in, possibly replaced by new continental copper coins of larger size. Evidently, the young captain was boning up on monetary policy.

Within days of Hickey’s execution, King George III revealed just how far he was prepared to go to crush his refractory colonies. The world’s foremost naval power began to gather a massive armada of battleships and transports at Sandy Hook, the prelude to the largest amphibious assault of the eighteenth century. An assemblage of military might was soon marshaled—some three hundred ships and thirty-two thousand men, including eighty-four hundred Hessian mercenaries—a fighting force designed expressly to intimidate the Americans and restore them to their sanity through a terrifying show of strength. The British had so many troops stationed aboard this floating city that they surpassed in numbers the patriotic soldiers and citizens left facing them in New York.

Entrenched in southern Manhattan, with fewer than twenty thousand inexperienced soldiers at his disposal and lacking even a single warship, Washington must have wondered how he could possibly defeat this well-oiled fighting machine. He was making “every preparation” for an imminent assault, he wrote, but conceded that his army was “extremely deficient in arms... and in great distress for want of them.”
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To remedy a grave shortage of ammunition, the New York Provincial Congress ordered that lead be peeled from roofs and windows and melted down to make bullets. So many trees had already been chopped down for firewood that New York resembled a ghost town. “To see the vast number of houses shut up, one would think the city almost evacuated,” one fleeing Tory wrote. “Women and children are scarcely to be seen in the streets.”
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On July 2, the British battle plan began to unfold as General William Howe directed ships commanded by his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, to sail up through the Narrows. Thousands of redcoats disembarked on Staten Island. From Manhattan wharves and rooftops, Continental Army soldiers stared flabbergasted at the interminable procession of imposing vessels crowding into the harbor. Surveying a bay thick with British masts, one American soldier said that it resembled “a wood of pine trees.” “I could not believe my eyes. I declare that I thought all London was afloat.”
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Captain Hamilton and his artillery company, posted at the Battery, had an unobstructed view of the enemy.

It seemed an inauspicious moment for the threatened colonies to declare independence, and yet that is exactly what they did. Faced with the military strength of the most colossal empire since ancient Rome, they decided to fight back. On July 2, the Continental Congress unanimously adopted a resolution calling for independence, with only New York abstaining. Two days later, the congress endorsed the Declaration of Independence in its final, edited form. (The actual signing was deferred until August 2.) There was nothing impetuous or disorderly about this action. Even amid a state of open warfare, these law-abiding men felt obligated to issue a formal document, giving a dispassionate list of their reasons for secession. This solemn, courageous act flew in the face of historical precedent. No colony had ever succeeded in breaking away from the mother country to set up a self-governing state, and the declaration signers knew that the historical odds were heavily stacked against them. They further knew that treason was a crime punishable by death, a threat that scarcely seemed abstract as reports trickled into Philadelphia of the formidable fleet bearing down on New York.

The Declaration of Independence did not achieve sacred status for many years and was not even officially inscribed on parchment for another two weeks. Instead, a Philadelphia printer, John Dunlap, ran off about five hundred broadsides that were distributed by fast riders throughout the colonies. On July 6, while Captain Hamilton wandered about trying to find a purse with money that he had lost—he sometimes had a touch of the absentminded genius—the local press announced independence. Two days later, Washington held a printed copy of the declaration in his hands for the first time. The next day, the New York Provincial Congress ratified the document, and at 6:00 p.m. Washington gathered all his troops on the Common—the very same Common where Hamilton had debuted as a speaker—to hear the stirring manifesto read aloud. As the rapt soldiers listened, they learned that “the United Colonies” of America had been declared “
Free and Independent States.
”
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The long-awaited words triggered a rush of patriotic exuberance. Militiamen and civilians barreled down Broadway, destroying every relic of British influence in their path, including royal arms painted on tavern signs. At Bowling Green, at the foot of Broadway, they mobbed a gilded equestrian statue of George III, portrayed in Roman garb, that had been erected to celebrate the repeal of the Stamp Act. John Adams had once admired this “beautiful ellipsis of land, railed in with solid iron, in the center of which is a statue of his majesty on horseback, very large, of solid lead, gilded with gold, on a pedestal of marble, very high.”
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Now, for reasons both symbolic and practical, the crowd pulled George III down from his pedestal, decapitating him in the process. The four thousand pounds of gilded lead was rushed off to Litchfield, Connecticut, where it was melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets. One wit predicted that the king’s soldiers “will probably have melted majesty fired at them.”
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The action boosted morale in the besieged city at a time of imminent peril. On July 12, the British decided to throw the fear of God into the rebels and test their defenses by sending the
Phoenix,
a forty-four-gun battleship, and the
Rose,
a twentyeight-gun frigate, past southern Manhattan with guns blazing. Undeterred by fire from the Manhattan shore, the two ships raced up the Hudson, peppering several New York rooftops with cannonballs and sailing by unscathed. The din from the shelling was deafening. Hamilton commanded four of the biggest cannon in the patriotic arsenal and stood directly in the British line of fire. Hercules Mulligan recalled, “Capt. Hamilton went on the Battery with his company and his piece of artillery and commenced a brisk fire upon the
Phoenix
and
Rose
then sailing up the river, when his cannon burst and killed two of his men who...were buried in the Bowling Green.”
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Actually, Hamilton’s exploding cannon may have killed as many as six of his men and wounded four or five others. Some critics blamed inadequate training for the mishap, but the general dissipation of troops addicted to whoring and drinking was more likely to blame. Lieutenant Isaac Bangs reported that many cannon at the Battery had been abandoned by troops who “were at their cups and at their usual place of abode, viz., on the Holy Ground.”
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Of the specific incident involving Hamilton’s men, Bangs wrote that “by the carelessness of our own artillery men, six men were killed with our own cannon and several others very badly wounded. It is said that several of the company out of which they were killed were drunk and neglected to sponge, worm, and stop the vent and the cartridges took fire while they were ramming them down.”
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(In other words, the men hadn’t swabbed out the sparks and powder after the previous firing.) That Hamilton was never reprimanded and that his military reputation only improved suggests that he was never faulted for the fatal mishap. However, crushed by the incident, he quickly learned that war was a filthy business.

By August 17, New York’s population stood in such grave danger that Washington urged residents to evacuate immediately; only five thousand civilians of a prewar population of twenty-five thousand remained. With a condescension typical of the British command, Lord Howe’s secretary, Ambrose Serle, snickered at the rebel forces as “the strangest that was ever collected: old men of 60, boys of 14, and blacks of all ages and ragged for the most part, compose the motley crew.”
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Washington had dispersed his tattered forces across Manhattan and Brooklyn. After crossing the East River to scout out the terrain, Hamilton doubted that the Continental Army could defend Brooklyn Heights against a concerted British onslaught. Hercules Mulligan recalled a dinner at his home at which Hamilton and the Reverend John Mason agreed on the need for a tactical retreat from Brooklyn, lest the Continental Army be wiped out. After they had “retired from the table, they were lamenting the situation of the army on Long Island and suggesting the best plans for its removal when Mr. Mason and Mr. Hamilton determined to write an anonymous letter to Gen[era]l Washington pointing out their ideas of the best means to draw off the army.”
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Mulligan transmitted this plan to one of Washington’s aides, to no avail.