Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [191]
Aware that further conflict with America would require expenditures of blood and money that the government could ill afford—resistance to domestic recruiting had already obliged it to hire soldiers from the Landgrave of Hesse in Germany—even moderate Whigs like Edmund Burke were urging Lord North to go easy. General Howe’s brother, Admiral Lord Richard “Black Dick” Howe, was in fact already on his way to the colonies at the head of a commission authorized by the king, reluctantly, to negotiate with Congress.
Both the Howe brothers felt personally well disposed toward the colonies. Both remembered with gratitude that the Massachusetts legislature had erected a monument in Westminster Abbey to the memory of an older brother killed at Ticonderoga during the Seven Years War. Both believed, vaguely, that the Americans had some cause for complaint. Both continued to believe in the possibility of a peaceful reconciliation. Both sensed that the annihilation of Washington’s army in New York would make reconciliation impossible and doom Britain to resolve the American crisis by force of arms alone—an unhappy prospect even for men who made a profession of war.
The course that both preferred, all things considered, was to make the colonies realize the danger they faced without closing the door to negotiations. Confronted with the combined might of His Majesty’s army and navy, Washington and the Congress (so the theory went) would come to their senses and return to the fold. A case could be made, in fact, that General Howe’s arrival off Staten Island was already having the desired effect. Virtually the entire Staten Island militia had joined the British army, and every day, from New Jersey, from Long Island, and even from Manhattan, scores of Tories were slipping through rebel lines to join the fleet. At a moment’s notice, they said, thousands more were ready to rise against the tyranny of Congress; Washington’s army, they said, was disintegrating.
Howe’s first move, accordingly, was a modest but revealing probe of the American defenses. On July 12 a pair of British warships, the gunship Phoenix (forty-four guns) and the frigate Rose (twenty-eight guns), detached themselves from the fleet anchored off Staten Island and crossed the upper bay toward the mouth of the Hudson. American cannon blazed away from Red Hook, Governors Island, Paulus Hook (New Jersey), and Manhattan, but to no effect. While the captain of the Rose and his officers sipped claret on the quarterdeck, the two sailed serenely into the Hudson, past the city, and all the way up river to Tarrytown, some thirty miles to the north.
Washington was appalled. His artillery did more harm to themselves than to the enemy—the only casualties of the day occurred when an ill-trained gun crew on the Battery blew themselves up—while many of his men and officers abandoned their positions to gawk at the spectacle. “Such unsoldierly conduct,” he explained to the Provincial Congress, would “give the enemy a mean opinion of the army.”
Just as unfortunate, casual return fire from the British warships, though doing no great damage, caused pandemonium among the civilian population. A few of Washington’s staff were convinced by what had happened that this was the wrong place and the wrong time for a head-on battle with the British. Washington, however, remained obstinate in his determination to fight for the city. Admiral Lord Howe and his fellow commissioners, who had by coincidence arrived on the evening of the twelfth (along with 150 ships and fifteen thousand more troops), got nowhere with the American commander in the days that followed. He firmly refused to see them; negotiation was a matter for Congress, he explained, besides which Howe had made the mistake of writing to “Mr. George Washington” rather than “General George Washington.”
Two weeks passed. Generals Henry Clinton and