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By Root 25823 0

Only recently a British judge had handed down this grisly sentence to Irish revolutionaries: “You are to be drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, where you are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, for while you are still living your bodies are to be taken down, your bowels torn out and burned before your faces, your heads then cut off, and your bodies divided each into four quarters. ”15 The British proved more lenient to captured American officers, but Washington knew that treason was a capital crime and that he had passed the point of no return. Employing a vivid metaphor, he later said that he and his colleagues had fought “with halters about their necks.”16 In the event of defeat, Washington knew, he would be hanged as the chief culprit; he decided that he would “neither ask for nor expect any favor from his most gracious Majesty.”17 He contrived a plan to flee, if necessary, to lands he owned in the Ohio Country, telling Burwell Bassett that “in the worst event, they will serve for an asylum.”18

On July 8 Washington held in his hands a broadside of the Declaration of Independence for the first time and ordered his troops to gather on the common at six P.M. the next evening to hear it read aloud. In general orders for July 9, he previewed its contents by noting that Congress had declared “the United Colonies of North America” to be “free and independent states.”19 Lest this sound abstract, he underscored the practical significance for the average soldier, pointing out that each was “now in the service of a state possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit and advance him to the highest honors of a free country.”20 Among other things, Congress could now coin money and devise other lucrative incentives.

The troops rejoiced upon hearing the document. “The Declaration was read at the head of each brigade,” wrote Samuel Blachley Webb, “and was received with three huzzas by the troops.”21 Washington was gratified by the “hearty assent” of his men and their “warmest approbation” of independence.22 News of the Declaration elicited snide rebukes from the British side, one officer saying that it served to highlight “the villainy and the madness of these deluded people.”23

Reading of the document led to such uproarious enthusiasm that soldiers sprinted down Broadway afterward and committed an act of vandalism: they toppled the equestrian statue of George III at Bowling Green, decapitating it, then parading the head around town to the lilting beat of fifes and drums. The patriots made excellent use of the four thousand pounds of gilded lead in the statue, which were melted down to make 42,088 musket bullets. Washington was appalled by the disorder. Ever the strict parent, he told his men that while he understood their high spirits, their behavior had “so much the appearance of riot and want of order in the army” that he disapproved their actions and urged that in future they should be left to the “proper authority.”24 His reproach might have sounded priggish, but Washington wanted this revolution to be an orderly one, with due respect for property, and he refused to abide even the desecration of the king’s statue. He sounded rejuvenated by the Declaration, writing defiantly to Hancock on July 10 that should the British mount an attack, “they will have to wade through much blood and slaughter before they can carry any part of our works.”25

Such bravado proved premature. On the afternoon of July 12, propelled by a stiff breeze and a powerful tide, five British ships—the forty-gun Phoenix and the twenty-gun Rose, along with a schooner and two tenders—sailed toward the Battery. In their first test, American defenses failed miserably. Only half the artillerists manned their guns, and hundreds of gaping soldiers stood onshore transfixed by the enemy ships, as if attending a sporting regatta. It was an ominous sign for the still-amateurish Continental Army. Six patriots were killed in an artillery company under Captain Alexander Hamilton when their cannon exploded, possibly from defective training or from