Washington [163]
Unscathed by steady fire from the Manhattan and New Jersey shores, the Phoenix and the Rose streamed up the Hudson River and pounded the urban population of New York with a terrifying two-hour cannonade that shrouded the city in smoke and panicked its occupants. The episode demonstrated the vulnerability to British warships of a town encircled by water. Attuned to the psychology of war, Washington saw with dismay that his soldiers were unnerved by the plight of overwrought civilians. Since his own early combat experience had been in frontier locations, this urban chaos was something altogether new for him. “When the men-of-war passed up the river,” Washington observed, “the shrieks and cries” of the women and children were “truly distressing and I fear will have an unhappy effect on the ears and minds of our young and inexperienced soldiery.”26 Afterward Washington tried to clear the city of remaining civilians to avoid a repetition of the episode. He was especially indignant at soldiers who had stood hypnotized by British ships bombarding the town. The next day Washington chastised them unsparingly: “Such unsoldierly conduct must grieve every good officer and give the enemy a mean opinion of the army . . . a weak curiosity at such a time makes a man look mean and contemptible.”27 Just as Washington feared, the British ships’ foray in the Hudson severed communications between New York and Albany and the strategically located upstate lakes.
Washington had gotten his first unforgettable taste of British sea power. Because of their speed and mobility, enemy ships could disappear, then surface anywhere, and they would keep him in suspense for the next seven years. As he would complain, “The amazing advantage the enemy derive from their ships and the command of the water keeps us in a state of constant perplexity.”28 On the evening of the Phoenix and Rose episode, Washington and his officers noticed that the appearance of a new ship, the Eagle, triggered delirious cheers from British soldiers aboard ships and encamped on Staten Island, and they deduced correctly that Admiral Richard Howe had arrived.
The Howe brothers, whose grandfather had been elevated to the peerage by King William III, boasted a blue-blooded pedigree that the young George Washington might have envied. Educated at Eton, befriended by King George III, they had become moderate Whig members of Parliament. Tall, well built, and graceful, the pleasure-loving General William Howe, forty-seven, had bold eyebrows, full lips, and a dusky complexion. He had fought bravely at Quebec in the French and Indian War and exposed himself to danger at Bunker Hill. He indulged the vices common to his class, especially gambling and whoring, and saw no reason why the American war should dampen his escapades. He took as his North American mistress the fetching Boston-born Elizabeth Lloyd Loring and made her husband, Joshua Loring, Jr., a commissary of prisoners. This opportunistic husband, content to be cuckolded, played the bawd for his wife, who became notorious as “the Sultana of the British army.”29 As one Loyalist writer said cynically, “Joshua had no objections. He fingered the cash, the general enjoyed madam.”30 Admiral Richard Howe, fifty, less of a bon vivant than his younger brother, had earned the nickname “Black Dick,” which referred to both his complexion and to his downcast nature. He was a somber man, thin-faced and tight-lipped, with a cool, somewhat forbidding gaze. So marked was his reticence that Horace Walpole described him as “silent as a rock.”31 For all that, he was a superb seaman, renowned for his courage, fighting spirit, and ethical standards.
As convinced believers in the British Empire and sympathetic to colonial grievances, the Howe brothers didn’t want to crush the patriots in a total war of annihilation. Still hopeful that their misguided American cousins could be restored to their senses, they came to North America bearing both peace and a sword. In the coming campaign, they would plot strategy with political