Washington [176]
As September ended, George Washington—stubborn, angry, indignant, and sleep deprived—was steeped in misery. His worst nightmare had materialized: he was doomed to fail because he hadn’t been given adequate means to succeed. He needed a confidant, and Lund Washington remained the recipient of choice for his jeremiads: “In short, such is my situation, that if I were to wish the bitterest curse to an enemy on this side of the grave, I should put him in my stead with my feelings . . . In confidence I tell you that I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born.”63 Mount Vernon again offered sustenance for his weary mind, and he pictured the new room under construction there. “The chimney in the new room should be exactly in the middle of it, the doors and everything else to be exactly answerable and uniform,” he advised Lund. “In short, I would have the whole executed in a masterly manner.”64
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
An Indecisive Mind
ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 12 General Howe applied renewed pressure on the Continental Army as 150 British ships sailed up the East River, slipping through pea-soup fog, and deposited four thousand men on the boggy turf of Throg’s Neck, a peninsula on the Westchester shore. This marshy spot lay due east of Harlem Heights, and Washington again brooded that the wily British might entrap his embattled army as part of “their former scheme of getting to our rear.”1 While the intervening ground had numerous stone fences to deflect British advances, Washington couldn’t take any chances. In this dismal season of defeats, he marched his endangered men eighteen miles north to the village of White Plains. He would long recall the hardships suffered by sick soldiers forced to limp along or be carried, so critical was the wagon shortage. The least fortunate were discharged as unfit for service and left behind as common vagrants to beg by the wayside on the road home. The plight of these pauperized soldiers, marooned on country lanes, only compounded the difficulties of recruitment.
On this northward march, the battle-weary soldiers found comfort in gallows humor. Joseph Plumb Martin told of a sojourn on Valentine’s Hill, “where we continued some days, keeping up the old system of starving.” When the soldiers resumed their march toward White Plains, they left behind a weighty iron kettle. “I told my mess-mates that I could not carry our kettle any further. They said they would not carry it any further. Of what use was it? They had nothing to cook and did not want anything to cook with.”2 Behind the macabre humor lay the somber reality of starving men having to swipe food from farmers’ fields to survive. Deprived of tents and blankets, soldiers burrowed beneath heaps of autumn leaves to stay warm on cool nights.
Around this time, Washington welcomed back General Charles Lee, who had acquired something of a halo after defeating a British expedition to South Carolina. Lee had prevailed upon Congress to compensate him for time lost to civilian pursuits, awarding him $30,000. In private, Lee repaid their generosity by reviling them as “cattle” and urging Washington to flout their orders.3 Lee’s popularity in Congress only stoked his vanity and encouraged the delusion that he was being groomed as Washington’s successor. Blind to this conceited rival, Washington renamed one of the twin forts on the Hudson—the one on the Jersey shore, opposite Fort Washington—Fort Lee.
Once at White