Washington [179]
That General William Howe had unfinished business in New York grew plain on November 15 when he sent his trusted aide Colonel James Paterson to hand an ultimatum to Colonel Robert Magaw, the superior officer at Fort Washington. The British offered a frightening choice: either relinquish the fort within two hours or brace for its destruction. Washington had underestimated the British forces that would be mobilized to this task: Howe dedicated thirteen thousand men to the operation. With three thousand men at his command, the unbending Magaw vowed that he was “determined to defend this post to the very last extremity.”15 This wasn’t the war’s last instance of misplaced bravado. Washington learned of this ultimatum while in Hackensack, New Jersey, and he instantly spurred his horse to Fort Lee, arriving at sundown. Nathanael Greene and Israel Putnam had crossed to Fort Washington, and Washington jumped into a boat to follow them. He encountered them in the darkness in midstream, as they were being rowed back to the Jersey shore. Messrs. Greene and Putnam reassured an agitated Washington that the men at Fort Washington were “in high spirits and would make a good defense.”16 The three men then spent the night at Fort Lee.
The next morning refuted the generals’ soothing words. Along with Greene, Putnam, and Brigadier General Hugh Mercer, Washington was boarding a rowboat to go to Fort Washington when they heard an uproar on the far bank: the British had launched a many-sided assault against the fort, the cannon thunder amplified by the rocky cliffs of the Hudson. Notwithstanding the danger, Washington and his generals sped across the river, landed on the opposite shore, and mounted to Harlem Heights, downriver from the besieged fort. They proceeded to the Roger Morris house, a mile south of Fort Washington, whose elevation enabled them to survey patriot defenses. There they stood, said Greene, “in a very awkward situation,” watching the enemy advance, but they “saw nothing amiss” and derived a false sense of comfort.17 American shells pulverized the Hessian lines, littering the battlefield with hundreds of enemy casualties. As one Hessian recalled: “They lay battered and in part shattered; dead on the earth in their own blood; some whimpering, looked at us, pleading that . . . we would ease their suffering and unbearable pain.”18 It attested to Washington’s dauntless courage that he wished to stay with his exposed men, but his companions convinced him that he stood in extreme danger. After insisting that the three generals accompany him, Washington was rowed back across the Hudson out of harm’s way. He made a hairbreadth escape: the British arrived at the Roger Morris house a scant fifteen minutes later.
From the rocky terrain of Fort Lee, Washington watched the disaster unfolding across the water. General Howe unleashed the full terror of his arsenal on Fort Washington, and by one P.M. almost all of the terrified American soldiers were squeezed inside the cramped fortress, now turned into a veritable death trap. The enemy then went on a rampage, bayoneting to death any American troops they could capture. As he stood high on the Jersey Palisades and watched through his telescope, George Washington gave way to strong emotions. As Washington Irving, who claimed to have heard the story from eyewitnesses, later wrote, the defeat “was said so completely to have overcome him that