Washington [180]
An hour later the Hessian general, Baron Wilhelm von Knyphausen, called for the surrender of the doomed fort. By four P.M., 2,837 soldiers, including 230 officers, emptied out and marched down a gauntlet of Hessian soldiers, who kicked and punched them. Even some of the victors found the procession of shabby, unkempt men a heartrending sight. “A great many of them were lads under fifteen and old men, and few had the appearance of soldiers,” wrote Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie, who said that many colleagues guffawed at this sad mimicry of a professional army.20 The American captives were dispatched to the grisly confinement of British prison ships in New York Harbor.
There was no way of putting a face-saving construction on this searing loss: it was a defeat without redeeming features. As David McCullough has summarized the debacle, “In a disastrous campaign for New York in which Washington’s army had suffered one humiliating, costly reverse after another, this, the surrender of Fort Washington on Saturday, November 16, was the most devastating blow of all, an utter catastrophe.”21 The outcome could only have deepened Washington’s nightmarish sense of helplessness. Just as he fretted about expiring enlistments, he had losses of almost three thousand men killed or captured. At the same time, a huge cache of valuable muskets and cannon had fallen into British hands.
The demise of Fort Washington could have scuttled the career of the distraught Nathanael Greene. As he told Knox the next day, “Never did I need the consoling voice of a friend more than now . . . This is a most terrible event; its consequences are justly to be dreaded.”22 It is a remarkable commentary on Washington’s admiration for him that he didn’t scapegoat Greene or drum him out of the ranks. Washington was honest enough to point out that his advice to Greene to evacuate the fort had been “discretionary” and took a portion of the blame on himself.23 On the other hand, he had granted this discretion because Greene was on the scene and presumably better placed to form a judgment. Washington couldn’t account for his own failure to reverse Greene’s decision once he had reviewed the situation firsthand. Drawing on a thin pool of talented officers, Washington was forced by circumstance to tolerate a high rate of failure among his generals. A master politician in the making, he had a knack for spotting and rewarding faithful subordinates who repaid his trust with absolute devotion. He seemed to know implicitly that no loyalty surpassed that of a man forgiven for his faults who vowed never to make them again.
By contrast, General Charles Lee tried to capitalize upon Washington’s tremendous stumble at Fort Washington. He claimed that, enraged upon hearing the news, he tore out a patch of his hair. “The ingenious maneuver of Fort Washington has unhinged the goodly fabric we have been building,” he wrote to General Horatio Gates. “There never was so damned a stroke. Entre nous, a certain great man is damnably deficient.”24 He tried to undermine Washington further by informing Congressman Benjamin Rush that “I foresaw, predicted, all that has happened . . . had I the powers I could do you much good . . . but I am sure you will never give any man the necessary powers.”25 To Washington himself, Lee wrote more tactfully. “Oh, General, why would you be over-persuaded by men of inferior judgment to your own?”26
Even more bad news hung in the offing. On the morning of November 20 word reached Washington in Hackensack that thousands of enemy soldiers, camouflaged by a dark, rainy night, had crossed the Hudson River in a daring raid, landing six miles above Fort Lee. They had nimbly scaled the Palisades, a solid wall of rock and dense greenery, and now marched toward Fort Lee in great numbers. After the fall of Fort Washington, Fort Lee had shed its strategic importance, since it was impossible to thwart British ships from only one side of the Hudson. Having seen the importance of reacting quickly to threats, Washington raced on