David mccullough library.., p.47
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set, page 47
General John Sullivan by Richard Morrell Staigg. An ambitious New Hampshire politician turned soldier, Sullivan had courage and tenacity, but nothing like Greene’s ability.
General Israel Putnam by John Trumbull. Indomitable, popular “Old Put” of Connecticut was afraid of nothing but unsuited for the multiple responsibilities of a large command.
William Alexander, Lord Stirling by Bass Otis. The only American general to claim a title, Stirling of New Jersey led his small force at Brooklyn with extraordinary valor.
Captain C. W. Peale self-portrait. To please his wife, the artist painted himself in his new Pennsylvania militia uniform.
Thomas and Sarah Mifflin in a portrait by John Singleton Copley. Especially during the escape from Brooklyn, Thomas Mifflin proved to be one of the best officers in Washington’s command.
General Henry Knox by Charles Willson Peale. Big, gregarious, artilleryman Knox, the former Boston bookseller, was, like his friend Nathanael Greene, a man of marked ability, which Washington saw from the start. Under the most trying conditions, through the darkest hours, Knox proved an outstanding leader, capable of accomplishing almost anything, and, like Greene, he remained steadfastly loyal to Washington.
Map 1. The “situation” at Boston as drawn by a British army engineer in October 1775.
Map 2. A detail from a 1776 British map of the battles of Brooklyn and New York shows British movements in red, American in green.
Map 3. A 1777 British map of the battles of Trenton and Princeton.
John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, in a detail from the Declaration of Independence 4 July 1776 by John Trumbull.
The Washington Family by Edward Savage. A post-war print depicts the commander-in-chief at home at Mt. Vernon, surrounded by his wife, Martha, and her grandchildren, Eleanor Custis and George Washington Parke Custis, and the slave William Lee, who served at Washington’s side through the war. The elegance of the general’s world was in sharp contrast to the ragtag army he led in 1776. The cartoon, a British rendition of a representative Yankee patriot, is not widely different from Washington’s own privately expressed view.
Washington’s headquarters through the Siege of Boston was a Cambridge mansion that still stands, now known as the Longfellow House.
General William Howe, who belonged to one of England’s most influential families, was a courageous professional soldier but inclined to dawdle when there was no action. The daring mission by the young amateur artilleryman Henry Knox, to bring the guns of Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights, took Howe completely by surprise.
A big man of big ideas, Knox liked to advertise the “very large” selections of his London Book-Store in Boston with advertisements displaying his own name written largest of all.
A page from Knox’s diary kept through the epic winter expedition to Ticonderoga and back is shown in its actual size. Here he writes of climbing peaks in the Berkshires “from which we might almost have seen all the kingdoms of the earth.” The date was January 10, 1776.
The British evacuation of Boston began before daylight, Sunday, March 17, 1776. Cannon were spiked or dumped in the harbor, as nearly 9,000 of the King’s troops, and 1,100 Loyalists went aboard British ships bound for Halifax. Americans on shore witnessing the spectacle were cheering and weeping. “Surely it is the Lord’s doing,” wrote Abigail Adams.
Among the Loyalists who fled were many of Boston’s leading citizens, like Justice Peter Oliver. The majority, however, were from every walk of life, farmers and tradesmen, who, firm in their loyalty to the King, considered themselves true patriots.
Washington generously conferred the honor of leading the American troops into Boston to the Massachusetts general, Artemus Ward, shown at left in a portrait by Charles Willson Peale.
Before the British set sail for the open sea, two of their engineers, Captains John Montresor and Archibald Robertson, blew up Castle William in Boston Harbor. The scene below was drawn by Robertson, who had done numerous sketches in and around Boston and kept a diary all through the Siege.
The British armada that sailed into New York Harbor in early summer, 1776, numbered more than 400 ships. It was the largest naval force ever seen in American waters, the largest sent out from the British Isles to defeat a distant foe. With no fighting ships of their own, the Americans faced an almost impossible task of defending against such might.
General Henry Clinton was neither impressive in appearance nor easy for his fellow British commanders to work with, but his plan for a night flanking movement on Brooklyn succeeded brilliantly. Had Clinton’s overall strategy for defeating the Americans been adopted, the outcome of the year’s campaign might have been different.
The fury of the first great battle of the war—and the first colossal defeat for the Continental Army—at Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, is dramatically portrayed in a painting by Alonzo Chappel. In the distance at left, Lord Stirling leads a few hundred Marylanders in a brave attack on the British lines, while in the right foreground other American troops in desperate retreat plunge into Gowanus Creek.
The night escape of the American army from Brooklyn, across the East River, could never have succeeded without the intrepid Marblehead mariners who manned the boats. The pencil sketch of their commander, Colonel John Glover, is by John Trumbull.
In a single night, 9,000 troops, plus equipment and horses, were transported across a mile of turbulent water to New York, without the British ever knowing and without the loss of a single life. In a print by M. A. Wageman, Washington is shown directing the exodus at the Brooklyn ferry landing.
A German engraving of the burning of New York, September 20, 1776, shows great drama but little knowledge of what the city looked like. The British blamed the fire on “lurking” American villains. Washington wrote, “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”
A British flotilla, led by Phoenix and Roebuck, defies the American guns of Fort Lee and Fort Washington to sail up the Hudson on October 9, 1776. The painting by a French marine artist, Dominic Serres, makes the Hudson look narrower—and thus the ships larger—than in reality.
One of the most revealing of the many diaries kept by American soldiers in 1776 was that of Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, a Connecticut farmer who recorded his experiences through one ordeal after another, including his time as a prisoner of war. The page at left, from August 28, records how, unexpectedly, the British general James Grant gave the famished prisoners “two quarters of mutton well cooked,” and, from August 29, that the prisoners are to be put aboard a ship.
Captured Americans by the thousands were crowded aboard rotting British prison ships anchored in New York Harbor, where they were to perish by the thousands, mostly from disease.
Grossly fat and contemptuous of Americans, the British general James Grant was also capable of small kindnesses to prisoners like Jabez Fitch (see diary at left) and wrote particularly vivid letters describing the campaign of 1776 from the British point of view.
British troops commanded by General Cornwallis scaled the Hudson River Palisades November 20, 1776, in a watercolor attributed to Lord Rawdon. In fact, this daring British move on New Jersey took place in the dead of night, not in daylight as shown.
Charles Cornwallis by Thomas Gainsborough. The most popular British general serving in America, Cornwallis had shown himself to be enterprising and aggressive. On November 25, 1776, with 10,000 men, he set off across New Jersey determined, he said, to catch Washington as a hunter bags a fox. The one looming uncertainty was the whereabouts of Charles Lee, the eccentric British general turned American patriot who was thought to be a more adroit and dangerous foe than Washington. a caricature of Lee with one of his numerous dogs.
A war of words came to a crescendo during the long retreat of Washington’s battered army across New Jersey. A Proclamation issued by Admiral Lord Richard Howe on November 30, 1776, offered pardon to all Americans who would take an allegiance to the King, and throngs in New Jersey flocked to British camps to sign their names. By contrast, Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis, which appeared on December 23, was a powerful summons to American patriotism second only to his Common Sense. Page one with its immortal opening lines is shown at left.
The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, New Jersey, 26 December 1776 by John Trumbull. Though the ceremony portrayed in Trumbull’s great, stylized painting, with the mortally wounded Hessian commander, Colonel Johann Rall, surrendering before George Washington, never happened, and no one after the battle looked so costume-perfect, the principals are all readily indentifiable (see key below), and the high drama of Trumbull’s scene was considered in the eighteenth century entirely suitable for the American triumph at Trenton, one of the turning points of the war.
A rapid sketch by John Trumbull, one of several preliminary studies, shows General Hugh Mercer being bayonetted in the fury of the Battle of Princeton.
KEY
1. Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall
2. Colonel William Stevens Smith, aide-de-camp to Major General Sullivan
3. Colonel Robert Hanson Harrison, Military Secretary to Washington
4. Captain Tench Tilghman, Military Secretary to Washington
5. General George Washington
6. Major General John Sullivan
7. Major General Nathanael Greene
8. Captain William Washington
9. Brigadier General Henry Knox
Washington at the Battle of Princeton by Charles Willson Peale. Painted in 1779, this full-length portrait became immediately popular, and Peale produced a number of replicas, one of which was ordered as a present for the King of France. The sash Washington wears is the light blue insignia he chose as commander-in-chief beginning with the summer of 1775. Nassau Hall at Princeton is shown on the distant horizon on the left.
As the war continued after 1776, Nathanael Greene wrote prophetically of Washington’s singular place in history as the “deliverer of his country.”
ALSO BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH
John Adams
Truman
Mornings on Horseback
The Path Between the Seas
The Great Bridge
The Johnstown Flood
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
Copyright © 1992 by David McCullough
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are
registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6123-1
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-5825-5
ISBN-10: 1-4165-6123-4
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
American Heritage: “The Lonely War of a Good Angry Man,” December 1969; “The Unexpected Mrs. Stowe,” August 1973; “Steam Road to El Dorado,” June 1976; “The Treasure from the Carpentry Shop,” December 1979; “I Love Washington” (titled here, “Washington on the Potomac”), April-May 1956.
Audubon: “The Man Who Rediscovered America” (titled here, “Journey to the Top of the World”), September 1973; “The American Adventure of Louis Agassis,” January 1977.
The Brooklyn Museum: “The Builders,” from The Great East River Bridge, 1883-1983, 1983.
Blair & Ketchum’s Country Journal: “Cross the Blue Mountain,” February 1977.
Geo: “Glory Days in Medora,” October 1979.
Life: “Extraordinary Times,” 1986, Vol. 9, No. 12, Time Inc.
The New York Times Magazine: “Aviator Authors” (titled here, “Long Distance Vision”), October 12, 1986.
The Saint Louis Art Museum: “Remington,” from Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1988.
Smithsonian: “A Rothschild Who Is Known as the Queen of the Fleas” (titled here, “Miriam Rothschild”), June 1985.
Viking Press: “South of Kankakee: A Day with David Plowden,” from An American Crenology by David Plowden, 1982.
For Rosalee Barnes McCullough
Contents
Introduction
I PHENOMENA
CHAPTER ONE Journey to the Top of the World
CHAPTER TWO The American Adventure of Louis Agassiz
CHAPTER THREE The Unexpected Mrs. Stowe
II THE REAL WEST
CHAPTER FOUR Glory Days in Medora
CHAPTER FIVE Remington
III PIONEERS
CHAPTER SIX Steam Road to El Dorado
CHAPTER SEVEN The Builders
CHAPTER EIGHT The Treasure from the Carpentry Shop
CHAPTER NINE Long-Distance Vision
IV FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE
CHAPTER TEN Cross the Blue Mountain
CHAPTER ELEVEN The Lonely War of a Good Angry Man
CHAPTER TWELVE Miriam Rothschild
CHAPTER THIRTEEN South of Kankakee: A Day with David Plowden
V ON WE GO
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Washington on the Potomac
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Extraordinary Times
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Recommended Itinerary
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Simon Willard’s Clock
Index
Introduction
THERE is a story that goes with the painting of Theodore Roosevelt by John Singer Sargent that hangs in the White House.
Sargent, it is said, had been waiting about the mansion for several days, hoping for a chance to see the president and talk to him about doing his portrait, when one morning the two met unexpectedly as Roosevelt was descending the stairway.
When might there be a convenient time for the president to pose for him, Sargent asked.
“Now!” said the president.
So there he is in the painting, standing at the foot of the stairs, his hand on the newel post. It is a great portrait, capturing more of the subtleties of the Roosevelt personality than any ever done of him.
And it’s a good story. Moments come and go, the president was telling the painter. Here is the time, seize it, do your best.
My earliest ambition was to be an artist. When I was ten or so, our art teacher at Linden School in Pittsburgh, Miss Mavis Bridgewater, demonstrated two-point perspective on the blackboard, and it seemed to me a miracle. I don’t think I would have been much more amazed had she caused her desk to levitate.
I began to draw and paint. At Yale later, though an English major, I studied under an artist named Dean Keller, who, because of the rather old-fashioned portraits he did (largely for the university of its prominent professors) and his insistence on understanding anatomy, was anathema in a department then dominated by Joseph Albers, the German cubist known for his paintings of squares. I wanted to be a portrait painter.
As a writer I am still drawn to the human subject, to people and their stories, more often than to large current issues or any particular field of academic inquiry. The explorer interests me more than geography, the ichthyologist more than his fish, Theodore Roosevelt before, say, the Progressive Movement.
Nor have I ever been able to disassociate people or stories from their settings, the “background.” If character is destiny, so too, I believe, is terrain.
Seeing how the light falls in a marble room on Capitol Hill, or smelling the coal smoke in the air on a winter night in Pennsylvania, helps in making contact with those who were there before in other days. It’s a way to find them as fellow human beings, as necessary as the digging you do in libraries.
At times I’ve not known for certain whether I wanted to go ahead with a story until I have been where it happened.
“The sun was scorching hot and we should have had hats, but we dipped our hands in the water and the farther we went the cooler it got and especially when we hit the rapids,” I read now in a letter I wrote to my wife from Panama years ago, after a first reconnaissance of the Chagres River wilderness made in a dugout canoe with two young sons, two Cuna Indians, and an American hydrologist, Frank Robinson, who knew the names of every tree, most birds and insects, and all about the stupendous cycle of Panama rainfall. A day or two in such country goes far in stirring your sympathy and admiration for those intrepid souls, the pioneer builders, who came there in the last century, first to build a railroad.
Surroundings are essential to contemporary subjects no less. To spend time with someone like Miriam Rothschild in the fervently bizarre atmosphere of the family estate north of London, for example, or to follow David Plowden through the cornfields and small towns of Illinois, is for me the only way to see them clearly.
