1776, Episode 2: Resting Upon a Broken Staff
Harlem Heights, Manhattan. September 30 to October 6, 1776.
Neither army moved that week.
The two armies sat across the north end of Manhattan and watched each other. Howe held the city below. Washington held the heights above it.
The city Howe held had just burned. On the night of September 21, a fire broke out near the waterfront and burned a long stretch of New York to the ground. The next morning the British hanged a young captain named Nathan Hale. If you read my letter last month, you know how he died.
Up on the heights, Washington was fighting a different war. It was on paper.
On September 25 he sat down and wrote to John Hancock, the president of Congress. It was a long letter, and it was blunt. He told Congress the army was built wrong.
The men he had signed on for a year, or less. The militia came and went. They were, he wrote, "Men just dragged from the tender Scenes of domestick life." They had never been under fire. They had no training. When the British came at them in a line, they ran. He had watched men run at Kip's Bay.
Then he gave Congress the line he wanted them to remember: "To place any dependance upon Militia, is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff."
What he wanted was an army that would stay. Men signed for the whole war.
Congress had already voted for it. On September 16, the same day as the fight at Harlem Heights, it ordered eighty-eight battalions raised to serve for the duration of the war. Every man who signed on for the duration got a cash bounty and a grant of land.
It was the right answer. It was also an army that did not exist yet. The one that did was sitting on the heights, and most of the men in it knew the day their time was up.
Lieutenant Monroe does not appear anywhere this week. No letter, no order, no roll puts him on a page. He was somewhere on those heights with the rest of them, waiting.
October 6, 1776. 86 days to December 31.
Howe still had the ships. Next Thursday he uses them.
