The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson

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СКАЧАТЬ army surely had far to travel, but so, too, did its commander.

      Aggressive and even reckless, Washington longed for a decisive, bloody battle that would cause Britain to lose heart and sue for a political settlement. That appeared unlikely in Boston, where “it is almost impossible for us to get to them,” he wrote. Instead, the summer and fall would be limited to skirmishes, raids, and sniping. “Both armies kept squibbing at each other,” wrote the loyalist judge Peter Oliver, “but to little purpose.”

      American whaleboats continued to bedevil Admiral Graves, who warned “all seafaring people” that rebels were trying to lure British ships into shoal water with “false lights.” After raiders burned part of the tall stone lighthouse on Little Brewster Island, a rocky speck eight miles east of Boston, Graves sent carpenters guarded by almost three dozen marines to make repairs and relight the beacon. At two a.m. on Monday, July 31, a British sergeant roused the detachment there with a strangled cry, “The whaleboats are coming!” More than three hundred baying Yankees in thirty-three boats, led by Major Benjamin Tupper of Rhode Island, pulled for the shoreline. Marines stumbled to the water’s edge, “though not without great confusion,” a British midshipman recorded, “many of them in liquor and totally unfit.”

      Rebel musket balls peppered the wharf and the stone tower, killing a marine lieutenant and several others. A few workmen escaped by swimming toward warships in Lighthouse Channel, but most were captured, along with twenty-four marines. Raiders seized the lantern and lamp oil, then set fire to the outbuildings, the keeper’s house, and the tower staircase before rowing to the mainland to receive Washington’s praise for their “gallant and soldierlike behavior.” One patriot observed that “the once formidable navy of Britain [is] now degraded to a level with the corsairs of Barbary.” The British Army tended to agree. “The admiral [is] thought much to blame,” Gage’s aide reported, while General Burgoyne was even harsher in a letter to London: “It may be asked in England, ‘What is the admiral doing?’ … I can only say what he is not doing.” Graves seethed, and plotted his revenge against the rebels.

      Yet squibbing would not winkle the British from Boston, nor provoke them to give battle. Moreover, Washington could hardly wage a protracted campaign, given that his army was short of virtually everything an army needed: camp kettles, entrenching tools, cartridge boxes, straw, bowls, spoons. “The carpenters will be obliged to stand still for want of nails,” a supply officer warned, while another advised in late July, “We are in want of soap for the army.” American troops—badly housed, badly clothed, and badly equipped—were at war with the world’s greatest commercial and military power, long experienced in expeditionary administration. As an ostensible national government, Congress had begun to improvise the means to fight that war, from printing money and raising regiments to collecting supplies. But the effort thus far seemed disjointed and often half-baked. Although Congress had appointed quartermaster and commissary chiefs, the jobs were neither defined nor supported, and other critical supply posts—notably for ordnance and clothing—would not be created for another eighteen months.

      Simply feeding the regiments around Boston had become perilous. Commissary General Joseph Trumbull, a Harvard-educated merchant and another of the Connecticut governor’s sons, frantically tried to organize butchers, bakers, storekeepers, and purchasing agents. Coopers were needed to make barrels for preserved meat, and salt—increasingly scarce—was wanted to cure it. Forage, cash, and firewood also grew scarce; an inquiry found that much of the “beef” examined was actually horse. To feed the army through the following spring, Trumbull told Washington, he needed 25,000 barrels of flour, 13,000 barrels of salt beef and pork, 28,000 bushels of peas or beans, 11 tons of fresh beef three times a week, and 22,000 pints of milk, plus 200 barrels of beer or cider, every day, at a total cost of £200,000. By late September, as prices spiraled and supply agents rode to New York to beg for flour, Trumbull worried that by spring the army would face starvation and thus have to disband. “A commissary with twenty thousand gaping mouths open full upon him, and nothing to stop them with,” he wrote, “must depend on being devoured himself.”

      But no shortage was as perilous as that discovered in early August. Washington’s staff calculated that an army of twenty thousand men, in thirty-nine regiments with a hundred cannons, required two thousand barrels of gunpowder—a hundred tons. Powder was the unum necessarium, as John Adams wrote, the one essential. Each pound contained roughly seven thousand grains, enough for a volley from forty-eight muskets. A big cannon throwing a 32-pound ball required eleven or twelve pounds of powder per shot; an 18-pounder used six or seven pounds. A survey taken soon after Washington’s arrival reported 303 barrels in his magazines, or fifteen tons—enough to stave off a British attack, but too little for cannonading. “We are so exceedingly destitute,” he told Hancock, “that our artillery will be of little use.”

      Precisely how destitute became clear from the report laid before the war council that convened at Vassall House on Thursday, August 3. The earlier gunpowder estimate had erroneously included stocks used at Bunker Hill and in various prodigal skirmishes over the summer. Despite generous shipments to Cambridge from other colonies, the actual supply on hand, including the powder in all New England magazines, totaled 9,937 pounds, less than five tons, or enough for about nine rounds per soldier. Washington was gobsmacked. “The general was so struck that he did not utter a word for half an hour,” Brigadier General John Sullivan told the New Hampshire Committee of Safety. “Everyone else was equally surprised.” When he finally regained his tongue, Washington told his lieutenants that “our melancholy situation” must “be kept a profound secret.” This dire news, he added, was “inconceivable.”

      More orders fluttered from the headquarters, along with desperate pleas. “Our situation in the article of powder is much more alarming than I had the most distant idea of,” Washington wrote Congress on Saturday. “The existence of the army, & the salvation of the country, depends upon something being done for our relief, both speedy and effectual.” Every soldier’s cartridge box was to be inspected each evening; some regiments levied one-shilling fines for each missing round. Civilians were asked “not to fire a gun at beast, bird, or mark without real necessity.” Even the camp reveille gun should be silenced. Desperate raids were contemplated, to Halifax or Bermuda. Pleading “the most distressing want,” Massachusetts requested powder from New York, which replied that it, too, was “afflicted and astonished,” with less than a hundred pounds for purchase.

      A rebel schooner from Santo Domingo, in the West Indies, sailed up the Delaware River in late July under a false French flag with almost seven smuggled tons hidden in the hold beneath molasses barrels. Loaded into a half dozen wagons, the powder was promptly sent north with an armed escort. A second consignment of five tons soon followed, and by late August Washington had enough for twenty-five rounds per soldier, still a paltry amount. War could not be waged with an occasional smuggled windfall, yet not a single American powder mill existed when the rebellion began. Mills operating during the French war had fallen into disrepair or been converted to produce flour or snuff. Of particular concern was the shortage of saltpeter—potassium nitrate, typically collected from human and animal dung, and the only scarce ingredient in gunpowder. Identified as a strategic commodity in the medieval Book of Fires for the Burning of Enemies, saltpeter had been imported to Europe from India through Venice for centuries; imperial Britain bought almost two thousand tons a year. The saltpeter was kneaded with small portions of sulfur and charcoal, then pulverized, dusted, glazed, and dried to make gunpowder.

      Saltpeter recipes soon appeared in American newspapers and pamphlets for patriots willing to collect the “effluvia of animal bodies” from outhouses, barns, stables, tobacco yards, and pigeon coops, preferably “moistened from time to time with urine.” Massachusetts offered £14 per hundred pounds, triple the price paid by Britain for Indian saltpeter. “I am determined never to have saltpeter out of my mind,” John Adams declared in October. “It must be had.”

      Yet it would not be had in sufficient quantities to supply Washington’s magazines, СКАЧАТЬ