them only upon the enemy and as a quality of the enemy. The popinjays were the others, not himself. He was recruited neither from the criminal classes nor from the serfs, but most frequently from the most advanced and educated elements of American society. What romance of warfare he might have gathered from storybooks had long since been dissipated by the bitter reality, and now soldiering in the army was to him and his fellows a common curse that had to be endured but never enjoyed. The only loyalty he had was to his cause, and this too was the only reason for existing as a soldier. He looked forward not to any rewards of cash, sex or plunder, but to that day when the unspeakable torment of the war would be over. Peace was paradise lost, the beloved condition in which he had once existed.
As for the Hessians, the American soldier despised them doubly. For one thing, they were the enemy; for another, they were foreigners who had been bought and paid for to fight in a war that the American felt was as unjustly directed against him as ever an armed movement was unjustly directed against defenders of their native soil. The Englishmen were strangers from overseas who had come to take his lands, burn his home, spoil his crop and put him into what he considered profoundlyâif emotionally-a condition of virtual slavery; yet he could comprehend the motives of the English, since he could remember them historically as owners of the country when they first took it for the Crown.
He had no such comprehension of the motives of the Hessians; and along with lack of comprehension went the ugly memory of what the Hessians had done to the raw, unsoldierly, American boys on Brooklyn Heights and on Manhattan Island.
[22]
GENERAL CHARLES LEE was a strange and misunderstood man, who put himself outside of our history and outside of some balanced comprehension of the situation in which he found himself at the time. For that reason he was damned beyond reason and perhaps beyond his deserving. Mrs. Mercy Warren, a charming and perceptive woman of the period, writing to Samuel Adams, said the following of Lee, who was an acquaintance of hers: â⦠Plain in his person to a degree of ugliness; careless even to unpoliteness; his garb ordinary; his voice rough; his manners rather morose; yet sensible, learned, judicious, penetrating.â
He was not a man whom women found attractive. Another woman of the time called him: âA crabbed man.â He was given to introversion, silences and too much alcohol, and he always resented the aristocratic airs of Washington and Washingtonâs circleâunself-conscious though these airs might beâand felt that Washingtonâs friends regarded him, an Englishman, as more renegade than recruit.
On December 12, he led his two thousand soldiers out of Morristown, New Jersey, and marched them eight miles to Vealtown, for what reason we do not know. It was in response to no commands or orders from Washington; nor was Lee such a person as to take others into his confidence. At Vealtown, he instructed General Sullivan, who was his second in command, to supervise the making of a temporary camp for the men.
Sullivan, an intelligent man and a lawyer, then thirty-six years old, followed Leeâs orders only because he had a deep, ingrained respect for the military acumen of his commander. He knew all the unpleasant personal characteristics of General Lee, but at the same time he recognized Leeâs incisiveness and his brilliance. In the year of war Sullivan had seen, he had experienced enough American blunders to make him slow to judgment and criticism, even though he knew Lee as an opportunistic soldier of fortune. In any case, they were not Leeâs blunders. A profound supporter of the Continental cause, Sullivan had been a delegate to the First Continental Congress. He was at the siege of Boston, and he fought gallantly at the battle of Brooklyn Heights, where he had been captured by
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