The Hudson
The Rivers of America Series
by: Carl Carmer   Illustrated by: Stow Wengenroth

CHAPTER 11

The Long Fight

The people of the Hudson had been expecting the British. The broad streak of water between high banks was too obvious a division of the New England colonies from those of the south to be overlooked by strategists. Once the forces of the king had occupied it, the rebellion would be cut in two. Eagerly, in 1776, many of the conservative, prosperous farmers of the valley looked forward to the comforting sight of redcoats on the march to restore law and order. Even more ardently the downriver manor lords yearned for a sight of white sails of his Majesty’s frigates beating upstream. British occupation of New York would, they were sure, moderate the radical ideas of the Livingstons and Van Rensselaers--traitors to their class who had espoused the cause of the discontented and rebellious lower classes along the river.

The Livingstons, it was true, had less to gain by maintenance of the old order since the huge old manor had been prudently divided up by the family itself. They had discovered that the eldest son, who would by law of entail come into possession of the estate, had imprudently entered into business negotiations with the Spanish allies of the French during the French and Indian Wars, and had been bamboozled into a bankruptcy which would eventually sacrifice a great portion of his inheritance. James Duane, that same shrewd, plump, cockeyed lawyer who had assisted in the prosecution of William Prendergast for offenses against the manor lords in 1766, had arranged the division, not without self-interest since his wife was a Livingston. As for the Van Rensselaers, both political alliances and political idealism--which did not extend far enough to include abolishment of aristocratic manorial abuses-- led them to oppose the British. But the spearpoint of the upriver resistance was not to be a representative of the great landholders.

He was a six-foot-four country lawyer, George Clinton, son of a farmer in Ulster County, where men plowed their own fields and milled their own flour with millstones that ranked higher in quality than the wheat they ground. He had married a Hudson River Dutch girl, a Tappan of Kingston, and he lived with his wife and two little daughters on a hill farm in a house whose southern windows opened on the great sweep of the Highlands. When George Clinton led, the traders of the unaristocratic west bank knew that he could be trusted. He was fighting for what they were fighting for.

When two river sloops scudded up to New Windsor to inform Clinton that on July eleventh [1776] the British had come to the mouth of the river and the next day had landed troops, he went out and told all the men who lived near him. He had forty of them with him when he reached weakly constructed Fort Montgomery just north of the point where the Popolopen Kill flows into the Hudson. From there he sent out a call for his friends and neighbors--the militia--but he was bitterly disappointed in the result. A thrifty farmer himself, he had encouraged the militia to harvest their crops while the enemy was still distant. But the summer had seen one long march of thundershowers and now that the farmer-soldiers were desperately needed they were staying at home, regardless of orders, to finish the haying.

The provincial convention obligingly tried to help Clinton summon his soldiers from Ulster and Orange and Dutchess counties to the defense of the river by promising them a bounty of twenty dollars plus their regular pay. On the same day that it made the offer, the sixteenth of July, the Rose and the Phoenix and other boats of his Majesty’s fleet appeared in the Tappan Zee and fired a few shots toward the shore. With even more arrogance, in the following few days, they sailed further up the river and sent out small landing parties. One fast sloop even stuck its curious nose within gunshot of Fort Montgomery.

Word of this raced through the valley. Farmers left their horses standing among the haycocks and made for the river. Their wives rushed to the fields, drove the horses to the house doors, loaded the wagons with their most precious belongings, and rolled away to visit relatives and friends not so close to danger. The back-river roads were full of creaking wheels and straining horses. At points where Clinton thought landings might be attempted he placed units of the increasing militia to do their best to kill invaders who dared step ashore.

In the meantime the nearness of the enemy made Clinton realize that by some stupidity Fort Montgomery had been built on a spot which would be untenable if the enemy occupied a hill south of the Popolopen. He wrote General Washington for permission to improve the fort and, without waiting for a reply, sent his militiamen up the hill with orders that read: "It is expected . . . that the Detachment of Militia now here, honorably employed in the Defence of their Country, will as Early each Morning as if working for themselves, which is truly the Case, turn out on Fatigue to forward and compleat these Works in Season." Washington not only concurred in Clinton’s decision but sent him experienced Lieutenant Macbin to supervise the building of the fortifications. An iron chain was hurriedly forged by the valley blacksmiths and stretched across the river from the foot of Anthony’s Nose to a point just below the new breastworks, which had already been christened Fort Clinton.

The hated warships had been moored above the Tappan Zee more than two weeks when five small American boats---the Lady Washington, the Shark, the Whiting, the Crown, the Spitfire---sailed up the river after them. There was great shouting from the shore as the guns roared, and long echoes sounded in the hills. For an hour and a half the first and last naval battle on the Hudson continued. By that time the Americans had lost many men and knew that they could not drive the enemy craft away. They turned about and made for Spuyten Duyvil as fast as their sails would take them.

Another two weeks went by and the big boats still idled contemptuously about. In frenzied rage the rivermen at Poughkeepsie were building fire rafts and mooring them just above Fort Montgomery to await an opportune moment. Below the fort the militia had piled 7 great pyramids of brush that on application of a torch would turn the river into an arena of light if the enemy vessels should dare to sail north under cover of darkness. And Captain Silas Talbot, whose fireship had been chased by the British warships from moorings just below the city, had anchored in a near-by cove and was plotting revenge.

The Fire Ships

The mid-August night was very dark and for a time Talbot could not see the hulk that lay somewhere ahead. Then it was towering above him--the Asia, with sixty-four guns that would blast his little tinderbox into eternal impotence if he could not drift into her. From high in the rigging came a piercing shriek--a boy’s voice calling terror to the men on deck. Hoarse shouts answered. A cannon roared. A shot splashed into the water, then another. There was a splintering crash and the two men on the fireship wondered if this was the I end of their careful planning. Their boat had a hole through the side but she was still drifting down on the Asia. She had not caught fire. Priestly was close enough to throw hooks across the gap now. Suddenly there was a shock and a groaning, rubbing noise. Two fuses dipped into gunpowder. A blinding flash!

When Talbot came to he was lying on the deck and flames were licking at his body. He was blind. He stood up and with hands outstretched tried to feel his way to the sally port. Everything he touched was afire. Frantically he rushed about--then he felt the rail and a moment later the coolness of the water. As he floundered about aimlessly the voice of Priestly was above him and he was lifted into the rowboat. Three big ships were firing on them, the men said, as they raced desperately for the west bank. The fireship was a pyramid of flame, making the whole river as light as day for the British gunners. Twice grapeshot skittered across the surface into their wooden hull but no one was hurt and the boat moved on. The Asia was not yet afire and the other ships had launched small craft to help her escape the flames. She had moved away. The fireship was burning alone on the water.

Blistered from head to foot, blind, naked, Talbot climbed out on land. Quickly his men dragged him into near-by woods. They led him, stumbling and only half conscious, for a mile or so through thick trees. Then he heard them asking where they were. "English Settlement," said a man’s voice with a Dutch accent. No, they couldn’td take in anybody--not a scarecrow like that--he would frighten the children. He was led away. Then a knock and a woman's voice in which fright and compassion mingled. She was an aged widow, all alone. Yes, she would care for the poor man. The men laid him on the floor, covered him with a blanket, and went away. They must make a report; they could not help him more.

For days and nights Talbot lay there sightless, tortured by the burns. Then his sight began to come back. In a week he could recognize the fat bulk of General Knox filling up the doorway of the oldwoman’s cabin. And behind the general came Dr. Eustis with bandages and healing ointments. Some days later Talbot was in Hackensack under friendly care. Comrades told him that on the night of his own vain attempt Ensign Thomas, of his regiment, with a 100-ton fire sloop had set fire to the 14-gun tender Charlotta in the Tappan Zee and burned her to the water, though he himself had been destroyed in the flames.

The British had enough--the Asia, the Phoenix, the Rose, the Tryal, the Shuldham had all dropped downriver. They knew now that the farther up the Hudson they went the more trouble they could expect. They knew, too, that in the valley were men who hated them so wholeheartedly that they would gladly give up their lives in searing flame to drive them away.

The Battles for New York City and White Plains

A month later they dashed down Manhattan Island to Harlem Heights and helped hurl the British back in the first American victory of the Hudson valley warfare. Two weeks later they were encamped at White Plains. The men of Ulster and Orange and Dutchess were learning that war is a nervous, desperate, hard business. General Clinton described their experience in a letter:

"We had reason to apprehend an attack last night or by daybreak this morning. . . . Our lines were manned all night . . . and a most horrid night it was to lie in cold trenches. Uncovered as we are, drawn on fatigue, making redoubts, flashes, abatis and lines and retreating from them and the little temporary huts made for our comfort before they are well finished I fear will ultimately destroy our army without fighting."

After the disastrous defeat at White Plains in October [1776], Clinton went back up the river, taking most of his men with him; Washington and his army crossed and fled south into New Jersey. The British stormed and captured Fort Washington, last Manhattan stronghold of the Continentals, though Margaret Corbin took her slain husband’s place at the parapet and fired at the advancing red line until she was herself wounded three times. While Washington evaded pursuit there was a conference of American generals at Peekskill. Clinton suggested that he and his men begin the further defense of the Hudson by fortifying Polopel’s Island and Constitution Island. The plan was approved.

At once most of the able-bodied revolutionists of the valley went to work. Major General Philip Schuyler came downriver from Albany with five hundred men from the north counties to help with the Constitution Island project. At his home in New Windsor, Clinton directed the work on Polopel. Sunlight caught the blades of three hundred new axes as the valley patriots swung them high. They might be inexperienced soldiers but these were weapons they knew how to use. Teams and wagons choked the river roads. Spars and timber and iron were on their way from Gilbert Livingston. Boats and scows crowded about the islands. The weather was stormy. The building of the foundations required work in the icy water of December. There was a great grumbling and a call for more rum to warm the men’s bellies. Work was interrupted to give help to Washington by a swift raid on New Jersey.

Burgoyne and the Battle of Saratoga - October 1777

A Negro slave ran panic-stricken across the level pasture of the Becker farm that lay north of Saratoga. He had seen Indians in war paint down by the river. Breathless, he gasped out his news. The family knew how to interpret it. The painted heathen were Burgoyne’s advance scouts. They were part and parcel of the damnable savages who had murdered and scalped pretty Jenny McCrea when she set out to visit her British fiance, an officer under Burgoyne. Sight of them meant that the British Army was only a few miles away.

Farmer Becker ran to his brother’s house a quarter of a mile off, while his wife packed as much of the family clothing as she could into a cask. Young John and a black boy went into the pasture to bridle the horses and hitch them to the wagons. They turned the squealing pigs loose in the woods. They dug holes in the earth and buried the hoes and rakes. By that time Mrs. Becker was ready to have the wagons loaded, and her husband had come back. At the farm dock where the light bateau was moored they emptied the wagons and carried their cargo of household treasures aboard. Then the wagons were sent back for another loading and flight downriver. Young John and the black boy took the canoe and paddled. That night the whole family was reunited at Vanderbergs’ little settlement below Stillwater. Other families had come there too; so many that all beds were full and most of the men slept in the cattle sheds.

Early the next morning Farmer Becker rode back to his farm, because in the panic of the day before he had not tried to save his cows. He found them and drove them down to Vandenbergs’. By that time the road along the river was jammed. John Becker looked on all this with the wide-eyed interest of a nine-year-old and in later years he described it: "A long cavalcade of wagons filled with all kinds of furniture not often selected by the owners with reference to their use or value on occasions of alarm . . . stretched along the road." Many of the refugees were on horseback--sometimes two on a horse. Others not so fortunate were fleeing on foot, hurrying frantically to keep up with the wagons as they thought of the Indians and soldiers behind them.

Meanwhile, a strange army was marching downriver. The painted Indians were no novelty to the Americans, nor were the redcoats--but the Hessians, with their heavy, befeathered hats, ornamented with brass, their long-skirted coats, long swords, canteens the size of small barrels, their big queues of powdered hair, were foreign enough to infuriate the American provincials. Terrified by the rattlesnakes of the rocky north country, clumsy and helpless in their efforts to penetrate the wilderness of felled trees with which General Schuyler had thoughtfully obstructed their path, homesick to the point of yearning themselves to death, consoling their loneliness by lavishing affection on their many animal pets--black bears, deer, foxes, raccoons--the German mercenaries were really a pitiful, bewildered lot, but they were objects of especial hatred to the country-boy soldiers from the Hudson valley.

An added fillip was given to the whole strange rout by the presence of hundreds of women-camp followers for the most part. There were also the Baroness Riedesel, wife of the commander of the Hessians, with her three little daughters; Lady Harriet Acland, wife of the commander of the Grenadiers; and a commissary officer’s wife who was making life pleasant for Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne.

The whole army had thought the expedition from Montreal to Albany would be a pleasant walking trip in the clear early autumn weather. They had expected the Beckers and their farmer friends to do exactly what they were doing. But they had not anticipated the fierce opposition of men roused to fury by the British use of mercenaries and Indians, by the murder of poor Jenny McCrea, by love of their river farms. Before the Beckers had reached Stillwater an army was advancing from that very town, an army in which Hudson valley men commanded by officers named Van Cortlandt, Livingston, Nixon, Ten Broeck were marching to defend their homes. With the Virginian Morgan’s picked riflemen, with the New Englanders of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, they were determined to stop the British at the northern end of the Hudson valley.

The story of the next weeks has been often told. Though the British claimed victory, they were stopped by the battle of September nineteenth. When it was over the Americans were nearly out of bullets and a British attack would have meant disaster. While they waited in fearful suspense, the Dutchmen of Albany were wildly scrambling about their roofs and windows, stripping them of lead to be handed over to General Schuyler and made into pellets. The army was once more ammunitioned before the enemy moved.

No satisfactory word had come to Burgoyne of the progress of Sir Henry Clinton toward the Albany rendezvous. In a desk drawer in faraway London, forgotten by the fox-hunting Colonial Secretary, lay the order that would have sent him to the rescue.

Burgoyne was not a coward. He built fortifications and prepared for battle. On the seventh of October he was ready and General Horatio Gates obliged him. In a spectacular battle--highlighted by the mad courage of General Benedict Arnold, who fought bitterly for the river he later tried to give away--the Americans defeated the invaders. Too late Burgoyne turned about. The weather, which had been, according to a young American officer, "charming" throughout the autumn, suddenly changed. A night retreat in a pouring rain bogged the wagons, including the thirty containing Gentleman Johnny’s personal wardrobe. Where Schuylerville now stands the British Army was surrounded. It could neither advance nor retreat.

The weather had cleared by October fourteenth when a British emissary, Major Kingston, "well formed, ruddy, handsome," was admitted to the American camp and led blindfolded ("hoodwinked") to a pleasant spot overlooking the Hudson. An aide-de-camp, ambitious young Captain James Wilkinson, "in a plain blue frock without other military insignia than cockade and sword" awaited him. There, in the cool, sun-drenched October morning, the Britisher, with aplomb typical of his kind, "expatiated with taste and eloquence on the beautiful scenery of the Hudson’s river and the charms of the season." Then he took up a discussion of such mundane matters as the surrender of Burgoyne’s army.

The Indians, the redcoats, the Hessians had been stopped by an army in which hardly a man was regularly equipped and many a soldier was "in clothes he wore at work in field or tavern," an unhealthy army, "their disease being chiefly Fever Ague and Dysentery" which left scarcely a man unscathed.

The Beckers could come back to their farm beside the narrow, rippling river.

The Lower Hudson - October 1777

It had done nothing of the sort, and the arrival of British reinforcements at New York seemed to prove that. All the further evidence necessary came a few days later. A crisp north breeze filled the sails of two great frigates, a half dozen smaller vessels, about forty clumsy flatboats, and Sir Henry Clinton was on the river with four thousand men. Tardily, on his own initiative, he had decided to create a diversion to help Burgoyne. The Americans would soon know whether their preparations of the past two years were sufficient.

Vainly General Putnam on the east bank and General Clinton on the west tried to outguess Sir Henry. With shrewd maneuvering the Briton kept them puzzled. He made a quick landing at Tarrytown--and was away. He did the same thing below Peekskill at Verplanck’s Point--and Putnam dared not send any of his men upriver to the Highland forts. On the morning of October sixth there was a heavy fog. Before it had lifted, two thousand redcoats had landed near Stony Point and were somewhere in the mountains below Forts Montgomery and Clinton. American scouts found them two hours before noon near Doodletown. Brom Springster, Tory neighbor of the Orange County militia, had guided the invaders through the fog over the high pass called "The Timp," a latter-day Thermopylae which could have been defended by a few men if George Clinton had thought to station them there. A hundred Americans awaited the British at the "Hell Hole," a mile west of Fort Clinton. They fought bitterly as they were driven back into the forts.

Twilight was deepening when the overwhelming British force made its sharp quick attack on the twin forts. The American militia fought like the wildcats of their river mountains. The British casualties were three hundred--but there could be only one outcome. The forts were taken at the point of the bayonet and the Americans ran. George Clinton saved himself by a magnificent slide down the Hudson’s steep bank--becoming a mighty human avalanche hurtling to the water’s edge where a boat awaited him.

Two American frigates, unable to escape against wind and tide, were given to the flames that night by their crews. The steep sides of Anthony’s Nose on the opposite side of the river reflected the yellow light. The river seemed molten with the still-glowing ashes of hope. Down below the captured forts there was a clanking of iron. Soldiers were working at the iron chain upon which George Clinton had depended so much. At eleven o’clock the next morning it gave way. There would be no stopping the British now.

The Burning of Kingston

At five o’clock the. white sails were off Esopus Island and messengers were spurring lathered horses over country roads to warn everybody along the river. Across the Hudson at Clermont the Livingstons had been working feverishly. The precious books of the late Judge Livingston were carefully laid in the bottom of a big dry fountain on the grounds and covered with old sloop sails and a thick top layer of barnyard manure. Possessions not easily carried were hidden in a deep cave formed weeks before by felling trees across the top of a sharp little ravine. A train of wagons filled with silver, furniture, bedding, was on its way into Connecticut. In one of them sat stalwart Margaret Beekman Livingston, ancestor of many a distinguished York Stater, laughing heartily at her fat black cook who sat on a pile of kitchen utensils and directed her little grandson’s driving efforts with energetic thrusts of a long-handled toasting fork.

The Livingstons might laugh. They would find warmth and food and friends where they were going. But the Dutch folk of Kingston were not laughing. Winter was only a month away, and the thought of a winter on the Hudson with no roof over the head is not a happy one. "Lope bei Hurley out!" came the cry through the starlit October night. "Lope younge Lope-die Roye komme!" All night frightened wives packed their belongings while burghers hurried to the woods to bury treasures they could not take with them. The road to Hurley, a little town three miles back from the river, was a channel of pitiful refugees, fleeing the wrath of the British.

In the morning [16 October 1777] at nine cannonading began. The American galley, Lady Washington, lay at the mouth of Rondout Creek and above it on the heights of Ponckhockie a hundred and fifty militia manned a battery of five guns. By noon the Americans had sailed the Lady Washington up the creek and scuttled her. A British force of four hundred was landing. A few moments later the militia had spiked their guns and fled. Then the British marched into the defenseless town and began a systematic campaign of pillage and burning.

Of the hundred and sixteen houses of the town only Tobias Van Steenbergh’s was left standing. Some said afterward that it stood because the Van Steenbergh servants had rolled a number of barrels of rum from the cellar and insisted on treating any soldier who came near. Others said General Vaughn was sweet on a pretty Dutch girl who lived there. One barn out of the hundred and four in the town was left, possibly because, the legend goes, owner Ben Low had once been kind to an ill wanderer who turned out to be a British spy. Church, courthouse, schools, markets, all were devoured by the flames. Mary Crooke Elmendorf, believing with reason that none could resist her Dutch cooking, left a full meal on her table. When she came back it was gone, and so was her house. Mrs. Ben Low left her silver chest in the care of a British officer’s wife who boarded with her. "I am a British officer’s wife," cried the lady when the soldiers found it. "You’ll all be saying that now," laughed one of the looters as he snatched the chest from her. He and his companions stole the silver, threw the chest in the street, abducted the lady’s daughter only to tear the rings from her ears and let her go.

Three hours after the British had landed, Kingston was a smoking ruin. The standing stone walls of the Dutch houses emphasized the destruction and desolation. General Clinton, hurrying to the rescue with a command of militia, arrived at Keykhout Hill above the old town just after the invaders had gone. He and his men looked down on a ravaged waste that had once been a placid, beautiful river town.

Before they returned to New York the redcoats burned several houses above Kingston and made the journey the Livingstons had expected them to make, to destroy the two big houses at Clermont. General Vaughn had heard of Burgoyne’s plight through the Tory messenger, Jacobus Lefferts, and had done his utmost to avenge it. But he did not dare stay so far upriver now, with no chance of uniting with the northern army. The Hudson had been saved again.

That winter many of the people of Kingston built lean-tos against the smoke-blackened stone walls of their old homes and lived in them. Others built roofs from one wall to another. A number lived with friends in near-by towns. Two companies of local militia were excused from service to help in preparations for reconstruction in the spring. Help came up the river from faraway South Carolina--money and food. Nothing could have done more to foster the idea of a unified and independent nation. At the town meeting in the unharmed Van Steenbergh house in March, trustees and officers were elected and one of their first acts was to authorize the transformation of many pounds of lead housed in Ben Low’s barn into bullets for the Continental Army. That was Kingston’s answer to its invaders.

Now that the British fleet had gone back to New York, and Burgoyne’s captured army was on its dreary march to Boston, the Hudson valley was suddenly a happy place.

From the Sterling Iron Works, thirteen miles west of the river near Sloatsburg, came the clang of hammers on anvils as the new chain that was to be stretched from West Point to Constitution Island was forged in links two feet long, two and a quarter inches square "with a swivel to every hundred feet and a clevis to every thousand feet." The rattle of iron and the jingle of harness sounded on the West river road as farm wagons brought the links to New Windsor, above West Point. There they were put together with logs attached to keep two strands floating parallel to each other, and allowed to drift downriver to the position intended. Here in April of 1778 the chain was anchored. Let the Britishers try to break through that!

Rage over the burning of Kingston and joy over Saratoga produced a great exaltation in every American, except the Tories, in the river counties. "No king but God," shouted the men of the Hudson and dared the British to come again. But the theater of war had been moved and the valley was comparatively quiet for a year.

Capture of Stony Point - 1779

The year 1779 came and in the summer and autumn the Continental Army was back on the Hudson keeping watch over the British in New York. The Americans wintered in Morristown, New Jersey. Then, in the spring, the enemy began to creep up the valley once more. They took Stony Point on the west shore and Verplanck’s Point opposite--gaining control of King’s Ferry, a valuable connecting link.

"I'll storm hell if you’ll only plan it," said thick- set, theatrical Anthony Wayne.
"Perhaps we’d better try Stony Point first," said George Washington grimly.

Out of Fort Montgomery swung a column of fourteen hundred men who did not know where they were going. They marched inland and then to the south around Bear Mountain and West Hill, over the back of the Dunderberg, and down by the creek called Flora’s Kill. At Springsteel’s Farm they halted. The silence of the Hudson twilight was intensified that evening. No farmyard barking challenged the advancing shadows of the night--for every dog within a radius of three miles had been killed. It was nearly a half hour after midnight when the British sentries of the high fort cried out that the Americans were advancing. A half hour later the silent steel bayonets had done their work. The guns of the fort had been turned on the enemy and were bombarding Verplanck’s Point and the frigate Vulture below in the river. The enemy’s frowning fortress had been taken and the victorious troops were uniting in a wild, early morning celebration with the folk of the countryside. [16 July 1779]

Though Wayne had to evacuate Stony Point soon after his dramatic exploit, the valley was a channel of joy. The Hudson’s patriots roared out gleefully the cocky folklore of the Revolution. Thirteen--the total of the states of the new nation--was a magic number. It had taken Wayne just thirteen hours to capture Stony Point; General Washington had thirteen teeth in each jaw, and since the Declaration of Independence he had grown three extra toes; Mrs. Washington had a mottled tomcat with thirteen rings around his tail; General Schuyler had a topknot of thirteen stiff hairs that stood up straight on the crown of his head whenever he saw a Britisher.

The feeling between noncombatants in the valley grew bitterer than it had ever been. Mounted bands of lawless men infested the neutral ground that extended for nearly a score of miles between the upriver Continentals and the downriver British. Claudius Smith, the "Cowboy of the Ramapos" who claimed to be a Tory, led one such group of outlaws. They made swift raids on the river farms, stealing cattle and livestock, which they sold on Manhattan. Sometimes an unlucky wagon train of supplies for Washington’s army, too weakly guarded to withstand the attack of Smith’s wild horsemen, would disappear mysteriously and completely. There were tales of the torture of old men and women in the effort to make them give up their savings, of sudden descents on little outlying communities and the murder of helpless inhabitants. Occasionally the Cowboys clashed with an equally dastardly gang of cutthroats called the "Skinners" who claimed to favor the revolutionary party but never troubled to ask the political beliefs of the farmers from whom they stole. Tory and revolutionary farmers alike heaved sighs of relief whenever these murderous bully-boys succeeded in destroying each other.

For his sins Claudius Smith danced at the end of a rope in his stocking feet before the war was over. He took his shoes off just before he swung to prove that his mother had not told the truth. She had said he would die with his boots on. Just to make him an ironic posthumous prop to law and order, the builders of the old courthouse at Goshen, west of the Hudson, used his skull as a brick over the doorway.

Meanwhile the British officers and men lived a gay life in the city at the Hudson’s mouth, caring little for the threat of the army to the north. On Manhattan’s boundary rivers lay prison ships filled to overflowing with miserable members of that despised military unit. A captured American poet, Captain Freneau, remembered them a few years after his release with bitter verses:

Two hulks on Hudson’s stormy bosom lie . . .
There the black Scorpion at her moorings rides
There swings Strombolo, yielding to the tides . . .
Thou Scorpion fatal to the crowded throng
Dire theme of sorrow and Plutonian song
Requir’st my lay—thy sultry decks I know,
And all the torments that exist below!
The briny wave that Hudson’s bosom fills
Dripp’d through her bottom in a thousand rills
Rotten and old, o’er filled with sighs and groans . . .
Here doom’d to toil or founder in the tide
At the moist pumps incessantly we ply’d . . .
No friendly awning cast a welcome shade
Once it was promised but was never made.

In these boats arid in others on the East River many Hudson valley farm boys wasted away under the stern eyes of the Hessian and Scottish guards. They ate moldy bread and rotten pork, or nothing. They spent every night in shackles. In the daytime they gazed from the decks across the water at the stockade in Lispenard’s Meadows (now part of Greenwich Village), where, imported by one Jackson, three boatloads of gay ladies--two white cargoes from England and one black from the West Indies--made merry with the British soldiers. It is scant wonder that so many men born to free life among the fields and wooded hills beside the same broad stream on which they floated, gave up reason, and often life itself.

Betrayal by Benedict Arnold

They were still talking when dawn had spread over the river. The light revealed the features of Major General Benedict Arnold, commander of the West Point fortifications, and of Major John André, an elegant of the British Army, poet, playwright, songster, embroiderer, beau. When farmer Joshua Smith refused to take the major back to the Vulture in daylight the two officers decided to continue their talk at Smith’s house. While they were closeted there during the day a few Americans on the east bank began a desultory fire on the Vulture with a small cannon incapable of doing the boat serious damage. Nevertheless, the Vulture dropped downriver, leaving its important passenger behind.

That night Smith gave André a civilian’s coat and ferried him to the east shore. He rode with the young man the rest of the night and left him after a roadside breakfast at the home of a poor widow. Only neutral ground lay between the major and safety. Three countrymen who occasionally served in the Continental militia captured him near Tarrytown, stripped him, and found the plans of West Point in his boots. Whatever the balance of cupidity and patriotism within them--and there have been many debates on the integrity or lack of it evidenced by the trio--they surrendered André to Colonel Jameson in command of Continental troops at White Plains.

That officer naively sent a messenger to General Arnold informing him of the capture of a British officer who had by some means obtained the plans of the fort. Arnold was having breakfast with his staff when the message came. He read it calmly, waited a few moments, excused himself and went to tell his wife what had happened. Then he strolled down to the river landing, boarded the six-oared barge that was kept at his disposal and ordered the crew to race downriver at top speed, for, said he, he was on a "mission of the greatest urgency for General Washington." Before he had climbed to safety over the side of the Vulture, General Washington was in West Point, the conspiracy to surrender the Hudson to the British had been at least partially revealed, and the name of the brave Benedict Arnold had been destined to become a symbol throughout America for treachery and ingratitude.

New matter affording some reasonable interpretations of motives has been added from time to time to this story, but the British documents concerning the traitorous plan have not been read by historians. Recently purchased from the British government by the University of Michigan, they await in Ann Arbor a perusal that may radically alter the conception current in America for more than a hundred and sixty years, and may destroy more reputations than Arnold’s.

The gallant British major was tried by a military tribunal of fourteen general officers at Tappan on September twenty-ninth. He was sentenced to be hanged at noon on October second, and hanged he was, while a Continental Army band played "The Blue Bird" and officers and men who would have gloated to see the hero of Saratoga so used were blinded by tears.

End of the War

There Washington received in a letter the so-called "offer of a crown" which he said he "“must view with abhorrence and reprehend with severity." It was there, too, that he watched the growing bitterness toward the Continental Congress that culminated in the seditious "Newburgh Address" with its demand that the troops make use of their armed might to better their condition, and its fiery rhetorical questioning of the soldiers: "Can you, then, consent to be the only sufferers by this revolution, and, retiring from the field, grow old in poverty, wretchedness and contempt?" And it was in the New Building of the Newburgh camp that Washington stopped his pacific reply to Armstrong to put on spectacles and say to his officers, "You have seen me grow gray in your service. Now I am growing blind,"--two sentences that destroyed the effect of the notorious address more effectively than public burning of it could ever have done.

The great Virginian did not like staying on the Hudson while the banks of the Potomac were calling. He had written to Martha Washington at Mount Vernon complaining of his life "without amusements or avocations. . . amongst these rugged and dreary mountains." The first of these phrases may not be accepted literally, however, for the people of the Hudson outdid themselves in honoring the successful general and his officers. Count de Ségur, one of the many French officers who visited the valley to pay his respects to Washington, was overwhelmed by the beauty of the river--"a vast sea flowing between forests centuries old"---and delighted with the people who lived along its banks. "I should like to live in this country with you, my heart," he wrote to his wife, ". . . this is the only country for honest people."

There was skating on the river that winter and the next summer gay parties rode along the banks. Baron von Steuben convulsed the headquarters family by returning from a few hours’ fishing to announce that he had caught a whale and by not seeming any the less proud when investigation proved that his German pronunciation had given seeming enlargement to a Hudson River eel.

On the sunny last day of May in 1782, General Washington gave a great party complimenting his allies and celebrating the birthday of the French dauphin. Tall evergreen saplings cut and trimmed in the valley woods were brought to the river bank on the shoulders of the American troops and there cast down with shouts of "God bless the dauphin"--though some who had worked hard at the job and did not like the French were suspected of shouting less complimentary sentences. Other soldiers built a sylvan bower interwoven with valley flowers and with fleurs-de-lis cut from tissue paper. Five hundred officers sat beneath the green canopy, ate heartily of roasted ox and drank the thirteen toasts, eight of which honored the French alliance. There was a parade of troops and then a gander hop to the old tune of "Soldier’s Joy," General Washington making a graceful figure in the stag affair stepping off with one of his officers. Late in the night a running fire laid by the troops in pyrotechnic design leaped into the sky, moving rapidly northward on the west bank. It seemed to jump the river to catch on the east bank and run southward. The bills on both sides of the water were black silhouettes and the Hudson’s ripples gave back the dancing flames.

The autumn colors had faded in the valley on the happy November day in 1783 when General Washington left Newburgh and rode down the river road to meet Governor Clinton and General Knox with his troops at Harlem. Even as the British were withdrawing from the Battery, big Knox led the vanguard of the victorious American Army into New York. The whole line of the Hudson was free.