General George Washington,

Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army

to Colonel Benedict Arnold

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In the summer of 1775, George Washington was appointed commander-in-chief of the newly-formed Continental Army. He arrived in Cambridge in early July to find his rag-tag army surrounding the British forces in Boston. Washington was certain that the British would attack any time, and he began to reinforce his defenses and prepare for the blow. He did not know that General Thomas Gage, commander of the British troops in Boston, had no intention of coming out.

As the summer turned to early fall, it became clear to Washington that Gage would not come out, and he had no way of driving him out or realistically attacking the British in the city. His only option was to starve them out, but with British transports arriving every day, bringing shiploads of supplies, that would never happen. Unless he could stop them, too.

It took Washington, the frontier soldier, months before he realized that the fight he was engaged in was a fight for supplies, and it would be fought on the high seas. But Washington also knew that the creation of a navy was a hot-button issue, tantamount to declaring sovereignty, and the Continental Congress was not ready to go that far. So, with no real authority to do so, and without letting the civilian leadership know what he was up to, Washington created a navy of his own.

Author's Note

George Washington's Secret Navy is my second nonfiction work about the naval action of the American Revolution. For all the topics I have written on, including piracy and the Civil War, the American Revolution is the topic I love best, and have since I was a little kid. It was a pleasure to dig through these primary sources, read the words of the men who created this little schooner navy, and to try and divine the motives and thinking behind the words. The story of Washington's fleet, the Virginian general's eventual embrace of sea power, and the conflict between the southern aristocrat and the republican Yankees is a fascinating one. I hope you enjoy.

Chapter One

A Very Delightful Country...

            It is a foreign country to him, but charming, lovely in its summer greens. He rides down the muddy road from his headquarters at Cambridge to the most prominent of the American defenses on Prospect Hill, about a mile away. He is considered one of the great horsemen of the age, and the horse between his legs is the one thing that is familiar to him. Everything else is completely new.

            George Washington has the mark of a leader, tall and erect in the saddle, a manner that others call noble and even majestic. A small sword hangs at his side, a black cockade adorns his hat. He is wearing a uniform, one of the few so dressed, even though he is in the midst of more than 14,000 soldiers.

            He is general and commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and has been for eighteen days. It has been more than a decade and a half since he last commanded troops in the field, and then, during the French and Indian War, he was colonel of a regiment of Virginia Provincials.

            A mist rises from the fields as the sun burns off the wet from yesterday’s heavy rains. The road is soft and muddy, and the horse steps through pools of standing water. The air is fine with the soft, clean smell that comes on the heels of a storm. It carries on it the trace of cooking fires and the tang of salt air.

            Major-General Charles Lee is riding at Washington’s side. Gangly, slovenly dressed and profane, he is in many ways Washington’s polar opposite, but he is considered the greatest military mind on the American side. He has accompanied Washington from Philadelphia and has been pleased to share in the adulation that has accompanied the new commander-in-chief on his nine day trip from the seat of government to the seat of war.

             Behind Lee rides Joseph Reed, a young lawyer from Philadelphia who has also accompanied Washington to Cambridge and will stay on as the general’s personal secretary. Lee’s dogs race madly around the little parade of mounted officers.

            The men, newly arrived from Philadelphia, left the pretty little village of Cambridge this morning, riding past the wide, open common, the smattering of houses, and the buildings of Harvard College. There are almost no civilians still living there - the houses and the college buildings are nearly all occupied by troops.

            The generals ride through open country now. Green hills roll along like ocean swells, and here and there stands of oak and elm trees rise in bursts of leaves. In any direction the odd church spire can be seen, brilliantly white in the morning sun, like fingers pointing to heaven.

            Washington the farmer, the eager land speculator, cannot help but assess the countryside. He likes what he sees, but he is on other business now.

            Ahead of him rises Prospect Hill, standing proud above the somewhat smaller hills surrounding it. Its top is scarred and turned in two places where redoubts have been constructed to keep the British, now entrenched on Bunker Hill, from pushing onto the mainland. The dirt and the wooden ramparts are only a few weeks old. The brown earth looks freshly dug, and it all looks bright and clean in the sun.

            The day is getting warmer, warm enough for Washington to feel uncomfortable in his wool regimental coat and waistcoat, but he gives no indication of this. He rides on, approaching the camps at the base of Prospect Hill and the soldiers stationed there. They are drawn up in ranks to welcome him. There has been no real parade, no assembly of the army to greet the new commander-in-chief. It is expected that the British will lead an assault on the American lines at any time, and the men cannot leave their positions for such a ceremony.

            Washington rides slowly down the line of men drawn up at attention, muskets on their shoulders. He will later tell John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress, that these men are the stuff from which a good army might be made, but privately he is not so sure. None of them have uniforms, which is only to be expected from an army that has assembled spontaneously, but what clothes they do have are little more than rags, and filthy from the near constant work of improving the defensive lines. There are boys and Black men in the ranks. Washington cannot distinguish officers from common soldiers. There is nothing about the troops to indicate that they enjoy any sort of discipline or order.

            Upon his arrival in Watertown, seat of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, Washington received a welcoming letter from that body that was in part a warning of what he was going to find. “We wish you may have found such Regularity, and Discipline already establish’d in the Army, as may be agreeable to your Expectations,” the Provincial Congress wrote, and then went on to explain why he would not find such things. The army had been assembled in a great hurry, at a time when there was no real government at work in Massachusetts. The soldiers were naturally brave and intelligent but had little or no military experience. “The Youth in the Army are not possess’d of the absolute Necessity of Cleanliness in their Dress, and Lodging, continual Exercise, and strict Temperance...”. Washington can see that the Provincial Congress was not exaggerating.

            As commander of his Virginia Provincials, he saw to it that his men were better outfitted, better equipped and better drilled than the British regulars he fought beside. It was a point of pride for him. His new command could not be further from that ideal. But Washington gives no indication of his concern.

            He rides on through the camp. The living quarters that the men have set up for themselves are perhaps the oddest, most unmilitary arrangement he has ever seen. There are massive tents made out of discarded sails, the work of troops from seaport towns. There are huts built of boards, or stone and turf, built of brick and brush. Some have been thrown together, while others are carefully constructed with doors and windows. A few regiments, he is relieved to see, have proper tents and marquees. But only a few.

            Washington will soon request that Congress send tents and 10,000 simple hunting shirts by way of uniform, but he will get neither.

            As he and Lee and their entourage pass through the camp, past the lines of soldiers drawn up to welcome them, the Yankee privates and the aristocratic Virginian regard one another warily, withholding final judgment. Washington continues on up the road, the mud turning quickly to dust under the rising sun, up to the crest of Prospect Hill where men in sweat-stained, dirt-smeared shirts, sleeves rolled up to their elbows, struggle to make the entrenchments more formidable yet. They have no engineers with experience in such things. They don’t even have enough shovels.

            From the crest of Prospect Hill Washington looks to the north and south. The visibility is good, unlike yesterday, and he is able to get his first real look at the enemy’s lines.

            Less than a mile away is Breed’s Hill, where the Massachusetts troops were driven from their works as he was riding to Boston, and Bunker Hill, where the British are now entrenched. The green slopes are covered with white tents in neat rows, laid out the way a proper encampment should be laid out - no old sails or huts build of sod. The works that the Americans had built in a single night are much improved now. The British will not easily be dislodged from there.

            The town of Charlestown, huddled at the base of Bunker Hill, is still mostly a blackened ruin from the fires that started there on the day of the battle.

            Beyond Bunker Hill, moored in the Mystic River, Washington can see three floating batteries, their guns trained on the thin neck leading to the high ground, the only land approach. On the flat water between Charlestown and Boston a twenty-gun ship swings at anchor. From that distance it looks like a delicate model, it’s masts and yards impossibly thin, though it is, in fact, more powerful than anything Washington could put to sea.

            His eyes move toward the south, toward the near-island city of Boston. Most of the town is hidden on the far side of Beacon Hill with its tall spire reaching high above the town. The steeples of Boston’s fourteen churches rise above the tight clusters of wood frame houses at the north end of town. South of that, partially visible past Beacon Hill and Mount Whoredom, Boston Common makes a wide swath of green. Through a glass Washington can see the lines of tents there, the British entrenchments, the long guns aimed at the Americans across the Charles River.

            He looks at the river below, noting the vulnerable places where the British could easily land troops, and begins to form a mental picture of what defenses he will strengthen to stop that from happening. He looks up at the city again, and then beyond it, to the low islands that lead like stepping stones out to the sea.

            The sea. It glitters and winks and stretches far away to the bright line of the horizon. Washington understands that he is looking at an unbroken highway to England, a highway carrying supplies and reinforcements to General Thomas Gage in the city he is trying to surround. It is a strategic advantage that the British enjoy, one he will have to contend with. He has no notion how he will do it.