I’ll Trade You A General, Part One
American Major General Charles Lee had picked a great place to hide.
Like big-city mobsters two centuries later, George Washington’s second in command had discovered that New Jersey was a great place to lay low if someone was after you.
Charles had a lot of people after him in December 1776. First and foremost was the British Army, commanded in that area by Lord Charles Cornwallis. After a string of British successes against the Continentals in New York, it wasn’t George Washington the English high command was afraid of.
It was Charles Lee.
(If you’d rather listen than read, check out this episode of the History’s Trainwrecks Podcast):
https://shows.acast.com/60a3be0e6196e1001b05895b/episodes/64d38853a1ec2f001197a53f
He had served with distinction in the British service, as well as the Polish and Russian armies. He was a good strategist, and one of the few American generals who had foiled British attacks. He was also a great networker and propagandist — the reputation he helped establish for himself made him appear way more fearsome than his own commander-in-chief. So it was Charles the British wanted to take out. Cornwallis believed that with Charles gone, the colonists’ little rebellion would be over.
George Washington was also looking for Charles. He was planning a major attack on the British. Winter was coming, so military operations traditionally stopped for a few months. Unable to defeat the British on a level playing field, Washington knew that surprise was his best ally. But he also needed the eight thousand or so troops Charles had with him. Washington, increasingly frustrated, had sent four emissaries to find Charles and get him and his army moving so he could join forces with him and keep the fight alive. The recent setbacks in New York in 1776, where the Continentals had been forced to retreat and surrender the island to the enemy, wasn’t inspiring confidence in the colonists or the Congress. The Continental Congress in Philadelphia, with a British army heading their way, was starting to make noise about replacing Washington with someone who could win battles.
Someone like General Charles Lee.
Charles himself wasn’t opposed to the idea. Part of his reason for hiding out in Jersey was that he knew if he joined forces with Washington and then the Americans won a big victory, the credit would go to his commander, not to him. Charles was also loosely planning some kind of surprise offensive against the British independent of Washington. He must have hoped to kill two birds with one stone — score a victory and then take command of the Continental Army.
But time was not on his side.
He had no choice but to send his army to meet up with Washington, so he told General John Sullivan to take the troops and go. At the same time, Charles Cornwallis had dispatched a contingent of dragoons into New Jersey with one mission: find General Lee.
Charles, with all this pressure and his army headed down the road, holed up in a nondescript tavern run by the Widow White. A year later, an American officer, riding past the spot remarked, “I should never have expected to find a General there.”
But the British dragoons did, aided by local Loyalists and some captured American soldiers. On December 12, 1776, the dragoons, led by Banastre Tarleton in a career-making move that would propel him to high rank and later infamy in the war in the southern colonies, arrived at the tavern. They fired “sixty or seventy shots” through the doors and windows. Tarleton said, “I know General Lee is in the house. If he would surrender himself, he and his attendants should be safe, but if my summons was not complied with immediately, the house should be burnt and every person without exception should be put to the sword.”
Later in the war, Tarleton became famous for executing captured Americans who had already surrendered. This was known as “Tarleton’s quarter.”
Stuck between the threat of being roasted alive in the tavern or surrendering, Charles picked the latter. He asked to be treated like a gentleman, and was tied to a horse, wearing “a blanket coat…his shirt very much soiled from several days use.”
The British departed the tavern, having taken the second highest ranking American general prisoner and the only one they thought stood between them and quick victory.
***
There were some in the British army who wanted to see Charles Lee hanged as a traitor. He had still been in the British service on half-pay at the rank of major when he was appointed a major general by the Continental Congress. Even though he had sent a letter of resignation, most of his former comrades believed that execution was the best thing for him. Charles wasn’t great at endearing himself to his fellow soldiers. No matter what army he was in. Being an oppositionally defiant crank sometimes rubs people the wrong way. Or so I’m told.
But Lord Cornwallis wasn’t going to waste such a high-value prisoner. He set Charles up in New York with his mistress and his dogs and allowed him up to six daily guests for dinner. Royal Governor of New Jersey William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin, complained that the British Crown was spending “thirty shillings sterling per day” on the costs of General Lee’s captivity. What Royal Governor Franklin didn’t know was that Charles Lee was writing up military strategies for the British designed to divide the colonies and end the war. This little fact was discovered decades later by an archivist going through British papers from the Revolutionary era.
Cornwallis had a couple of great reasons for keeping Charles alive and comfortable. He had taken a high-value opponent out of the field, and a prisoner of such high rank was good insurance. If a British general, say Lord Cornwallis himself, was captured, he could be traded for Lee and thereby avoid extended captivity in the hands of the Americans. He seemed to place no value on Charles’s advice about how to defeat the uppity colonists.
Some members of Congress, along with quite a number of soldiers, believed the American cause was lost without General Lee. As word of his capture spread, the mood in the colonies grew worse. A lot of Americans wanted him back as soon as possible.
All they needed was a big enough British officer to trade for him.
***
British Major General Richard Prescott was a big deal. He was second-in-command of the British troops in Canada, and he was no fan of colonists in rebellion. To his thinking, the soldiers on the opposing side weren’t military men; they were traitors and should be treated as such.
His earliest test case was when Ethan Allen was sent to him as a prisoner. Allen and his Green Mountain Boys had captured Fort Ticonderoga with an assist from historical trainwreck Benedict Arnold. Like many Americans at the time, including historical trainwreck Aaron Burr, Allen believed that success in the Revolution hinged on the conquest of Canada. He attempted an invasion of Quebec and was captured. Failing at Canadian conquest did not dampen the American enthusiasm for the idea. Brace yourselves for more trainwrecks, Canadian-style.
Prescott insisted that his famous prisoner be treated with “severity,” shackling Allen in heavy chains and putting him aboard a prison ship bound for England. Allen wrote back home that British prisoners should be treated the same way he was.
News of Prescott’s harsh treatment of American prisoners made it to General Philip Schuyler, Alexander Hamilton’s future father-in-law, in November, 1775 half an hour after Schuyler interviewed General Prescott himself, who had been captured by the Americans a few weeks before. But Schuyler, instead of clapping Prescott in heavy irons or smacking him about the head and neck with a cane, chose instead to drop a mean note to his prisoner, essentially saying that Schuyler knew what a bad bad man Prescott was.
George Washington waded in, writing British General Howe to complain about Ethan Allen’s treatment at Prescott’s hands. He told Howe, “whatever treatment Colonel Allen receives, whatever fate he undergoes, such exactly shall be the treatment and fate of Brigadier Prescott, now in our hands.”
Even reading between the lines of flowery eighteenth-century diplomatic prose, one gets the sense that George was fairly peeved. And his temper was legendary. General Schuyler sent Prescott to the Continental Congress to answer for his rough treatment of Ethan Allen. The Congress listened to Prescott’s explanations, clapped him in irons, and had him sent to the Philadelphia common jail.
Good one, Continental Congress.
Thomas Jefferson, conflict-averse in person but a firebrand with the printed word, wrote, “Brigadier General Prescott to be bound in irons and confined in close jail, there to experience corresponding miseries with those that shall be inflicted on Mr. Allen. His life shall answer for that of Allen.”
Good one, Thomas Jefferson.
So Prescott went to jail, where an old war wound and damp conditions put him at death’s door after about a week. Congress had the general removed from the jail and quartered at City Tavern under guard.
Well, Continental Congress. You sure showed him.
There is no record of what George Washington thought of the whole thing, but Prescott, promoted to major general during his captivity, was exchanged for American General John Sullivan in August, 1776. Sullivan had been captured at the Battle of Brooklyn. Ethan Allen, after spending some time in London while Parliament debated whether or not to hang him as a traitor, eventually made it back to America.
At the end of June, 1777, George Washington wrote another letter to General Howe saying that he expected “General Lee be declared exchangeable, when we shall have an officer of yours of equal rank in our possession.”
Which, at the time, George did not have. If you’re keeping track of chess pieces, by the middle of 1777, Charles Lee and his dogs and his mistress were living the high life in expensive captivity while secretly collaborating with the British on the best way to bring the Americans to heel. General Richard Prescott had spent a bad week in Philly whining in jail, got promoted to major general, and was then off to Newport, Rhode Island, which the British had recently captured, where he was placed in overall command of the colony.
Prescott must have thought he was doing okay. What he didn’t know was that Charles Lee had an admirer right down the road who saw Prescott as the key to getting Charles back to the American side.
***
Lieutenant Colonel William Barton was twenty-nine years old and such a firm American patriot he named his third son George Washington Barton. Barton himself, though a hatter by trade, was a talented military planner. In January 1776, he concocted a ruse where a British ship looking for runaway slaves to work for them as spies was hailed from the shore by an African American man. When a British landing party came ashore to capture HIM, Barton captured THEM.
When Barton heard of Charles Lee’s capture, he wrote that he had “a very high opinion of the General’s abilities” and that he “used the greatest endeavors to get intelligence of some British officer of the same rank with Major General Lee whom I might surprise and thus effect an exchange of that great man.”
Oppositionally defiant cranks, can, apparently, have devoted fans. Good to know.
In June, 1777, Barton interviewed an American who had escaped from Aquidneck Island, which the British were using as their base in Rhode Island. This fellow told Barton that Major General Prescott was spending his nights at a comfortable farmhouse some five miles from Newport, where the bulk of British forces were headquartered, and that just maybe he didn’t have a lot of guards keeping watch. I’m sort of reminded of that time General Charles Lee hung out at a New Jersey tavern while his army camped a ways down the road.
Stay tuned.
