The Worst Week of the War

Nathanael Greene stood on the Palisades and watched Fort Washington fall. From the New Jersey cliffs, he could see the British and Hessian columns closing in from three sides. He could hear the firing. He could not do anything about it.

Greene had recommended holding Fort Washington. He had argued that the position was defensible, that the garrison could be evacuated by boat if necessary, that abandoning the fort would surrender control of the upper Hudson. Washington had listened to Greene's argument and, against his own instincts, agreed.

Now nearly three thousand men were being marched into captivity. Many of them would die on British prison ships in Wallabout Bay, crowded into rotting hulks where disease killed more men than the British army ever did. Greene bore the weight of their fate for the rest of his life.

Four days later, Cornwallis came up the Palisades. Greene had at most an hour's warning. There was no time to save the cannon, no time to pack the tents, no time to load the wagons. He saved the men. Two thousand soldiers walked away from Fort Lee with whatever they were carrying and started the long retreat across New Jersey.

It was, by any measure, a catastrophe. The twin forts were gone. The army was shrinking by the day. Enlistments were expiring. The British seemed unstoppable. Thomas Paine was there, watching, and what he saw became the opening of "The American Crisis": these are the times that try men's souls.

But Greene learned. The general who had insisted on holding Fort Washington became the general who knew when to let go. In the Southern campaign four years later, Greene would fight a war of movement and strategic retreat that exhausted Cornwallis and won the war. The lesson of Fort Lee — save the army, sacrifice everything else — became his operating principle.

The irony is almost too neat: the man who learned the hardest lesson of 1776 on the Palisades of New Jersey was the man who used that lesson to break Cornwallis in the Carolinas.