Each Man Waiting for the Other

Solomon Lovell could see the fort from his position on the heights. He could see that it was not finished. He could count the British soldiers working on the walls. He could estimate — any competent officer could — that the garrison was smaller than his own force and that the fortification, incomplete as it was, was not yet the obstacle it would become in a week's time.

He did not attack.

The reasons were not cowardice. Lovell was a competent officer who had served throughout the war. The reason was structural: the American command at Bagaduce had been designed with two equal authorities and no mechanism for resolving disagreement between them. Saltonstall commanded the fleet. Lovell commanded the land forces. Neither had authority over the other. And both had concluded, by different reasoning, that they needed the other to act first.

Saltonstall's reasoning was that the three British sloops-of-war in the harbor were a threat to his fleet if he engaged them without protection against fire from the heights. Lovell's reasoning was that his soldiers could not assault the heights without naval fire suppression of the British positions. Each waiting for the other. Three weeks of councils of war. Arguments that produced minutes instead of orders.

The fort got taller while they argued.

There is a letter Lovell wrote to the Massachusetts General Court during the siege that is worth reading carefully. He says, in effect: I believe we can take this position, but I cannot take it without naval cooperation, and I cannot obtain naval cooperation. He is describing the failure of an organizational system, not his own nerve. He is correct. The system had failed.

What Lovell could not have known was that Collier was coming. The British relief was in the water before the siege began, working its way north from New York. The window that existed in late July — when the fort was incomplete and the garrison was small — closed a little more each day. By the time Collier arrived, the window was gone entirely.