1776

by David McCullough

  Washington found the defenses only about half done, and even with the troops he had, he knew more were needed. Crowding the streets of the city, the army seemed an overwhelming multitude. The soldiers themselves were emboldened by their numbers. But only half were fit for duty and Washington worried exceedingly over what the toll from disease would be with the return of warm weather, and from such dissipations as were now readily at hand. Washington had seen enough of New York on prior visits to dislike and distrust the city as the most sinful place in America, a not uncommon view.

  Larger than Boston but smaller than Philadelphia, New York had a peacetime population of perhaps 20,000 people crowded into an area of less than a square mile, less than a tenth of the Island of Manhattan—or York Island, as it was then known—which from the Battery to its northern boundary at the Harlem River reached nearly eleven miles. That far larger stretch north of the city, known as the Outward, was a mix of woods, streams, marshes, and great rocky patches interspersed with a few small farms and large country estates, all the way to King’s Bridge, where a narrow wooden bridge over the Harlem connected the island to the mainland.

  Normally it was a city of thriving commerce, shipbuilding, and seagoing trade, and with much to see and talk about. “The inhabitants are in general brisk and lively,” wrote one visitor. The women were “handsome,” he recorded—as did others new to the city—though, he added, “it rather hurts a European eye to see so many Negro slaves upon the streets.”

  Broadway, straight and wide, was the grand thoroughfare lined with shade trees and fine houses and churches. Queen Street, close to the crowded East River wharves, was the bustling business center. City Hall stood on Wall Street, or “in” Wall Street, as people said.

  Henry Knox, stopping at New York for the first time on his way to Ticonderoga in November, had admired the “principle streets much wider than ours” and brick houses “better built than in Boston.” New Yorkers, however, were another matter, as he reported to his adored Lucy:

  The people—why the people are magnificent: in their carriages, which are numerous, in their house furniture, which is fine, in their pride and conceit, which are inimitable, in their profaneness, which is intolerable, in the want of principle, which is prevalent, in their Toryism, which is insufferable.

  But the city had greatly changed. It had become an armed camp, and thousands of people—perhaps a third of the population—had fled, fearing it was soon to be the scene of terrible calamity. One would “think the city almost evacuated,” wrote a dispirited resident. Business was at a standstill.

  Large numbers of troops were quartered in vacant buildings and many of the finest mansions. (“Oh, the houses of New York, if you could see the insides of them!” grieved another resident.) King’s College, west of the Commons, one of the largest, handsomest buildings in town, had been taken over as an army hospital, once the library books were removed, lest the soldiers burn them for fuel.

  For the troops from New England a roof overhead of any kind seemed the height of luxury, and New York, however changed, a center of wonders. Joseph Hodgkins decided, “This city York exceeds all places that ever I saw,” though he found the living “excessive dear.”

  “They have all the simplicity of ploughmen,” a New Yorker wrote of the Yankee soldiers. And according to one local paper, the New York Packet, they were unexpectedly well behaved, “their civility to the inhabitants very commendable.” They attended prayers “evening and morning regularly,” their officers setting the example, the paper noted. “On Lord’s day they attend public worship twice, and their deportment in the house of God is such as becomes the place.”

  But an earnest young Presbyterian chaplain with the New Jersey troops, a graduate of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, Philip Vickers Fithian, found the level of piety alarmingly below his expectations and worried what the consequences might be to the American cause of so many of all ranks so habitually taking the name of the Lord in vain. “But alas, swearing abounds, all classes swear,” he noted sadly.

  Lieutenant Isaac Bangs of Massachusetts, who in his journal would provide one of the fullest accounts of unfolding events that spring and summer, wrote of his walking tours about town and such sights to be seen as the waterworks and the larger-than-life equestrian statue of King George III, which dominated Bowling Green in front of Washington’s headquarters. “The design was in imitation of one of the Roman emperors,” Bangs wrote. The King was represented “about a third larger than a natural man,” and both horse and rider were “neatly constructed of lead [and] gilt with gold,” and “raised on a pedestal of white marble” fifteen feet high.

  With twenty or more churches of differing denominations to choose from (something unknown in Massachusetts), the lieutenant attended as many as possible—an “English” church (most likely Trinity Church on Broadway, which was Church of England), a Congregational meeting, a high Dutch church (probably Old Dutch Church on Garden Street), where only Dutch was spoken, and the city’s one synagogue, Shearith Israel, on Mill Street. He liked the Dutch church best, he decided, preferring the priest’s manifest piety to the “pomp” of the English church, though he understood not a word of the Dutch sermon. On a later Sunday he and a friend attended a Quaker meeting, but after sitting through two hours during which not a word was said, they happily repaired to a nearby tavern.

  In his conscientious way, Bangs proceeded to investigate the darker side of city life that so worried his commander, embarking into the section called the Holy Ground, a foul slum and brothel district west of the Commons, much of which was owned by Trinity Church, hence the name. By some estimates as many as five hundred prostitutes plied their trade there. Robinson Street especially was notorious for its rough gin shops and bawdy houses. If there was trouble after dark in New York, it was nearly always in the Holy Ground.

  Bangs, a Harvard graduate with training in medicine, had initiated his own tour of inspection out of concern for the health of his men—though also out of curiosity, as he conceded—and was appalled by what he saw.

  “When I visited them [the prostitutes] at first I thought nothing could exceed them for impudence and immodesty, but I found the more I was acquainted with them the more they excelled in their brutality.” How any man could desire “intimate connection” with such “creatures” was more than he could comprehend. But so it was, and among officers and soldiers alike, “till the fatal disorder [syphilis] seized them.”

  On April 22, less than a week after the Continental Army moved into the city, all hell erupted in the Holy Ground. The mutilated bodies of two soldiers were found concealed in a brothel. One of the victims had been “castrated in a barbarous manner,” as Bangs recorded. In furious retaliation, gangs of soldiers went on a rampage, tearing to pieces the building where the murders had taken place. Some days later, the remains of “an old whore” were discovered dumped in a privy, “so long dead that she was rotten,” as Bangs also recorded.

  Washington condemned all such “riotous behavior.” Were it to happen again, the perpetrators would be subjected to the severest punishment. If they resisted arrest, they would be “treated as a common enemy,” meaning they would be shot dead on the spot.

  He ordered a curfew and warned that any soldier found “disguised with liquor” would be punished. Still, it seems, business was business and not to be intruded upon. “Every brutal gratification can be so easily indulged in this place,” wrote William Tudor of Boston, Washington’s judge advocate, to his fiancée, “that the army will be debauched here in a month more than in twelve at Cambridge.”

  The whores, the trulls, “these bitchfoxly, jades, hags, strums,” as wrote another officer, Colonel Loammi Baldwin, continued “their employ which is become very lucrative.” Baldwin, an apple grower from Massachusetts, was one of the officers dispatched to the Holy Ground with military patrols, under orders to deal only with drunken or unruly soldiers—“hell’s work,” as he said. Since almost no soldiers had uniforms, it was
all but impossible to distinguish who among the drunks and brawlers were soldiers and who were not, in dark, shadowed streets lit only by dim oil lamps. Baldwin and his patrol broke up “knots of men and women” fighting, cursing, “crying ‘Murder!’ ” and “hurried them off to the Provost dungeon by half dozens.” Some were punished and some “got off clear—hell’s work.”

  Meantime, the army was “growing sickly.” Smallpox appeared and several soldiers died. Frightful rumors swept through the city, including one that the British had returned to Boston and taken Dorchester Heights. With more bad news from Canada, Washington was directed by Congress to send reinforcements. When approximately 3,000 men under General Sullivan departed by ship up the Hudson, Washington informed Congress he had to have at least 10,000 more.

  Drill went on in the streets and on the Commons. Work on defenses continued under steadily increasing pressure.

  ***

  GENERAL LEE, considered an expert on defense, had concluded that without command of the sea New York could not be held. Still, as he had said, it could be an “advantageous” battlefield. If the British were determined to take the city, they could be made to pay a heavy toll.

  Crucial to Lee’s plan was the defense of that part of Long Island directly across the East River and particularly the imposing river bluffs near the tiny hamlet called Brooklyn, which was also spelled Breucklyn, Brucklyn, Broucklyn, Brookland, or Brookline, and amounted to no more than seven or eight houses and an old Dutch church that stood in the middle of the Jamaica Road, the main road inland from the Brooklyn ferry landing.

  From the New York side of the river, the village was out of sight, three-quarters of a mile back from the partly wooded “noble bluff” known as Columbia Heights or Brooklyn Heights. All one saw looking across from New York, as Washington frequently did, was the steep face of the bluff rising above the river and crowned now by the beginnings of Fort Stirling, and to the right, also on the brow of the bluff, the country house of Philip Livingston, a wealthy New York importer and delegate to the Continental Congress.

  When finished, the large square bastion of Fort Stirling, mounting eight cannon, was expected to command the East River and New York just as Dorchester Heights commanded Boston and its harbor. From Brooklyn Heights one looked down on all of New York City, the harbor, the rivers, and the long, low hills of New Jersey beyond. It was one of the grandest panoramas to be seen on the entire Atlantic seaboard.

  The East River, no river at all but a saltwater estuary nearly a mile wide, was famously difficult to navigate, with swift, contrary currents and tides of as much as six feet. Because of winds and tides, ferryboats to and from Brooklyn often had great difficulty. Even with three men pulling at the oars, crossing the river could take over an hour.

  The Hudson, or North, River was greater still, more than two miles wide, and so, as Lee had acknowledged, impossible to keep closed to the enemy. But with batteries along the New York shore of the Hudson, the British might think twice before risking their valuable ships.

  Washington agreed with the general outlines of the plan, including, most importantly, the premise that an effective defense of New York City would depend on the defense of Long Island. If New York was the key to the continent, then Long Island was the key to New York, and the key to the defense of Long Island was Brooklyn Heights. “For should the enemy take possession of N[ew] York when Long Island is in our hands,” Lee had written to Washington, “they will find it almost impossible to subsist.”

  That New York or Long Island, or both, could be a trap, neither of them seems to have seriously considered, or at least acknowledged for the record.

  Given the importance of Long Island, Washington put General Greene in command there, and by the first week of May, Greene and his men, with the addition of a Pennsylvania rifle company, were encamped at Brooklyn. In little time there were several thousand troops on Long Island—which seemed a great many, but were less than a third of those in and around New York—and their efforts began to show. As would be said, the experience at Boston had made them “veterans at least of the spade.”

  In addition to Fort Stirling, three more forts were under construction on the other, or eastern, side of the hamlet of Brooklyn, these intended as a defense of Fort Stirling and Brooklyn Heights. If the British were to come ashore on the broad beaches to the west, in the vicinity of the village of Gravesend—as was widely expected—and attack from the open plains to the south, this line of defense would check their drive for the river.

  To the left was Fort Putnam, named for Rufus Putnam, who marked out most of the fortifications. In the middle was star-shaped Fort Greene, mounting six cannon and commanding the Jamaica Road. On the right was Fort Box, named for one of Greene’s officers, Major Daniel Box.

  Each of these bastions was to be surrounded with a broad ditch and all were to be connected by a line of entrenchments reaching a mile or more. With hundreds of axmen at work, trees were cut to give full sweep to the fire of the cannon, and along most of the line, pointed stakes—pickets—were driven into the ground. Farther still to the right, at an isolated point on the Upper Bay called Red Hook, a fifth defense, Fort Defiance, was being built. From Fort Putnam on the left to Fort Defiance on the right was nearly three miles.

  As the days grew longer and steadily warmer, the hard labor continued with unrelenting determination. Any soldier caught leaving the works without proper liberty would do “constant duty” for a week, Greene warned. One Rhode Island officer riding herd on the men, Colonel Ezekiel Cornell, became known as “Old Snarl.”

  Greene himself was tireless in his efforts. Nothing escaped his notice. He was everywhere on horseback surveying the work, or scouting the lay of the land, making himself familiar with the whole terrain from Brooklyn to Gravesend, and particularly the densely wooded ridge about a mile and a half to the south known as the Heights of Gowan, which ran like a natural defense between the forts and the broad flatlands to the south.

  Earthworks and gun emplacements were also under way on little Governor’s Island between the Heights and Red Hook, in the direct path of the entrance to the East River. “We have done a great deal,” Washington could claim in early May. “Governor’s Island has a large and strong work erected…. The point below (called Red Hook) has a small, but exceedingly strong barbette [mounted] battery—and several new works are constructed and many of them almost executed at other places.”

  Barricades were thrown up within the city itself. In the words of a surviving British intelligence report, “every street facing both North and East Rivers has wooden trunks made across ten feet thick filled with earth, in order to intercept any troops that may attempt a landing.”

  There were guns along the banks of the Hudson, heavy cannon at old Fort George by the Battery, and more at the Whitehall dock on the East River.

  Henry Knox was proud to report that 120 cannon were in place in and about the city and this time ample ammunition was standing by. The one glaring problem was an acute shortage of artillerymen. Knowing how many soldiers in the ranks were without muskets or arms of any kind, Knox persuaded Washington to reassign five or six hundred of them to the artillery. Never mind that they were entirely inexperienced, almost any live body being preferable to nothing.

  The daily labors of the artillerymen were hardly less wearisome than those of the troops digging trenches and throwing up earthworks, and potentially a great deal more dangerous, as the diary of the Massachusetts soldier Solomon Nash gives some suggestion.

  Monday, May 13…Fetched one 32 pounder from the fort and placed it to the eastward of the grand battery…. Employed in piling up shot.

  Thursday, May 16…Some of us employed…in firing our cannon with double charges in them to prove them and they all proved good but two. One of them split at the muzzle and the other at the grand battery burst all in pieces. One piece went 30 or 40 rods [about 200 yards] and fell upon a house…through the roof and all the floors to the last one, which hurt the house very
much, but hurt nobody.

  Wednesday, May 22…Employed in making cartridges….

  Friday, May 31…Bigger part of our regiment employed in making cartridges. So ends this month.

  In early June, Knox and Greene rode together to the rugged uppermost end of York Island to survey a craggy ridge 230 feet above the Hudson, the highest point on the island, as the site for still another major defense, and work soon commenced on what was to be called Fort Washington, intended to keep the British navy from coming up the river. Another fort, to be known as Fort Constitution, was also planned for the opposite side of the Hudson.

  The friendship of Knox and Greene that had begun in Knox’s Boston bookshop continued to grow, as the two officers found themselves increasingly important in the overall command and nearly always in agreement on matters of consequence. In their admiration of and loyalty to Washington, they were of one heart and both had begun helping Washington in his dealings with Congress.

  Greene, in a letter stressing the urgent need for more troops, told John Adams, head of the Board of War, that if Congress were to provide support for those soldiers maimed or killed that this in itself would increase enlistments and “inspire those engaged with as much courage as any measure that can be fixed upon.” He wrote, too, of the low morale among officers whose pay was not enough to defray even ordinary expenses. Good officers were “the very soul of an army,” Greene wrote. The Congress must not be overconfident. “The fate of war is very uncertain,” he warned.