1776

by David McCullough

  ***

  AT THE CENTER, where Hessian artillery had been bombarding Sullivan’s lines along the ridges since early morning, General von Heister’s brigades could be seen drawn up on the plain to the south, but showed no sign of moving. Three Hessian brigades stood waiting in a line nearly a mile long.

  Sullivan had ridden out from Brooklyn to take command at the Flatbush Pass. Seeing that the Hessians were not moving and that Stirling was in trouble on the right, he sent some of his regiments to help.

  Until nine o’clock the battle seemed to be unfolding about as the Americans had expected, with the enemy attacking, or poised to attack, head-on.

  But at nine came the crash of Howe’s signal guns, and suddenly Sullivan realized that a whole British army was coming at him from behind and that he was surrounded.

  On the plain beyond the ridge, General von Heister gave the order and with drums rolling, the Hessians were in motion.

  Leaving his advance guard posted along the ridge to do what they could to hold off the Hessians, Sullivan pulled back his main force and swung around to face the oncoming British ranks. And though vastly outnumbered, the Americans returned the British fire with murderous effect. Officers on both sides feared their men would be cut to pieces, and officers and soldiers on both sides often had no idea what was happening. Nor was it the Americans only who, when faced with annihilation, ran for their lives.

  A British light infantry officer who led thirty of Clinton’s advance guard into the “very thick” of several hundred American riflemen, saw a third of his men go down in the most ferocious exchange of fire he had ever known. When he and a half dozen redcoats broke for the woods, more rebels sprang up out of nowhere. The fire seemed to come from every direction.

  I called to my men to run to the first wall they could find and we all set off, some into some short bushes, others straight across a field…[and] in running across the field we [were] exposed to the fire of 300 men. We had literally run out in the midst [of them] and they calling to me to surrender. I stopped twice to look behind me and saw the riflemen so thick and not one of my own men. I made for the wall as hard as I could drive and they peppering at me…at last I gained the wall and threw myself headlong.

  In the turmoil and confusion, Sullivan struggled to hold control and keep his men from panicking. Their situation was desperate; retreat was the only alternative, and in stages of “fight and flight,” he lead them as rapidly as possible in the direction of the Brooklyn lines.

  Those left to hold the ridge had by now been overrun by the Hessians. Green-coated jaegers (literally, huntsmen) and the blue-coated grenadiers with their seventeen-inch bayonets had moved up through the steep woods of the ridge—the “terrible hills”—as swiftly and expertly as any Virginia rifleman. So suddenly did they appear that the Americans had time to get off only a shot or two, or none at all. Some fought back, wielding their muskets and rifles like clubs, before being run through with bayonets. Some pleaded for mercy. “Their fear of the Hessian troops was…indescribable,” wrote General von Heister. At the very sight of a blue coat, he said, “they surrendered immediately and begged on their knees for their lives.” Those who could get away fled back down through the trees and out into the open, only to run headlong into a hail of British fire.

  At the same time, the whole left side of the American line collapsed. Thousands of men were on the run, hundreds were captured. Sullivan held back, in an effort to see as many as possible to safety, and amazingly most of the men succeeded in reaching the Brooklyn lines.

  Sullivan, however, was captured. An American soldier named Lewis Morris, who himself barely escaped, wrote of Sullivan in a letter home. “The last I heard of him, he was in a cornfield close by our lines, with a pistol in each hand, and the enemy had formed a line each side of him, and he was going directly between them. I like to have been taken prisoner myself.”

  ***

  THE PRECISE TIME of Washington’s arrival on the scene at Brooklyn was not recorded, but it is believed he crossed over from New York at about nine o’clock, or just as Howe’s signal guns sounded.

  Like General Putnam, Washington, too, had been awakened in the middle of the night with word of Grant’s early assault, and at daybreak, still apprehensive of a second, larger attack on New York, Washington had watched with increasing anxiety as five enemy warships—Roebuck, Asia, Renown, Preston,and Repulse —started for the East River with a favorable wind and tide. It was what he had most feared.

  Then miraculously the wind had veered off to the north. The ships, after tacking to and fro, trying to gain headway, at last gave up. Only the Roebuck could “fetch high enough” to threaten the battery at Red Hook with a few random shots.

  So Long Island it was to be, Washington saw. He immediately ordered more troops to Brooklyn and wasted no time having himself rowed across the river, Joseph Reed at his side.

  Private Joseph Martin, one of those in the units ordered to march to the Brooklyn ferry, remembered the cheers of the soldiers as they embarked, and the answering cheers of the spectators who thronged the wharves to watch the excitement. “They all wished us good luck apparently.” For his own part, Private Martin could think only of the horrors of war “in all their hideousness.”

  On reaching the Brooklyn side, he saw, as he never had, the blood and suffering of wounded men. “What were the feelings of most or all the young soldiers at this time, I know not,” he would remember, “but I know what were mine.”

  I saw a lieutenant who…. ran round among the men of his company, sniveling and blubbering, praying each one if he had aught against him, or if he had injured any one, that they would forgive him, declaring at the same time that he, from his heart, forgave them if they had offended him…had he been at the gallows with a halter about his neck, he could not have shown more fear or penitence. A fine soldier you are, I thought, a fine officer, an exemplary man for young soldiers! I would have suffered anything short of death rather than have made such an exhibition of myself.

  Accounts of Washington’s activities as the battle raged are few and somewhat conflicting. He would be remembered out in plain view on horseback watching the clash of armies through a telescope. Stories would be told of him riding among the troops exhorting them to “quit yourselves like men, like soldiers,” or saying, “I will fight so long as I have a leg or an arm.” One soldier later described him walking the lines to rally the men. Possibly he did all of that. More likely his place was a vantage point on Brooklyn Heights, and in any case what was happening was out of his hands.

  By ten o’clock his army had been hopelessly outflanked. The British were within two miles of the Brooklyn lines. Defeated men by the hundreds were streaming in from the battlefield, many blood-spattered and wounded, all exhausted. Officers were missing. Washington was facing disaster and could do nothing but sit astride his horse and watch.

  ***

  ONLY ON THE RIGHT did the uproar of cannon and musket fire continue, as the indomitable Stirling and his men fought on against Grant’s far greater force, still in the belief that they were holding the line.

  Colonel Samuel Atlee, who commanded the Pennsylvanians, would remember actually thinking that the British were going down to defeat: “For the batteries began to play and mowed them down like grass when they retreated, and our army cried out, ‘The day is our own!’ ”

  But Grant kept holding back and in the interval, his division of 5,000 had been reinforced by 2,000 marines from the British ships offshore and two companies of New York Loyalists recruited that spring and summer by Governor Tryon.

  Stirling had been ordered by Putnam to “repulse” the enemy, and for lack of orders to the contrary, he and his men had held on for nearly four hours. With great pride and no exaggeration, Colonel John Haslet would describe how his “Delawares” stood with “determined countenance,” in close array, their colors flying, the enemy’s artillery “playing” on them all the while, and the enemy, “though six times their number,�
�� not daring to attack.

  But they had stayed too long. At eleven o’clock Grant’s redcoats hit hard at the center of Stirling’s line, as thousands of Hessians struck from the woods to the left. When Stirling at last pulled back, it was too late. More British were coming at him from the rear, on the Gowanus Road, the line of retreat he had been counting on. A full British division led by Cornwallis now stood between him and Brooklyn. The only escape route still open, he saw, was in the direction of Gowanus Bay, now on his left, across a tidal marsh and a creek, which at high tide was about eighty yards wide, and the tide was coming in rapidly.

  Stirling ordered his men to “make the best of their way” through the marsh and across the creek. Then, he and Major Mordecai Gist and no more than 250 Marylanders attacked Cornwallis in a headlong, valiant effort to cover the retreat of the others and perhaps even break through the redcoats who had established their line on the Gowanus Road beside a stone farmhouse.

  The fighting was the most savage of the day. Driven back by a blaze of deadly fire, Stirling’s men rallied and struck again five times. Stirling himself fought “like a wolf.” The Marylanders, who until that morning had never faced an enemy, fought no less tenaciously than their commander.

  Washington, watching from a Brooklyn hill, is said to have cried out as he saw the Marylanders cut down time after time, “Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose!”

  Giving up at last, Stirling ordered the men to scatter and try to get back to the Brooklyn lines any way they could.

  Of those trying to escape through the marshes, many bogged down in the mud and could get nowhere. Men unable to swim struggled pitifully in the swift tide of the creek and under a hail of musket fire. Some officers swam their horses across. A few of the men who could not swim held back and were captured.

  An eighteen-year-old, six-month volunteer with a Pennsylvania unit, Private Michael Graham, who started the day posted with eight others on the ridge at the center of the American lines, had been ordered to retreat. With men running in almost every direction, he found himself mixed in with Stirling’s troops in their desperate flight.

  It is impossible for me to describe the confusion and horror…. [I] entered a swamp or marsh through which a great many of our men were retreating. Some of them were mired and crying to their fellows for God’s sake to help them out. But every man was intent on his own safety…. At the side of the marsh there was a pond which I took to be a millpond. Numbers, as they came to this pond jumped in, and some were drowned…. I got safely into camp. Out of the eight men that were taken from the company to which I belonged the day before the battle on guard, I only escaped. The others were killed or taken prisoners.

  At the time, I could not account for how it was that our troops were so completely surrounded.

  Joseph Hodgkins, as he later recounted for his wife, had run pell-mell into the marshes while being fired on the whole way. He hardly knew who was killed or drowned or taken prisoner.

  Lord Stirling, finding himself hopelessly surrounded, and determined not to surrender his sword to the British, broke through their fire to a Hessian regiment and gave himself up to General von Heister.

  By noon or shortly thereafter the rout was over, the day lost for the Americans. British troops, having advanced so far so rapidly wanted to keep going and carry the attack straight to the Brooklyn works. Numbers of British officers, too, felt it was no time to stop. But Howe ordered a halt.

  In his original plan, General Clinton had said that the principal attacks, while vigorous, should not be pushed too far. The only exception was the all-important flanking attack, which, he said, “should be pushed as far as it will go.”

  Clinton would later write of Howe’s decision to halt: “I had at the moment but little inclination to check the ardor of our troops when I saw the enemy flying in such a panic before them.” Howe himself, recalling the mood of the men, would later write that “it required repeated orders to prevail on them to desist.”

  ***

  IT HAD BEEN the first great battle of the Revolution, and by far the largest battle ever fought in North America until then. Counting both armies and the Royal Navy, more than 40,000 men had taken part. The field of battle ranged over six miles, and the fighting lasted just over six hors. And for the Continental Army, now the army of the United States of America, in this first great test under fire, it had been a crushing defeat.

  “O Doleful! Doleful! Doleful!” scrawled Chaplain Philip Fithian in his diary, expressing only the obvious.

  To the British it was a “glorious day”—“a cheap and complete victory” in the terse summation of General Grant. “You will be glad,” Grant wrote to General Harvey, “that we have had the field day I talked of in my last letter. If a good bleeding can bring those Bible-faced Yankees to their senses, the fever of independency should soon abate.”

  Everything had gone like “clockwork.” Clinton’s overall plan had succeeded “beyond our expectations,” reported Lord Percy to his father. “Our men behaved themselves like British troops fighting in a good cause.” In the opinion of Sir James Murray, no soldiers had ever behaved with greater spirit.

  In one thing only had they failed, thought Ambrose Serle. “They could not run so fast as their foes, many of whom indeed were ready to run over each other.”

  In his own official reports, William Howe left no doubt about the magnitude of the victory and was no less generous than others in his praise of the army:

  The behavior of both officers and soldiers, British and Hessians, was highly to their honor. More determined courage and steadfastness in troops have never been experienced, or a greater ardor to distinguish themselves, as all those who had an opportunity have amply evinced by their actions.

  Howe reported his losses to be less than 400—59 killed, 267 wounded, and 31 missing. The Hessians had lost a mere 5 killed and 26 wounded.

  Rebel losses, on the other hand, numbered more than 3,000, Howe claimed. Over 1,000 prisoners had been taken, while another 2,000 had been killed, wounded, or drowned.

  The disparity of the losses as reported by Howe was greatly exaggerated, however. Washington, unable to provide an exact count, would later estimate in a report to Congress that about 700 to 1,000 of his men had been killed or taken prisoner.

  General Parsons, who had succeeded in avoiding capture, wrote that in the course of the battle the number of American dead he and his men had collected, taken together with “the heap the enemy had made,” amounted to 60, and while the total loss was still impossible to know, Parsons judged the number of killed would be “inconsiderable.”

  Some of the other officers who had been in the thick of the fight were convinced that the British had suffered more men killed than had the Americans, but that the British took the most prisoners.

  Very few on the American side were ready to acknowledge just how severe a defeat it had been. In fact, American losses, though far less than what Howe had reported, were dreadful. As close as can be estimated about 300 Americans had been killed and over 1,000 taken prisoner, including three generals, Sullivan, Stirling, and Nathaniel Woodhull. Sullivan and Stirling were to be treated with marked courtesy by their captors, would even dine with Lord Howe on board the Eagle. But Woodhull died of wounds a few weeks later.

  Among the swarms of prisoners in British hands were Captain Samuel Atlee and Lieutenant Jabez Fitch. Atlee was marched under guard to General Howe’s headquarters at Bedford, where he and other prisoners were subjected to “the most scurrilous and abusive language, both from officers, soldiers, and camp-ladies, everyone…demanding of the guard why we were taken, why we were not put to the bayonet.”

  Jabez Fitch, who had fought through the long day and surrendered only after being surrounded, was confined with “a great number of prisoners” in a barn, where he did all he could to comfort his friend and company commander, Captain John Jewett, who had been bayoneted twice, in the chest and stomach, and was in excruciating pain. “I sat wi
th him most of the night, and slept but very little,” Fitch wrote. “The capt[ain]…was sensible of his being near his end, often repeating that it was hard work to die.”

  The father of ten children, Jewett made Fitch promise to describe the circumstances of his death to his wife. Later, Fitch would write to tell her that her husband had received his mortal wounds with a bayonet “after he was taken prisoner and stripped of his arms and part of his clothes.”

  Accounts of British, Scottish, and Hessian soldiers bayoneting Americans after they had surrendered were to become commonplace. There were repeated stories of Hessians pinning Americans to trees with their bayonets. A letter said to have been written by an unnamed British officer appeared in the Massachusetts Spy describing how readily surrendered Americans were “dispatched.”