1776

by David McCullough

  The Hessians and our Highlanders gave no quarters [the letter read], and it was a fine thing to see with what alacrity they dispatched the rebels with their bayonets after we had surrendered them so that they could not resist…. You know all stratagems are lawful in war, especially against such vile enemies to their King and country.

  Numbers of individual Americans were indeed severely beaten after surrendering, or, like Captain Jewett, run through with bayonets, as reliable accounts attest, but no mass atrocities were committed. The letter in the Massachusetts Spy —a letter quoted repeatedly—was very likely a fake, fabricated as propaganda. Nor was there truth to an account in a London paper of Hessians burying five hundred American bodies in a single pit.

  Some American prisoners, including Jabez Fitch, recorded acts of genuine civility and kindness on the part of their captors. Even the infamous General Grant, wrote Fitch, “was so good as to make us a present of a side of mutton.”

  For their British and Hessian captors, and particularly for the Hessians, the prisoners were great curiosities, a first chance to see close up what the rebel foe looked like. “They could not have been taken as soldiers as they had no uniforms, but only torn blouses of all colors,” wrote one astonished Hessian. Lieutenant von Bardeleben, too, was surprised to see how badly clothed the Americans were. Most, he wrote, “have nothing but a wretched farmer’s costume and a weapon. Most of their officers are no better dressed and until recently were only ordinary manual laborers.”

  Writing in his diary in a code, Lieutenant von Bardeleben also recorded that some of his fellow officers “shed their ideas of being heroes. The prisoners who knelt and sought to surrender were beaten.”

  For most of the prisoners still worse treatment lay in store, when confined and starved in old jails, church crypts, and vile British prison ships anchored in the harbor.

  ***

  IN THE REMAINING HOURS of the day, after the guns grew silent, the Americans inside the Brooklyn defenses, expecting the British to attack full force, waited tensely hour after hour as nothing happened. All afternoon and into the night, pitiful cries could be heard from wounded men who lay among the unburied dead on the battlefield. Stragglers who had escaped capture kept coming into the lines almost by the hour, bedraggled single soldiers or clusters of three or four, many badly wounded. (“And the distressed wounded came crying into the lines!” wrote Philip Fithian.) The morning after, Mordecai Gist and nine others crossed into the camps. They were the only ones of the valiant Marylanders to have made it back.

  III

  ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, August 28, the situation faced by Washington and the army was critical. Having been outsmarted and outfought, they were now hemmed in at Brooklyn in an area about three miles around, their backs to the East River, which could serve as an escape route only as long as the wind cooperated. With a change in the wind, it would take but a few British warships in the river to make escape impossible. Brooklyn was a trap ready to spring.

  Yet early that morning Washington ordered still more of his army over from New York, almost as though he did not comprehend how perilous his position was.

  Two Pennsylvania regiments and Colonel John Glover’s Massachusetts troops—approximately 1,200 men—crossed the river and marched into the Brooklyn entrenchments with considerable show. Possibly it was this, the show, that Washington wanted, and if so, he succeeded. The sight of the new troops, wrote the Pennsylvania officer Alexander Graydon, brought a marked change. “The faces that had been saddened by the disasters of yesterday assumed a gleam of animation on our approach, accompanied with a murmur…that ‘These were the lads that might do something.’ ”

  In command of the fresh Pennsylvania brigades was handsome, self-assured Thomas Mifflin, formerly of Washington’s staff at Cambridge and now, at thirty-two, a brigadier general. Mifflin immediately volunteered to survey the outermost defenses and report back to Washington, little expecting the part he was soon to play.

  Joseph Hodgkins, so exhausted from the battle that he could hardly hold his head up, nonetheless took time to write home to report that “through the goodness of God,” he was still in one piece. Like everyone, he expected at any moment to be in action again. “The enemy are within a mile and a half of our lines,” he noted.

  The weather had changed dramatically from the day before. Under darkening skies, the temperature dropped ten degrees.

  Riflemen in the outermost defenses were ordered to keep up a steady fire at the enemy, if only to raise spirits, and the British fired back steadily on into the afternoon when the clouds opened in a cold, drenching downpour, the start of a northeastern storm that brought still further misery to the defeated army.

  Afternoon, at three, an alarm [gun] in the midst of a violent rain [wrote Philip Fithian]. Drums heavily calling to arms. Men running promiscuously and in columns to the lines. All the time the rain falling with an uncommon torrent. The guns of the whole army are wetted. And after the alarm was over, which was occasioned by the regulars coming in a greater body than usual to drive our riflemen, our troops fired off their guns quite till evening, so that it seemed indeed dangerous to walk within our own lines—for we could from every part hear perpetually firing, and continually hear the [cannon] balls pass over us.

  The storm and the roar of the guns continued into the night. Across the river in New York, Pastor Ewald Shewkirk wrote of the boom of cannon at Brooklyn intermixed with flashes of lightning and the roar of thunder.

  The following day, Thursday, August 29, the storm continued, heavy rains fell. Troops without tents also had little or no food. Fires were nearly impossible to keep going for cooking or warmth. Private Martin got by with biscuits he had had the foresight to stuff into his knapsack before leaving New York, biscuits “hard enough to break the teeth of a rat,” as he wrote. Anyone who had a bit of raw pork to gnaw felt privileged. Nearly all were hungry and soaked to the skin. In places in the trenches men stood in water up to their waists. Muskets and cartridges were almost impossible to keep dry. Soldiers, unable to stay awake any longer, fell asleep standing upright in the rain or sitting without cover in the mud.

  Washington, who had had little or no sleep, sent off a brief, somewhat incoherent report to Congress at four-thirty in the morning, saying his people were much “distressed.” Of the defeat of the day before he said only that there had been “engagement” with the enemy and that he had heard nothing from General Sullivan or Lord Stirling. “Nor can I ascertain our loss.” Nor did he report that in the night the British had started “advancing by approaches,” as it was known. Instead of risking an open assault, they were digging trenches toward the American lines and throwing up embankments that already were no more than six hundred yards from Fort Putnam.

  Yet for all the miseries it wrought, the storm was greatly to Washington’s advantage. Under the circumstances, any ill wind from the northeast was a stroke of good fortune. For as long as it held, Lord Howe’s ships had no chance to “get up” where they could wreak havoc.

  But who knew how long such good fortune might serve? And what if his luck ran out? (“But lest some unlucky event should happen unfavorable to my reputation,” he had told Congress when accepting his command, “I beg it may be remembered by every gent[leme]n in the room that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command I [am] honored with.”)

  He was now advised that the old ships that had been sunk in the East River could not be counted on as a serious barrier against British warships, and especially the smaller ships, which could come up through that part of the East River between Governor’s Island and Brooklyn where there were no barriers at all.

  With the situation as grim as it could be, no one was more conspicuous in his calm presence of mind than Washington, making his rounds on horseback in the rain. They must be “cool but determined,” he had told the men before the battle, when spirits were high. Now, in the face of catastrophe, he was demonstrating what he meant b
y his own example. Whatever anger or torment or despair he felt, he kept to himself.

  Since he first arrived in New York in April, the essence of Washington’s policy had been to keep close watch and make decisions according to circumstances. Sometime before noon, having heard General Mifflin’s report on the progress made by the British with their “approaches” during the night, as well as the strongly expressed views of Joseph Reed, and having looked things over himself, he made a momentous decision.

  A secret and deliberately deceiving urgent message went off to General Heath at King’s Bridge. Every flatbottomed boat or sloop, almost any watercraft available, was to be rounded up “without delay” for the reason that “we have many battalions from New Jersey which are coming over to relieve others here.” The message was signed by Mifflin.

  Washington would later recall emphasizing that there be no “ceremony” in carrying out the order—meaning that whatever boats would serve should be confiscated on the spot.

  Heath assigned the roundup to Colonel Hugh Hughes, a New York schoolteacher, who, in pursuit of his mission over the next twenty-four hours, would scarcely ever dismount from his horse.

  At four in the afternoon, with still no letup in the rain, Washington called a meeting with his generals at the Livingston mansion, on the brow of Brooklyn Heights overlooking the river.

  Mifflin, who had advised Washington that he must either fight or retreat immediately, asked to be the one to propose the retreat, with the understanding that if it were agreed on, he and the Pennsylvania regiment would serve as the rear guard in the outermost defenses, and thus hold the line until the rest of the army had departed. This would be the most dangerous assignment of all and he insisted it be his, Mifflin told Washington, lest by proposing retreat his reputation should suffer.

  In the words of the minutes of the meeting: “It was submitted to the consideration of the council whether, under all circumstances, it would not be eligible to leave Long Island and its dependencies [fortifications] and remove the army to New York.”

  Only one man expressed doubts: General John Morin Scott, a leading New York attorney and ardent patriot-turned-soldier.

  “As it was suddenly proposed, I as suddenly objected to it,” Scott later wrote, “from an aversion to giving the enemy a single inch of ground, but was soon convinced by the unanswerable reasons for it.”

  Of the reasons put forward—ammunition spoiled by heavy rains, the miseries and discouragement of the exhausted troops, the enemy’s advancing by approaches, the precarious situation of an army divided in half—the most serious was the looming threat of the British fleet suddenly in command of the East River. As Joseph Reed wrote in explanation, with Lord Howe trying every day to “get up” against the wind, “it became a serious consideration whether we ought to risk the fate of the army, and perhaps America, on defending the circle of about three miles fortified with a few strong redoubts, but chiefly open lines.”

  The decision was unanimous. Orders went out and by evening the plan was rapidly unfolding.

  At Dorchester the year before, Washington had taken advantage of the night to catch Howe by complete surprise. On Long Island, Howe had sent 10,000 men through the night to catch Washington by surprise. The night of Thursday, August 29, it was Washington’s turn again.

  ***

  THE ORDERS CAME AT SEVEN. The troops were to be “under arms with packs and everything.” It was to be a night attack on the enemy, they were told.

  To Alexander Graydon, who was with the Pennsylvania regiments assigned to the rear guard, it seemed a desperate measure, almost suicidal. “Several nuncupative wills were made upon the occasion, uncertain as it was, whether the persons to whom they were communicated would survive, either to prove or to execute them.” Graydon concentrated on summoning his own courage.

  At about nine o’clock the troops with the least experience, along with the sick and wounded, were ordered to start for the Brooklyn ferry landing, on the pretext that they were being relieved by reinforcements. But of this the soldiers nearer the front lines knew nothing. “The thing was conducted with so much secrecy,” wrote another of the Pennsylvanians, Lieutenant Tench Tilghman, “that neither subalterns or privates knew that the whole army was to cross back again to New York.” Nor were the officers told.

  Alexander Graydon kept thinking what “extreme rashness” it was to order an attack, given the condition of the men and their rain-soaked arms. The more he thought, the more puzzled he became, until suddenly it “flashed upon my mind that a retreat was the object, and that the order for assailing the enemy was but a cover to the real design.” The fellow officers to whom he confided his thoughts “dared not suffer themselves to believe it.”

  Others elsewhere in the forts and defenses began thinking that a night escape had to be the true intent, and to weigh the risks involved. As one particularly clear-headed officer, Major Benjamin Tallmadge of Connecticut, would later write, putting himself in Washington’s place:

  To move so large a body of troops, with all their necessary appendages, across a river full a mile wide, with a rapid current, in face of a victorious well-disciplined army nearly three times as numerous as his own, and a fleet capable of stopping the navigation, so that not one boat could have passed over, seemed to present most formidable obstacles.

  The rain had stopped at last, but the northeast wind that had kept the river free of the British fleet was blowing still, and this, with an ebb tide, was proving no less a deterrent to an American retreat.

  The first troops ordered to withdraw to the ferry landing found that the river was so rough that no boats could cross. The men could only stand and wait in the dark. According to one account, General Alexander McDougall, who was in charge of the embarkation, sent Washington a message saying that with conditions as they were, there could be no retreat that night.

  It was about eleven o’clock when, as if by design, the northeast wind died down. Then the wind shifted to the southwest and a small armada of boats manned by more of John Glover’s Massachusetts sailors and fishermen started over the river from New York, Glover himself crossing to Brooklyn to give directions.

  Glover’s men proved as crucial as the change in the wind. In a feat of extraordinary seamanship, at the helm and manning oars hour after hour, they negotiated the river’s swift, contrary currents in boats so loaded with troops and supplies, horses and cannon, that the water was often but inches below the gunnels—and all in pitch dark, with no running lights. Few men ever had so much riding on their skill, or were under such pressure, or performed so superbly.

  As the boats worked back and forth from Brooklyn, more troops were ordered to withdraw from the lines and march to the ferry landing. “And tedious was the operation through mud and mire,” one man remembered.

  Wagon wheels, anything that might make noise, were muffled with rags. Talking was forbidden. “We were strictly enjoined not to speak, or even cough,” wrote Private Martin. “All orders were given from officer to officer and communicated to the men in whispers.”

  They moved through the night like specters. “As one regiment left their station on guard, the remaining troops moved to the right and left and filled up the vacancies,” wrote Benjamin Tallmadge, recalling also that for many of the men it was their third night without sleep. Washington, meanwhile, had ridden to the ferry landing to take personal charge of the embarkation.

  The orderly withdrawal of an army was considered one of the most difficult of all maneuvers, even for the best-trained soldiers, and the fact that Washington’s ragtag amateur army was making a night withdrawal in perfect order and silence thus far, seemed more than could be hoped for. The worst fear was that by some blunder the British would discover what was afoot and descend with all their superior force.

  Those in greatest jeopardy, the troops in Mifflin’s vanguard, were still holding the outer defenses. Waiting their turn to be withdrawn, they kept busy creating enough of a stir and tending campfires to make it appea
r the army was still in place, knowing all the while that if the enemy were to become the wiser, they stood an excellent chance of being annihilated.

  In the event of a British attack, they were supposed to fall back and rally at the old Dutch church in the middle of the road in the village of Brooklyn. As the hours passed, there was no mistaking the sound of British picks and shovels digging steadily toward them in the darkness.

  The full garrison at Fort Stirling on Brooklyn Heights also had orders to stay through the night, as cover against an attack by enemy ships.

  At about two in the morning a cannon went off. No explanation was ever given. “If the explosion was within our lines,” Alexander Graydon later speculated, “the gun was probably discharged in the act of spiking it.”

  For the rest of his life, Graydon could never recall that night without thinking of the scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V of the long night wait before the Battle of Agincourt, in which, as Graydon wrote, “is arrayed, in appropriate gloom, a similar interval of dread suspense and awful expectation.”