by Ron Chernow
The main reason for this slaughter was the success of the eastern flanking movement along the Jamaica Pass. Marching silently by night, Howe, Clinton, and Cornwallis led ten thousand men in a column two miles long through the gaping hole in patriot defenses. So egregious was the security lapse that the British encountered only five mounted militia officers at the pass, allowing them to sneak up behind the unsuspecting Stirling and Sullivan. The American death toll for the Battle of Brooklyn (or Battle of Long Island) was grim: three hundred killed and another thousand taken prisoner, including, temporarily, Generals Stirling and Sullivan. For Washington, it had been an unmitigated disaster. As Douglas Southall Freeman concluded, “The American Commander-in-Chief had appeared to be a tyro, a bungler as well as a beginner, in comparison with the English General.”17 John Adams summed up the case succinctly: “In general, our generals have been outgeneralled. ”18 During this agonizing day, the commander in chief had been reduced to a helpless spectator of the carnage.
If George Washington stared into the abyss at any single moment of the war, it must have been as he contemplated the vast British force arrayed below him, poised to shatter his army forever. Luckily, General Howe didn’t press his advantage and withdrew his men from cannon range, even though his troops scented blood and “it required repeated orders to prevail on them to desist.”19 Howe feared that the casualties would have been too high to justify a charge against the American fortress. As he explained, if the troops had “been permitted to go on, it is my opinion they would have carried the redoubt, but . . . I would not risk the loss that might have been sustained in the assault.”20
The Howe brothers imagined that they could now deliver the coup de grâce to Washington by slipping warships behind him in the East River, catching him in a vise between royal sailors and soldiers. Once again the weather rescued Washington. On August 28 a chill drizzle descended steadily on Brooklyn, soaking already-soggy ground. Since many American soldiers lacked tents, they had difficulty keeping clothes and munitions dry. The next day grew even darker and wetter as Washington, riding among his men and peering through the mist, saw that British troops had inched forward overnight, digging trenches to within six hundred yards of his outermost position. His army was being slowly, insidiously, trapped by the enemy. He found his men sick, bedraggled, and badly demoralized, “dispirited by their incessant duty and watching.”21 The men assigned to trench duty stood waist-deep in pools of water—a sight that surely reminded Washington of Fort Necessity—and the mood was scarcely relieved by the incessant roar of British cannon pummeling American positions.
From a military standpoint, Washington stood in an untenable position, and not only because ships might entrap him from behind. If Howe now lurched toward a thinly guarded Manhattan, Washington would not be able to save the troops there. He had to do something daring. On August 29, at four P.M., he ordered his generals to attend a war council at a Brooklyn Heights house called Four Chimneys with a superlative vista of New York Harbor. They voted unanimously to take advantage of the lull in fighting to withdraw from Brooklyn to Manhattan. After days of dithering, with his back to the wall, Washington was now crisply decisive. Though one-fourth of his men were sick, he wanted to evacuate the entire American army of 9,500 men across the East River that night, winding up the operation by dawn. He was willing to wager everything on this operation, perhaps because he had no other choice. Leaving nothing to chance, he decided that his troops would be kept ignorant and told only that they were changing positions.
In a prodigious effort, operating on his last reserves of energy, Washington pushed himself past the point of exhaustion and personally led the evacuation. He would later claim that, for forty-eight hours, he scarcely dismounted from his horse or shut his weary eyes. He now trusted his intuitions, as if a powerful survival instinct simplified everything. Earlier in the day he had perpetrated an excellent hoax to prepare for the operation. On the pretense of bringing over fresh troops from New Jersey, he had instructed General Heath to collect boats of every description that he could find. Now, right after dark, the Continental Army lined up to begin its silent retreat across the water. Washington himself, an indomitable presence, presided at the ferry landing. At first the crossing was impeded by rough winds, and only rowboats could be used, their oars covered with cloth to mute sounds. Then winds rose from the southeast, and sailboats could be used as the river turned smooth as glass. In another piece of deceptive theater, Washington kept campfires going in Brooklyn Heights to conceal the evacuation. He maintained such strict secrecy that only general officers knew the scope of the undertaking. Since nobody could speak, the soldiers moved like ghostly sleepwalkers in a pantomime. “We were strictly enjoined not to speak, or even cough,” wrote Private Joseph Plumb Martin.22 Although Washington tried to remove all possible supplies, the wheels of the heaviest cannon got stuck in thick mud, and this ordnance had to be discarded.
Even at its narrowest point (close to the current Brooklyn Bridge), the East River was a mile wide and notorious for treacherous currents. The Continental Army was exceedingly fortunate to enjoy the services of Colonel John Glover, a ship captain from Marblehead, who led a regiment of seamen, including several free blacks, from the Massachusetts fishing ports. A small, brawny man with a broad, square face and wild red hair, Glover had been a fiery political radical. The uniforms his men wore evoked sailors’ costumes: blue coats, white caps, and canvas breeches treated to make them waterproof. As they ferried soldiers across the river, these mariners piloted assorted small craft against brisk winds under a moonless sky. Some of them crossed a dozen times that night. The boats, often dangerously overloaded, sat only inches above the waterline. Amazingly enough, as these shadowy shapes glided through the night, the dozing British Army had no idea of this hectic activity.
For George Washington, patrolling the shore on horseback, it was a night of appalling tension. The one real blunder revealed the almost insupportable pressure he endured. He had assigned Colonel Edward Hand to defend the Brooklyn Heights ramparts until the last moment. General Mifflin gave Hand premature orders to come forward with his men to the ferry stop, and Washington was horrified to encounter them on the darkened road. At that moment, when Mifflin galloped up, Washington exploded in wrath. “Good God! General Mifflin, I am afraid you have ruined us!” he hissed in the dark. He labeled Mifflin’s order a “dreadful mistake,” said there was still “much confusion at the ferry,” and told Hand to return at once to the bluff.23
As the sun rose on the morning of August 30, some American troops still lingered on the Brooklyn shore, including Washington, who swore he would cross on the last boat. Then with uncanny good fortune, a heavy fog rolled across the Brooklyn shore, screening evacuees from the stirring British. The fog lay so thick that one could “scarcely discern a man at six yards’ distance,” said Major Benjamin Tallmadge. 24 In this tumultuous final phase, a surplus of desperate men barged onto one boat and wouldn’t budge until a furious Washington held aloft a huge stone and threatened to “sink [the boat] to hell” unless the men got out at once.25 They promptly obeyed. True to his word, Washington boarded the last boat in the nick of time: he could hear the British firing as it pushed into the water. The enemy had awakened, aghast, to discover that more than nine thousand men had traversed the East River. Not a single American died in this virtually flawless operation.
There was no time to exult over this extraordinary feat. Although it was a defensive action, it had saved the American cause in spectacular fashion. The new nation could easily have been buried on that Brooklyn shore. Still, it was impossible to forget that Washington and his generals had bungled the defense of New York by an elementary failure to guard the Jamaica Pass. An exhausted Washington did not inform Congress of what had happened until a day later, after he had gotten some overdue sleep. In writing to Hancock, with becoming modesty, he did not boast about the nocturnal retreat from Long Island, but neither did he accept blame for the lost battle. Riding his
favorite hobbyhorse, he blamed the absence of a professional army and argued that nobody could have predicted where the British would come ashore, forcing him to defend a vast expanse. He was especially eager to lambast the militia, saying they were deserting in droves; whole regiments had scampered away in fear. Fortunately for Washington, General Howe did not pursue his men right away and sent another peace overture to Congress on September 2, when he paroled General Sullivan as a prisoner of war. Washington scoffed at this diplomatic offering, noting caustically that “Lord Howe had nothing more to propose than that, if we would submit, His Majesty would consider whether we should be hung or not.”26
Manhattan patriots were shocked at the pitiable state of the soldiers who washed up on their shores, as a defeatist mood enveloped the city. The Reverend Ewald Shewkirk wrote that “the sight of the scattered people up and down the streets was indeed moving. Many looked sickly, emaciated, cast down etc.; the wet clothes, tents . . . were lying about before the houses and in the streets to dry. In general, everything seemed to be in confusion.”27 Only two-thirds of the soldiers could take shelter in tents. In despair, some looted homes and even pillaged the mansion of Lord Stirling. Washington was so upset by this “plundering, marauding, and burning of houses” that he carried out a parade ground search of knapsacks.28 Trying to calm his men, he rode along the East River and inspected his troops in full view of the enemy. The Hessian major Carl Leopold Baurmeister said that a Captain Krug of the artillery fired two shots at Washington and his retinue, “and he would have fired a third if their horses had not kept moving.”29 As in the French and Indian War, Washington seemed blessed with a supernatural immunity to bullets.
Later on Washington asserted that he had recommended burning New York; that he feared it would furnish the British with “warm and comfortable barracks” and would be a perfect haven for the Royal Navy; and that Congress had overruled him in a “capital error.”30 In fact, at Brooklyn Heights Washington assured the New York Provincial Congress that he did not intend to torch the town and deprive “many worthy citizens and their families” of their homes and businesses.31 When he raised the issue in a letter to Hancock on September 2, he did so in a neutral manner; the next day Hancock conveyed the congressional verdict that “no damage should be done to the City of New York.”32 Unaware of how entrenched the British would soon become, the self-styled experts in Congress insisted that they had “no doubt of being able to recover” the city.33
At this point Nathanael Greene, having returned to service, urged Washington to burn and abandon a city teeming with Tories. The British, he feared, could isolate American troops in southern Manhattan as they had so effectively done in Brooklyn Heights. At a September 7 war council, Washington sided with a majority of generals who wanted to hold the town, lest its loss “dispirit the troops and enfeeble our cause.”34 The next day a chastened Washington informed Hancock of a compromise decision to keep five thousand men in the city, while removing the rest to points north on the island. The tone of this letter was diametrically opposed to the cocksure attitude Washington had exhibited after the Boston siege. Humbled by experience, Washington said that he and his generals had resolved to wage a defensive war, a policy from which he would only periodically deviate. “It has been even called a war of posts, that we should on all occasions avoid a general action or put anything to the risk unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn.”35 Never again, he swore, would he send young troops into “open ground against their superiors both in number and discipline.”36 This strategy was neither glamorous nor particularly congenial to Washington’s personality, but it might prove sure and effective.37 That Washington was able to adjust his strategic doctrine again showed his capacity for growth and his realistic nature.
On September 12, alarmed by British actions in the Harlem River, another war council revoked the earlier decision to defend New York. Two days later Washington transferred his headquarters to a graceful Palladian mansion set on a hilltop in the northern terrain of Harlem Heights. It was owned by Roger Morris, who had been Washington’s successful rival for the hand of Mary “Polly” Philipse. Because many men remained behind, the British didn’t realize that the Americans were relinquishing the city. While Putnam supervised American troops in lower Manhattan, some militiamen manned makeshift defenses in the center of the island. One of them, Joseph Plumb Martin, stationed at the cove of Kip’s Bay on the East River (the East Thirties in modern-day Manhattan), ridiculed their defensive lines as “nothing more than a ditch dug along the bank of the river, with the dirt thrown out towards the water.”38 For some soldiers, their only weapons consisted of sharpened scythes fastened to poles, forming primitive spears.
During the night of September 14-15, five British ships dropped anchor in Kip’s Bay, soon accompanied by eighty-four barges that had been secreted in Newtown Creek on Long Island, with four thousand British and Hessian troops on board. At eleven A.M. the warships’ big guns swiveled toward Manhattan and began to thunder with a horrendous, sustained racket, blowing the American breastworks to smithereens. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before,” wrote Ambrose Serle.39 For the few hundred American hayseeds cowering onshore, the cannonade, lasting an hour, provoked a terrified flight. “I made a frog’s leap for the ditch,” wrote Joseph Plumb Martin, “and lay as still as I possibly could and began to consider which part of my carcass was to go first.”40
Once the American defenses were demolished, British and Hessian troops waded ashore in neat rows, their bayonets flashing. As in the Battle of Brooklyn, the Hessians took no prisoners and oversaw mass executions, shooting in the head dozens of young Americans who tried to surrender; one Hessian decapitated an American prisoner and posted his head on a pike. These atrocities spread contagious fear among the American troops, but officers lost their nerve as well, abandoning their men. Joseph Plumb Martin bluntly parceled out blame: “I do not recollect of seeing a commissioned officer from the time I left the lines on the banks of the East River in the morning until I met . . . one in the evening.”41
Four miles north, in the Dutch village of Harlem, George Washington heard “a most severe and heavy cannonade” and saw puffs of smoke rising from Kip’s Bay. He traveled south as fast as he could. As usual, he plunged into the thick of the action, heedless of his own safety. Coming to a cornfield on Murray Hill, a half mile from Kip’s Bay, he was shocked to encounter troops “retreating with the utmost precipitation and . . . flying in every direction and in the greatest confusion.”42 Faced with collapsed discipline, Washington flew into a rage. He was momentarily relieved by the appearance of Massachusetts militia and Connecticut Continentals and hollered at them to “take the wall” or “take the cornfield,” motioning toward various spots. Then as sixty or seventy British grenadiers came up the hill, these terrified men also succumbed to panic and ran in confusion, dumping muskets, powder horns, tents, and knapsacks without firing a shot. William Smallwood claimed that Washington, Putnam, and Mifflin, appalled by the disorder, resorted to whipping fleeing men with their riding crops. Dr. James Thacher said that Washington “drew his sword and snapped his pistols” to check his men but still couldn’t bring them to stand and shoot.43 Washington’s letters to John Hancock had hinted at mounting exasperation with his men, but now his frustration burst into the open. The man of consummate self-control surrendered to his emotions. Fuming, he flung his hat to the ground and shouted, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”44 According to another account, he swore, “Good God! Have I got such troops as these?”45 This display of Washington’s wrath still could not stem the panic. As he told Hancock, “I used every means in my power to rally and get them into some order, but my attempts were fruitless and ineffectual.”46
Colonel George Weedon says that Washington grew so distraught that “he struck several officers in their flight.”47 It is extraordinary to think of Washington flogging officers amid
a battle—a measure of his impotent frustration and shattered nerves. Finally he was stranded alone on the battlefield with his aides, his troops having fled in fright. Most astonishingly, Washington on horseback stared frozen as fifty British soldiers started to dash toward him from eighty yards away. Seeing his strangely catatonic state, his aides rode up beside him, grabbed the reins of his horse, and hustled him out of danger. In this bizarre conduct, Nathanael Greene saw a suicidal impulse, contending that Washington was “so vexed at the infamous conduct of his troops that he sought death rather than life.”48 Weedon added the compelling detail that only with difficulty did Washington’s colleagues “get him to quit the field, so great was his emotions.”49 It was a moment unlike any other in Washington’s career, a fleeting emotional breakdown amid battle.
Once again General Howe tardily pursued the Americans, enabling Washington to evacuate almost all of his men safely to Harlem Heights. Nonetheless Howe had bagged a great prize, a city that would serve as a perfect British headquarters for the duration of the war. For all his valor, Washington had again been caught off guard and he smarted from the bitter defeat. He would spend the rest of the war trying to avenge the loss of New York and dreaming of its recapture. Moreover, the day had provided fresh proof of how skittish his men were, officers and infantry alike.
The next day Washington’s spirits were lifted by a skirmish in the Harlem woods as a corps of rangers under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Knowlton probed British positions. At one point, as these rangers retreated, the British soldiers taunted them, blowing a bugle with a sound used in foxhunting to signify the end of the chase. “I never felt such a sensation before,” wrote Joseph Reed. “It seemed to crown our disgrace.”50 It was a clever, if cruel, way to jangle the nerves of the squire of Mount Vernon. Reed, who could be unfairly critical of Washington, claimed that the commander was still sunk in a terrible funk from the day before, his will paralyzed, and had to be “prevailed upon” to capitalize upon the situation.51 In fact, Washington reacted to the British provocation with fighting spirit. His honor insulted, he sent into the fray Virginia riflemen and Knowlton’s rangers, 1,800 men in all, who chased the British troops from the field in what became known as the Battle of Harlem Heights. Although both sides counted about 150 casualties, Washington scored a small but timely victory that buoyed his downtrodden men, and his aide Tench Tilghman said that the American troops “gave a hurra[h] and left the field in good order.”52
