by Terry Golway
Two thirds of the Property of the City of New York and the Subburbs belongs to the Tories. ... I would burn the City and Subburbs. ... It will deprive the Enemy of an opportunity of Barracking their whole Army together. . . . It will deprive them of a general Market. . . . All these advantages would Result from the destruction of the City. And not one benefit can arise to us from its preservation.
Washington agreed, but Congress did not. The politicians expressly forbade Washington to carry out Greene’s wishes. “This in my judgment may be set down among one of the capital errors of Congress,” an exasperated Washington wrote to his cousin, Lund Washington. Greene then contended that the army should retreat from the city anyway, but nobody else shared his view. At a council of war on September 7 in Washington’s headquarters, Greene’s colleagues, including Washington, decided on a compromise plan that combined withdrawal and defense of the island. Nine thousand troops were ordered north to Harlem Heights in upper Manhattan, a dozen miles from the settled part of the city and south of an American strongpoint dubbed Fort Washington, which was perched on the high ground along the North River palisades. Five thousand Americans were left within the city itself, and another five thousand or so were stretched in positions between the city and Harlem Heights to guard against a British invasion from the East River.
This was a dubious evasion of a difficult decision. Instead of either withdrawing completely, as Greene argued, or fortifying the city, Washington and the other generals spread the American army thinly along the length of Manhattan Island. Greene stubbornly continued to press for a general retreat from the island. He was convinced that Washington was on the verge of a catastrophic miscalculation. With boldness that bordered on impudence, Greene addressed a petition to Washington, begging that a new council of war reconsider the decision to defend New York. Greene was the highest-ranking officer, and only major general, to sign the petition.
A new council of war took place four days later, on September 11, in the headquarters of General Alexander McDougall. Greene made an impassioned and effective argument in favor of withdrawal from the city. The army’s youngest major general carried the day, and the vote was reversed. The troops in the city began moving north, toward Kings Bridge, and Washington moved his headquarters to Harlem Heights to supervise the retreat. Left behind in the city, because of a lack of wagons, was about half of the army’s cannons and other vital equipment and food supplies.
The British arrived even as the withdrawal was under way. They landed in force on a sultry morning, September 15, in Kip’s Bay, along Manhattan’s East River waterfront near present-day East Thirty-fourth Street. The American defenders, most of them militiamen, ran away. Their performance so embarrassed Washington that Greene would later say that his commander was “so vext at the infamous conduct of the Troops that he sought Death rather than life.”
The British halted their northward advance that day without assailing Harlem Heights. Other British troops had turned south, to take the city itself. As if to confirm Greene’s assessment of their allegience, hundreds of New Yorkers turned out to greet the British forces. The following morning, September 16, Greene and his three-thousand-man division were deployed south of the heights, near where today’s West 125th Street approaches the Hudson River, when gunfire signaled a skirmish nearby. An American patrol had stumbled upon British light infantry units operating north of the main British line. The Americans fired several volleys and then began withdrawing back toward the main American position. The British followed, and one of their buglers taunted the retreating rebels with a fox-hunting call used when the quarry disappeared into a hole. The American commanders flushed with embarassment and anger.
The British were far too eager to complete the rout. Their contingent numbered only about three hundred, and they had moved far in front of their lines. Washington seized a chance to redeem the previous day’s dishonor; he told Greene to send a hundred and fifty men forward to distract the British from an encircling movement under the command of Colonel Thomas Knowlton.
The British spotted Knowlton before he could complete his maneuver, forcing the Americans to attack from the flank rather than from behind. The British buckled and began to retreat as Greene pressed from one side and Knowlton from the other. The Americans saw something new and startling: the back of a British redcoat.
Major General Nathanael Greene had never been in battle before. The siege of Boston, though hardly casualty-free, was static and almost predictable, a waiting game. This was something else again. Men shouted and screamed to unhearing comrades; smoke covered the field; young, healthy men dropped in their tracks, dead before they hit the ground if they were lucky; if not, their youth and lives seeped away slowly, horribly, and they would scream until they could scream no more.
For Nathanael Greene, war no longer consisted of words on a page. It was happening all around him. He rode among the suddenly emboldened American soldiers, shouting orders and encouragement. The Americans continued to rally. After nearly two hours of intense fire, the British retreated again, and the Americans were prepared to pursue. Washington, however, dared not risk a general engagement, so he judiciously ordered his men to cease firing and return to their defenses.
The Battle of Harlem Heights was hardly an epic. The Americans suffered about sixty casualties; the British, about a hundred and seventy. Numbers aside, it was the sight of those redcoats in retreat that gave the battle significance. As Greene noted, at Harlem Heights the British had “met with a very different kind of Reception from what they did the day before.”
Still, there was no denying the disaster that had befallen the Americans. New York City was lost to the enemy. The day after the Battle of Harlem Heights, Washington dispatched Greene across the river to New Jersey to take command of that state’s defenses, including a strategic fortress across from Fort Washington called Fort Constitution–later renamed Fort Lee. Greene’s new assignment was critical. New Jersey offered a path from New York to Philadelphia; defending that path suddenly was of the utmost importance. Long Island and New York already had fallen. Could the cause survive the loss of Philadelphia, too?
Greene was given the task of guarding against the unthinkable. It would require all of Greene’s organizing skills and strategic vision. But Washington, whose faith in his troops remained shaken despite Harlem Heights, had decided that this young major general was fit for important work. Washington’s secretary wrote that “Greene is beyond doubt a first-rate military genius, and one in whose opinions the General places the utmost confidence.”
Three days into Greene’s new command, his wish for New York City came true. On the night of September 20, a series of fires erupted along the waterfront, and within hours, a third of the city was in flames. British soldiers summoned to perform the work of firefighters discovered that buckets and other firefighting equipment were either disabled or nonexistent. The fires became an inferno, and from his headquarters on Harlem Heights twelve miles to the north, Washington saw an orange glow in the sky. “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves,” he said as he watched the lost city burn. A good honest fellow who had nothing to do with the fire, but who was arrested in a roundup of suspected patriots that night, was Nathan Hale, an American spy. He was hanged the next morning.
If Greene felt some sense of satisfaction as he watched the flames from his post in New Jersey, he was discreet enough to keep such thoughts to himself. But there was no disguising his optimism, even in the face of disastrous defeats. “I apprehend the several retreats that have taken place begin to make you think all is lost,” he wrote to his brother Jacob. “Don’t be frightened; our cause is not yet in a desperate state.” But Greene was not so sanguine about members of Congress who continued to believe the war could be won with part-time soldiers. That, Greene believed, was frightening.
The policy of Congress has been the most absurd and ridiculous imaginable, pouring in militia men who come a
nd go every month. A military force established upon such principles defeats itself. People coming from home with all the tender feelings of domestic life are not sufficiently fortified with natural courage to stand the shocking scenes of war. To march over dead men, to hear without concern the groans of the wounded, I say few men can stand such scenes unless steeled by habit or fortified by military pride.
Greene continued to insist that the nation needed a regular army to defeat the professionals of Britain and the mercenaries purchased from German princes. But until Congress came around to his (and Washington’s) view, he would do his best to turn these militia outfits and inexperienced regulars into a fighting force. A corporal in New Jersey, John Adlum, quickly noticed a difference almost as soon as Greene arrived: There was, he wrote, “a great change with respect to the discipline of the troops, which before was lax.” As if to acknowledge Greene’s complaint about the dangers of relying on militia, Congress soon authorized the raising of eighty-eight more regiments for the Continental army.
One of Greene’s tasks in New Jersey, in addition to strengthening Fort Lee and overseeing the construction of a new barracks, was the reorganization of the army’s hospitals, which he found in a wretched state. He wrote directly to John Hancock, the president of Congress, demanding more medicine for suffering soldiers who “exhibit a Spectacle shocking to human feelings.” Hospitals were too small for the number of sick and wounded, and some regimental surgeons “[couldn’t] be trusted with the necessary Stores”–it was rumored that they were using the army’s supplies for private purposes. As was the case in Boston and Long Island, Greene continued to look after his sick and wounded troops, not only out of humanity but because he understood that their suffering brought down morale among healthy soldiers.
Greene also spent time studying maps of New Jersey, the vital link between New York and Philadelphia. Anticipating the worst, a march through the state toward the capital, he organized supply depots in several towns, including Princeton and Trenton, along a possible line of retreat. This was precisely the kind of foresight and organization that so impressed Washington. Other generals had leadership abilities, other generals understood strategy and tactics, but Greene knew how to get things done.
His diligence brought him into the interior of New Jersey, where Continental soldiers stood guard over vital bridges and scoured the countryside looking for deserters. During one such trip, Greene sought to cross a bridge on the Hackensack River in the New Jersey Meadowlands but found his journey blocked by a Continental soldier named Kilpatrick. An Irishman who had been serving in the British army in Boston until he defected to the American cause, Kilpatrick was singularly unimpressed by the stranger with a slight limp. The soldier summoned Corporal Adlum. “Here is a gentleman who says he is General Greene,” Kilpatrick said, gesturing toward the gentleman and sizing him up. Kilpatrick reminded Adlum that they had orders to stop anybody “that had the appearance of a soldier.” Kilpatrick didn’t realize how flattered Greene must have felt to be judged as having the appearance of a soldier–a far cry from what his colleagues had said about him in the Kentish Guards! Greene amiably produced a letter attesting to the fact that he was, indeed, General Greene, and an embarrassed Kilpatrick allowed him to pass. Greene seemed to appreciate the soldiers’ professionalism, even more so when they stood at attention and presented arms when he returned during several other excursions. Greene became so familiar with the guards that he soon was asking them about local conditions: Were there loyalists in the neighborhood? Were supplies readily available in case of an emergency? Unlike the aristocratic generals across the Hudson River, Nathanael Greene did not consider the troops below his station. Many years later, Adlum recalled that Greene remembered him when they crossed paths in camp, and often spoke with him.
Greene’s command expanded in mid-October, when Washington was forced to withdraw from Harlem Heights after a British landing at Throgs Neck, in what is now the Bronx, threatened to trap the Americans on Manhattan. With Washington headed for White Plains, Greene inherited the garrison at Fort Washington, just across the river from Fort Lee.
The American generals believed Fort Washington was unassailable, even with the rest of the army to the north and west. The fort’s two thousand troops could disrupt British communications from one end of the island to the other and could menace British warships attempting to sail north up the Hudson River. What’s more, with Fort Washington in American hands, the British would have to leave sizable forces on Manhattan, rather than throw their whole might in pursuit of the retreating Washington. And if the American troops were threatened, Greene believed the garrison could easily be evacuated across the river to New Jersey.
Greene saw Fort Washington as a second Bunker Hill. If the British attempted to attack this strongpoint built more than two hundred feet above the river, they would be punished as they were punished on that bloody day in June in Charlestown. He was not alone in this view. In late October, the fate of Fort Washington became the topic of much discussion and controversy among Washington’s generals. Among those who believed the fort should be held was General Charles Lee, recently arrived from his victory in Charleston. Washington himself wasn’t much help: though his instincts suggested that the fort’s troops could be better used elsewhere, he hesitated. Greene convinced him that he could sell the British another hill at great expense.
Greene crossed the Hudson River regularly through late October and early November as an attack on Fort Washington seemed likely. He alerted Washington to one potential problem at the fort: if the Americans were forced to withdraw from the fort’s extensive outer defenses to make a stand inside the fort itself, it wasn’t large enough to accommodate all the troops. Nevertheless, Greene reinforced the fort and its outer defenses with a thousand more soldiers, increasing troop strength to nearly three thousand.
The possibility of an assault increased after the British attacked Washington in White Plains and, after an indecisive standoff, General Howe withdrew back to Manhattan.
The guns of Fort Washington opened fire on the night of November 5 as three British warships attempted to slip past the American defenses. While the ships were damaged, they managed to get upriver, mocking the American defenses. When Washington received this disturbing news, it awakened his reservations about defending the fort named in his honor. Although he had told Greene, “Pay every attention in your power and give every assistance you can” to Fort Washington, now he dispatched quite another message. “If we cannot prevent Vessels passing up,” he asked, “what valuable purpose” could Fort Washington serve? “I am therefore inclined to think it will not be prudent to hazard the Men and Stores at [Fort] Washington, but as you are on the Spot, [I] leave it to you to give such Orders as to evacuating [Fort] Washington as you judge best.”
But Greene had no intention of ordering an evacuation. The fort’s commander, Colonel Robert Magaw, told Greene that if the British tried to besiege the fort, he could hold out until December. Greene decided to hold his ground and tempt the British into disaster. “I cannot conceive the garrison to be in any great danger,” Greene wrote to Washington. “The men can be brought off at any time.”
Nevertheless, after marching south from White Plains, Washington arrived at Fort Lee on November 13 and was surprised to discover that Greene had not acted on his suggestion to evacuate the fort. Still, Washington hesitated as he heard reassuring words from Greene, prompting Washington’s aide Joseph Reed to complain of his commander’s “indecisive mind.”
In White Plains, where Washington had left him with more than five thousand troops, General Charles Lee seemed anything but indecisive. He wrote to Reed that defending Fort Washington would be a huge mistake. He made no mention of his arguments in favor of the fort’s defense several weeks before. And, in a letter to Greene on November 11, Lee said nothing about his new doubts about the fort. Instead, he simply asked that Greene return the horse and sulky he had borrowed; more remarkably, Lee boldly asserted, “My fr
iend Howe has lost the Campaign.” A few days later, however, Lee adopted an entirely different tone in his letter to Reed: “I cannot help expressing my concern that General Greene has reinforced [the fort]. I should have been rather pleased had he called off a considerable part of the garrison.”
Lee issued his warning on November 16. It was too late.
General Howe sent ten thousand troops forward to attack Fort Washington’s three thousand defenders. Greene and the Americans had not anticipated that the British commander would hurl such a large force at the garrison. At about one o’clock on the afternoon of November 15, a British officer carrying a white flag marched toward the American defenses with a drummer at his side. He had a message from Howe: surrender or die. Colonel Magaw said he was prepared to fight to the last man. When Greene received word of the ultimatum, he crossed the river for an urgent conference with Magaw and other officers. He recrossed the river late at night and kept his thoughts to himself.
The following morning, Greene, Washington, and two other officers were climbing into rowboats that were to take them from Fort Lee to Fort Washington when they heard a tremendous roar from the opposite shore. The British assault on Fort Washington had begun. The fort’s outer defenses came under a fierce bombardment by land and by sea. The generals hurried across to the scene of the action, landed at the foot of the craggy palisades upon which the fort was built, and were escorted to the top. They found themselves in what Greene would later call “a very awkward situation.” Awkward, indeed–the British already were pressing in on all sides. Shells were blasting great gaps in the American defenses, and British and Hessian troops were advancing from three directions. Washington, Greene, and Generals Israel Putnam and Hugh Mercer were caught in the middle of this impending catastrophe.
