Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  What General Sir William Howe finally decided upon was the latter. Driving across the entire island, he would split the island like an apple, then deal with the separated American forces in detail.

  He chose September 15 for his assault at Kip’s Bay, just when Washington and his generals were beginning a withdrawal to the north from their doubtful-appearing New York positions. The big ships appeared in the East River that morning just two hundred yards from shore. The militia pulled back when the big guns opened up. Then came the attack by the British and Hessian troops, the Hessians once again putting the bayonet to deadly use. It was all too much for the green militiamen posted along the shoreline. Their initial withdrawal inland became an outright rout.

  That’s when an aggrieved—in fact, enraged—Washington tried to stem the stream of fleeing, panic-stricken militiamen. Having hastened to the scene after hearing the battle sounds from his headquarters, he now shouted commands to halt; to form defensive lines behind the nearest walls; even to “take the cornfield.”

  Apparently there was a pause in the tide of men, but the panic began again when a few redcoats came into view. Washington, ignoring the British fusillades aimed his way, stormed and raged at his terrified troops, but they paid little heed. The fugitives included members of two reinforcing brigades (2,500 men) who caught the panic fever and also turned tail, littering the ground with their discarded weapons.

  His anger soon spent, an uncharacteristically listless Washington had to be led from the shameful scene by an aide before the advancing British could simply ride up and take him into custody.

  To the north, John Glover’s Marblehead mariners and troops under Colonel William Smallwood were instrumental in stopping the headlong flight from mid-Manhattan and halting further British advance up the eastern side of the island.

  Fortunately for the revolutionary forces (and unknown to the British), Israel Putnam already was moving his men north from the New York City end of Manhattan along a route west of today’s Central Park. By day’s end, the previously dispersed American forces were consolidated in northern Manhattan, largely at the Harlem Heights.

  Howe had not succeeded in cutting the apple in half. On the other hand, the Americans had conceded the city of New York in lower Manhattan—today’s “Big Apple”—to the British. In the process, the Patriots had lost valuable military stores and more than fifty cannon.

  They would fight a somewhat redeeming Battle of Harlem Heights the very next day, turning back a British reconnaissance in force and sending Howe in search of a more vulnerable flanking location. Washington, nursing his wounded pride, remained busy with the day-to-day perils of his small army, but he also was thinking ahead…thinking that he must buy time to train his Continentals and shape them into a professional army. The militia—bless them for what they could do—simply were too undisciplined, too unreliable for the job at hand.

  ***

  Additional note: The Continental Army (also called the Patriot Army) was a creation of Congress, as opposed to the more loosely organized militia units and guerrilla bands from the various colonies. One reason the militia was woefully ineffective at times was because its members joined for a precise period of time, then were permitted to return home, regardless of the battle or campaign just ahead. This arrangement often allowed just enough time to train the men, only to have them disappear before they could be put to use. They often came back for subsequent enlistments and fought with great valor, making a major contribution to the success of the Revolution. But Washington and his commanders never knew when the militia would come through for them, especially in the first two years of the war.

  It was Congress, incidentally, that coined the name for Washington’s professional army—by acting in June 1775 to appropriate the grand sum of $6,000 to support a “Continental Army,” with Washington named then and there as its first and only commander in chief. Through the next eight years of war, it is reliably estimated, he never had more than twenty-five thousand troops at his command at any single moment.

  Stolen from History

  JOHN GLOVER OF MARBLEHEAD, MASSACHUSETTS, IS TODAY A “FORGOTTEN HERO of the war,” complains his modern-day biographer, George Athan Billias. And true, Glover remains best known for his key role in Washington’s remarkable evacuation of his troops from the shores of Brooklyn…but not much else.

  The Massachusetts mariner certainly deserves wider recognition for his contributions as a consistent performer on the side of the Patriots. He was the one and only architect of an American stand against an overwhelming British force in the Battle of Pelham Bay, so forgotten these days that historian Lynn Montross has described it as “lost, strayed or stolen from the pages of history.” It was October 1776, and the American army was in retreat from Harlem Heights to White Plains, New York, its men, horses, and equipment strung out over the eighteen-mile route. The withdrawal, conceding the British total control of Manhattan Island, would take four days. Glover and a brigade of 750 men had been posted to the east as one of several screening units deployed by Washington along the Long Island Sound against flank attack from the east. Glover’s sentry post was Pell’s Point on Pelham Bay, hard by a narrow road running into the American rear.

  The morning of October 18, Glover mounted a hill overlooking the Sound, put a spyglass to his eye and was shocked to see a small fleet of British ships and boats out on the water. In fact, some of the British had already landed. Hurrying to send messages to his superiors and to deploy his brigade in a defensive posture, the militarily inexperienced Glover ran into a party of British skirmishers. Fortunately, he was able to slow them with a few men of his own, but he still faced a major problem in trying to keep the British from using nearby Split Rock Road to drive west, disrupting Washington’s strung-out columns. But how could he and 750 men deal with a landing force of four thousand British troops? As he later wrote, “I would have given a thousand worlds to have had [General Charles] Lee, or some other experienced officer present, to direct, or at least to approve of what I had done.”

  And what had he done? It is suggested by the very name of the road he had been entrusted to guard—Split Rock.

  Aptly named, it was a wandering lane flanked on either side by stone walls, with yet more stone walls in the fields alongside. “The stone fences running along this lane and located in the adjacent fields would, of necessity, force the enemy to advance down the narrow roadway,” wrote biographer Billias in his book General John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners. “Glover skillfully hid his men behind these readymade fortifications to take advantage of the cover and concealment.”

  While even the lowliest private of any army certainly would have thought to dive for cover behind the same stone barricades, the real genius of Glover’s quick-sketch defensive plan lay in the deployment of three undermanned regiments staggered on alternate sides of the road while he held his fourth regiment in reserve.

  “Glover instructed each regiment to hold the enemy in check as long as possible and then to fall back to a new position in the rear while the next unit in reserve took up the brunt of the fighting,” explained Billias.

  Glover’s deployment of the three regiments meant that the advancing British first would face fire from the left, then the right, then the left, and so on interminably as one regiment took over from another. As each fresh regiment took up the shooting, the preceding unit would slip away into the fields and retreat to a new position along the stone walls to the rear.

  With his men hastily thrown into position, Glover took the initiative by ordering his advance patrol to mount an aggressive attack against the British. After five rounds of fire were exchanged, the redcoats suffering from the American marksmanship, the enemy began to reinforce the skirmishers. Soon, they pushed ahead, closer to Glover’s men.

  He ordered what appeared to be a retreat. Anticipating a rout, the redcoats “gave a shout” and rushed forward, into the mouth of Glover’s deadly funnel. “Colonel [Joseph] Read’s two hundred [the Th
irteenth Continentals], who were crouched behind stone fences, sprang up and delivered a withering fire at murderously close range. Faced with a sheet of flame, the attackers broke ranks and retreated out of range of the American fire to await more reinforcements.”

  When they came on again ninety or so minutes later, British and Hessian, supported by six cannon, Read’s men again delivered a devastating volley… again and again, seven rounds in all. The enemy fired back vigorously but still suffered the greater losses. Finally, Glover ordered his first blocking regiment to slip away to the rear while his second unit, Colonel William Shepard’s Third Regiment, lay waiting on the opposite side of the road.

  Once again suckered into thinking they had the Americans on the run, the British, with loud cheers, heedlessly raced forward. “But up leaped Shepard’s men as if popping out of the earth and let loose a deadly hail of bullets which stopped the enemy.”

  This time, as the most heated fighting of the day, the Americans “pumped a total of seventeen rounds into hostile ranks.”

  Shepard’s unit fell back, but up sprang yet another regiment, the Twenty-sixth Continentals, under the command of Colonel Loammi Baldwin, a fruit-grower for whom the Baldwin apple is named.

  Glover’s tactic probably could have continued for hours longer, but he learned around midday that more redcoats were circling around his left flank and could cut him off. Withdrawing for real this time, and in good order, he pulled his men back to the American side of Hutchinson’s Creek. From there he exchanged artillery fire with the British until dark, then led his men to a nighttime bivouac three miles farther to the rear, “in the direction of Dobb’s Ferry.” As was General Sir William Howe’s emerging pattern, the British once again did not hasten in pursuit.

  Overall, the Americans had perhaps six killed and thirteen wounded, but the British must have lost hundreds in Glover’s narrow funnel. As biographer Billias noted, “His men poured more than twenty-five volleys at close ranges of thirty to fifty yards into compact enemy columns along a narrow roadway.”

  Whatever the body counts, the key result was delay. “What Washington desperately needed on October 18 was time—time to extricate the Patriot army from the threat of Howe’s encircling movement while American forces were in the process of withdrawing to White Plains,” explained Billias.

  After Glover’s “spirited one-day stand,” added Billias, “Howe’s dilatory strategy did the rest.” The British made no further threatening moves for another two days. Thus, Washington had the benefit of three days in all “to form a line of temporary redoubts behind the Bronx River to shield the retreating Americans from further attack by Howe’s forces.”

  Deadly “Turtle” at Large

  PEERING SEAWARD FROM THEIR FORT ON GOVERNOR’S ISLAND, ALERT BRITISH lookouts spotted a strange-looking craft bobbing in the nearby waters of New York Bay. Inside his “American Turtle,” Sergeant Ezra Lee saw them, too.

  He could tell that he was the cause of considerable excitement. “When I was abreast of the island’s fort,” he wrote later, “300 to 400 men got upon the parapet to observe me.”

  The next development early that morning was a bit more ominous. “Then a number came to the shore, shoved off a 12oar’d barge with five or six sitters and pulled for me.”

  But he had an ominous response of his own at the ready. “I eyed them, and when they got within 50 or 60 yards of me I let loose the magazine in hopes that if they took me they would likewise pick up the magazine, and we would all be blown up together.”

  The device he set loose began bobbing in its own fashion—and so alarmed the British seamen by its appearance that they turned about and, oars flashing, pulled for shore at the greatest speed possible.

  Sergeant Lee floated on toward a more friendly reception committee awaiting him at the American-controlled South Ferry Landing at the bottom tip of Manhattan Island. They sent out a whaleboat to tow the “Turtle” and its exhausted crewman to shore. About the time he began telling his anxious colleagues about his night’s adventure, a distant boom interrupted their excited conversation.

  The mine had gone off.

  The giant column of water and debris caused by the explosion did no harm, but a number of British ship captains were so alarmed they ordered their anchor lines cut, with their ships then floating down the bay in disarray.

  Had they known the true potential of inventor David Bushnell’s “American Turtle,” they would have been even more shocked. A floating mine was one thing, but a hidden, submersible boat delivering explosive charges would be an even greater menace to the British fleet.

  Fact was, the British onlookers that morning of September 7, 1776, had been treated to a historic glimpse of America’s first submarine.

  David Bushnell, a native of Saybrook, Connecticut, and a recent graduate of Yale, already had demonstrated that gunpowder could be made to explode in an underwater container—as probably the world’s first mine or torpedo. A Patriot determined to find some way to make up for the American scarcity of warships and cannon, he spent much of his time at Yale developing his mine: basically a watertight wooden keg holding a packed charge of gunpowder, a fuse, and a clock-timer device.

  With the feasibility of such an antiship weapon proven, the next step would be to develop the means to deliver the device to its target, and that’s where Bushnell’s “American Turtle” entered the picture. He had conceived of a submersible boat while still a student at Yale. After graduation in 1775, he began building his revolutionary craft at home in Saybrook.

  The result would be another watertight container, this one large enough to hold its operator, nine hundred pounds of lead ballast, a manpowered propulsion system, and a few basic controls—humankind’s first operational submarine.

  The strange craft was six feet in height, just over seven feet in length, and looked like a giant beached turtle when completed and displayed on Poverty Island…thus he named it the American Turtle.

  Bushnell and his brother Ezra took the craft out on Long Island Sound one night, for its first operational test. “David squeezed in, then secured the entrance hatch, which he had designed so that it could be screwed tight (or unscrewed) by either the operator or someone outside,” wrote Peggy Robbins in the October 1989 issue of Military History magazine.

  “From his seat on the beam buttressing the sides, David looked by moonlight through the windows into the waters of the sound. Above his head, the two brass tubes admitted fresh air and behind him, the exhaust ventilator ejected stale air. Steering by compass and utilizing the craft’s depth gauge, he successfully put his Turtle through various practice operations,” wrote Robbins.

  With the air in his craft turning stale after thirty minutes or so, Bushnell surfaced. He was exultant—everything had worked as he hoped, even the length of time he could stay submerged.

  His next task would be to perfect a method of delivering his mine to the target—a ship’s bottom. But that, too, would be an entirely surmountable obstacle for the inventive Bushnell. All that was needed was a sliding tube running through an opening near the hatch of his submarine. Through the tube ran a detachable rod with a screw at its business end. Bushnell’s idea was to float silently to the target ship’s bottom, extend the tube and rod their full six inches, then bite into the wooden hull or keel with the screw, twisting it into firm place with a hand crank, then detach.

  The screw, meanwhile, was connected to the mine at the Turtle’s stern by a line attached to another screw holding the mine in place on the “Turtle’s” outer skin. With that screw loosened and disengaged by the operator inside, the mine floated free of the undersea boat but remained tethered to the first screw, which was fastened to the target ship.

  Bushnell also used the disengagement of the second screw as the trigger for a clocklike timing mechanism inside the mine that would detonate its explosive charge after the Turtle moved out of harm’s way.

  Would his step-by-step system actually work? Could just one man operating th
e underwater craft manage the hand-cranked propulsion system of two windmill-like oars, the rudder, the valves controlling ascent and descent—and fix the mine to a target ship, then safely move away—all in just thirty minutes or so?

  For a final field test of all systems, the sometimes sickly David Bushnell gave way to his stronger brother Ezra as operator. “The ‘attack,’” wrote Robbins, “was made on an old ship hulk that David had talked a Saybrook shipowner into donating to the cause. Much to everyone’s delight, the hull was blown to pieces and Ezra returned quite safely. Surely, even the greatest ship in the Royal Navy could be destroyed the same way.”

  Now, in the late summer of 1776, with the blessings of George Washington, Israel Putnam, and a young liaison officer named Aaron Burr, the Bushnell brothers prepared to put their unprecedented weapons system to the ultimate test—an attack on the Royal Navy fleet off Manhattan Island.

  Ezra Bushnell would have been the craft’s pilot for the attack on Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship, the sixty-four-gun Eagle, but Ezra unexpectedly was sidelined by a fever—someone else would have to do the job. After a hasty search, David Bushnell chose twenty-seven-year-old volunteer Ezra Lee of Lyme, Connecticut, for the high-risk mission in the untried craft.

  George Washington himself once explained just how difficult and dangerous Lee’s attempt would be. The underwater attack, said Washington, would require a pilot “hardy enough to successfully encounter the variety of dangers from the difficulty of conducting the machine and governing it underwater, on account of the current, and the consequent uncertainty of hitting the object devoted to destruction, without rising frequently above water for fresh observations, which, when near the vessel, would expose the adventurer to discovery and almost certain death.”