by Jack Kelly
The foray dismayed and embarrassed Henry Knox. Some of his men had been drunk, more were incompetent. They were too “impetuous” around the guns, Knox observed. Their carelessness had caused several cannon, including two of Alexander Hamilton’s, to explode, killing six men.
If two ships could skim past the American gauntlet, so could the entire fleet. The British demonstration had suddenly drained New York City of its military value. The city had become a trap. If the British army were to secure a beachhead to the north, Washington’s own force, arrayed on two islands, would be cut off. His tentative optimism evaporated. Militarily, the best bet was to abandon the city, but Congress would not allow him to cede it without a fight.
Another group of warships now dropped anchor in the lower bay. They included the Eagle, the sixty-four-gun flagship of Admiral Richard Howe. Known as “Black Dick” because of his swarthy complexion, he was the dour older brother of General William Howe. He had come to America not only as naval commander but also as peace commissioner. The British ministers, blanching at the potential cost of another prolonged war, were willing to make concessions. A negotiated settlement would be a feather in the caps of the Howe brothers. Such a course seemed eminently practical even after Howe heard about the Declaration of Independence. That measure, said one of his aides, simply pointed up “the villainy and the madness of these deluded people.”14
Black Dick, fifty years old and a veteran of two wars, sent over his adjutant with a letter addressed to “Mr. Washington, Esq., etc. etc., etc.” Washington, whom John Adams would call one of the great actors of the age, was in his element. His bearing and gravity could not fail to impress. The general insisted on being referred to by his appropriate title. The et ceteras, the adjutant declared, implied everything. “Or anything,” Washington rejoined, “or nothing.”
Howe was authorized to pardon the rebels’ treason. Washington pointed out that “those who have committed no fault want no pardon.” If the admiral wanted to negotiate, he should apply to Congress, which spoke for the new nation. Knox attended the meeting and wrote that he “lamented exceedingly the absence of my Lucy” to enjoy this historic repartee. The British officer “appeared awe-struck, as if he was before something supernatural. Indeed, I don’t wonder at it. He was before a very great man.”15
The British military build-up around New York continued. Arriving troops moved into well-ordered camps on Staten Island and enjoyed the ripening melons and peaches. They raped local women—a young officer named Lord Rawdon complained that the wenches didn’t tolerate the assaults “with the proper resignation,” resulting in “most entertaining courts-martial.”16
On August 1, General Henry Clinton arrived with nine more warships, thirty-five transports, and three thousand veteran troops. He and Lord Cornwallis had attempted to capture the important southern port at Charleston. American general Charles Lee had arrived just before the British attack to help the citizens of Charleston prepare their defenses. Patriot guns had prevented the enemy from gaining the harbor. Unsuccessful in their southern adventure, a chastened Clinton and Cornwallis joined the main British army for the attempt against a much more important prize.
They were followed by yet another fleet of ships carrying Hessian soldiers. The Germans had been thirteen weeks at sea and were glad to step onto dry land. Now General Howe had assembled his army: thirty-two thousand trained and disciplined soldiers, along with four hundred warships and transports to move them at will. “A Force so formidable would make the first Power in Europe tremble,” was how the commander of a British escort frigate described it.17
To counter this host, Washington commanded twenty-eight thousand men in New York, only twenty thousand of them fit for duty. Many of the reinforcements who had streamed in during the summer were militiamen, eager but inexperienced. “Let their Force be what it will,” General Howe declared, “it can never stand against the veteran Troops commanded by the best Officers in Europe.”18
Washington struggled to guess Howe’s intentions. Why the maddening delay? Why did he not attack? There was, he wrote, “something exceedingly mysterious in the conduct of the enemy.” Tedious guard duty and continual false alarms abraded the nerves of Washington’s men and officers.
Then a grievous misfortune. The disease that had depleted Washington’s force struck Nathanael Greene, who had spent the summer preparing the fortifications on Long Island. On August 15, he reported being “confined to my Bed with a raging fever.” Five days later he was “sick nearly to death.”
A reluctant Washington replaced Greene with General John Sullivan. The former New Hampshire lawyer had been one of the first to respond to the crisis at Boston. Enthusiasm and political connections had won him high rank in the army. Earlier in the summer, the intense, dark-haired Irishman had led troops north to reinforce the crumbling American army in Canada, the remnants of the invasion led by Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold. Sullivan had blindly sent his men against a superior British force, then managed a chaotic retreat. Replaced by Horatio Gates, he had rushed to Philadelphia in a fit of anger to resign his commission. His friends convinced him to stay in the service.
Asked his opinion, Washington described Sullivan as “active, spirited, and Zealously attach’d to the Cause.” But, he said, Sullivan “has his wants, and he has his foibles. The latter are manifested in a little tincture of vanity, and in an over-desire of being popular.”19 Nevertheless, Sullivan’s political allies in Congress had promoted the ambitious soldier to major general. He lacked Greene’s innate judgment, as well as his familiarity with the geography of Long Island.
Two days later, on August 22, drums in the American camp beat “to arms.” The sound, after four months of waiting, sent an electric charge through the men. British transports were sailing across the placid waters of the bay to deposit eight thousand troops on the shore of Long Island. The redcoats quickly shoved back the rebel riflemen screening the shore. Now hidden from American eyes, boatmen ferried another fifteen thousand troops, the bulk of Howe’s army, across the bay. The British lined up in an eight-mile arc along the plains of southern Kings County.
Washington, still in New York, was told about the landing of the advanced guard. He decided it was a trick. Howe was trying to get him to commit his forces to Long Island before striking the main blow elsewhere, probably at Manhattan. The cautious Washington sent four more regiments across, but held his best troops in New York.
The next day, he went over himself to ride the ground with Sullivan. He concurred with a significant alteration that Sullivan had made in the plan laid down by Lee and implemented by Stirling and Greene. He would align three thousand men along a rocky, wooded ridge that ran ten miles obliquely in front of the fortified line. The steep, densely wooded, sixty-foot-high obstacle would serve as its own defense, preventing the passage of artillery or massed troops. Sullivan would station most of his own men at the three roads that cut through the ridge, one by the Gowanus marshes in the west and two more near the villages of Bedford and Flatbush in the center.
“The hour is fast approaching,” Washington wrote that day, “on which the honor and success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding country depend.”20 Trepidation suddenly swarmed Washington’s mind. Doubting the judgment of the vain and callow Sullivan, he abruptly named Israel Putnam overall commander on Long Island. Sullivan would assume responsibility only for the soldiers on the ridge; Putnam would direct the defense from inside the Americans’ fortifications.
For the second time that summer, the prickly John Sullivan saw himself superseded. For the second time that week, the defenders of Long Island came under a new commander. Yet Sullivan’s inexperience was a trait shared by all officers, including Washington. Directing a skirmish was one thing. Moving masses of troops over a wide area was a far more intricate matter. “The limited and contracted knowledge which any of us have in Military Matters,” Washington admitted,
“stands in very little Stead.” They were, in fact, amateurs at war. Their resources were “some knowledge of Men and Books” and an elusive quality that Washington called “enterprizing genius.”21
That same day, 4,300 Hessians marched off transports to take up positions on Long Island opposite the center of the American line. Howe’s total force on the island had reached twenty thousand men.
On Sunday, August 25, Washington sent six more regiments to Long Island. He had divided his force almost in half in the face of a superior enemy, something all military textbooks condemned. Convinced the enemy was on “the point of striking the long expected blow,” he crossed to Long Island once again to survey the American position. With Putnam and Sullivan, he rode along the ridge that now formed the first line of defense. “At all hazards prevent the Enemy’s passing the Wood and approaching your Works,” he told Putnam.22 He warned that when the attack came, it was likely to be “sudden and violent.”
* * *
Sullivan commanded the center of the ridge in person. He stationed a force of riflemen to his left and assigned Lord Stirling to guard his right. On the night of August 26, Stirling was sleeping in his camp behind the line. His troops were arrayed across the Gowanus Road at the western end of the American front. Two of the best units in the Continental Army manned this important position. The First Delaware Regiment, under Colonel John Haslet, was the largest battalion in the army, eight hundred men outfitted in identical blue coats with white waistcoats. Colonel William Smallwood had recruited his First Maryland soldiers from some of the best families in Baltimore. The men of both units carried good English muskets fitted with bayonets. Unfortunately, the two colonels had been detained in the city that night to serve on a court-martial.
At midnight, a smattering of musket fire broke out—some British scouts had raided a watermelon patch near the Red Lion Inn just beyond the pass. Then the night settled into deep quiet. A couple of hours later, sentries on the Gowanus Road, their eyes tired from staring into darkness, spotted three hundred British regulars marching toward them like a bad dream. The guards ran for it. Awakened inside the fortifications, Putnam rode out to Lord Stirling’s camp and ordered him to meet whatever enemy force was advancing toward his position and to “repulse them.”
Stirling roused his young men at three in the morning, the hour of nightmare. Through keen blackness, with no experience of combat, they marched to meet the enemy. If this was to be the “grand Push,” it would be their first battle, the first battle fought by soldiers of the newly independent United States, and the first time that Americans faced the enemy without stone walls or breastworks for protection.
Stirling met Colonel Samuel Atlee and his Pennsylvania musket regiment retreating along the Gowanus Road. It was more than a skirmish, Atlee told him. They faced a large body of troops commanded by General James Grant, a fat Scotsman who had earlier bragged about the ease with which he would whip the Americans. His men were advancing in full force. “Indeed I saw their front between us and the Red Lion,” Stirling noted. He quickly issued orders.23
“The enemy advanced towards us,” wrote Major Mordechai Gist, the ranking officer with the Maryland battalion, “upon which Lord Stirling, who commanded, drew up in a line and offered them battle in true English taste.”24 Stirling posted his men in formal battle array and ordered them to face the enemy in the open. This time, it was the British who took cover behind trees.
Lightning from field guns and muskets flashed in the darkness. Quiet became din. The battlefield took on the jagged confusion of a dream. Rather than rush the American line, the British “began a heavy fire from their cannon and mortars,” wrote Gist, “for both the Balls and Shells flew very fast, now and then taking off a head.” For men who had never endured organized violence, the sudden decapitation of a comrade was a rude introduction to the hallucinatory world of combat. “Our men,” Gist added, “stood it amazingly well.”
They stood it and stood it. The concussions of British artillery and the zinging musketballs stripped the world of all safety. The deafening percussion went on hour after hour.
All of New York came awake to the desperate struggle that had erupted. As dawn brightened the eastern sky, Stirling rode up and down his lines, adjusting, encouraging. General Washington came over from New York—he could do little but observe from Cobble Hill, a high point inside the American fortifications. At nine o’clock, amid the din, Stirling’s ears picked out the firing of a single cannon. Could it be? Yes, the boom sounded a second time—from behind him. What could it mean?
An instant later—for Stirling, for Sullivan and Putnam, for Washington and the whole Continental Army—the veil dropped. The attack against Stirling was a diversion. While Grant’s cannon banged away at the American right, General Howe had marched his army through the darkness to a distant pass where the Jamaica Road went around the end of the American line. The pass, Howe noted, had, through “unaccountable negligence,” been left undefended. His men captured the five mounted sentinels stationed there and slipped around to the north of Sullivan’s men. They marched down the length of road that led straight toward the main American fortifications.
Now the whole tenor of the battle changed. The Hessians, who had been exchanging a sporadic fire with Sullivan’s men in the center, formed for an attack in earnest. The green-jacketed jaegers, German hunters, scrambled through the woods, firing with short-barreled rifles. The huge, brass-helmeted grenadiers came tromping forward, their drums pounding an angry tattoo. The Americans, accustomed to clean-shaven faces, had never seen the like of the fierce black mustaches the men wore. These fairytale giants from the German woods, smelling blood, thrust their eighteen-inch bayonets into any American flesh that came within reach. They had no mercy.
Caught in a vice between the Hessians in front and Howe’s infantry to their rear, Sullivan’s men threw down their muskets and sprinted to gain the relative safety of the fortified lines two miles away. Fear gave their feet wings. “The rebels abandoned every Spot as fast, I should say faster, than the King’s Troops advanced upon them,” General Howe’s secretary noted.25
Sullivan did what he could, which was nothing. “The last I heard of him,” one of his officers reported, “he was in a corn Field close by our Lines with a Pistol in each Hand.” He was captured by three Hessians.26
The American outer line collapsed. Lord Stirling, with his Maryland and Delaware regiments, stood alone outside the fortifications. They now faced the all-out attack of Grant’s brigade at their front, the Hessians sweeping down the ridge from the east, and General Cornwallis leading the British advance guard against their rear. Stirling “encouraged and animated our young soldiers with almost invincible resolution,” Major Gist wrote. Watching the action beyond the American fortifications, Washington was reported to have sobbed or yelled, “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose.” It apparently had not occurred to him or to Putnam to order these troops to retreat. Lord Stirling had been directed to repulse the enemy and he had received no further orders. He fought on.
Finally, pressed on three sides, Stirling saw that the only escape was through the marshy Gowanus Creek. He detached 250 Marylanders as a rear guard and sent the rest of his regiments toward the water. Wading through the tidal muck under fire, most of them made it across, emerging inside the American lines “looking like water rats.”
Sword in hand, Lord Stirling led his Maryland contingent in a sharp counterattack to the north against Cornwallis. Flung back, the Americans regrouped and tried again. And again. They came very close to breaking through and gaining the fortified line. Their commander, a soldier noted, “fought like a wolf.” 27
After five charges, Stirling saw that it was “impossible to do more than to provide for safety.” His men ran for it the best they could—all but nine were killed or captured. Stirling was cornered and forced to surrender. As his biographer duly noted, no one could ha
ve predicted that this amateur, “this overweight, rheumatic, vain, pompous, gluttonous inebriate,” would shine so in battle.28
By noon, the largest battle that would be fought during the entire war was over. It seemed to officers on both sides that the rebellion itself was finished. The Americans had been utterly defeated. William Howe had outthought, outmaneuvered, and outfought George Washington. Nathanael Greene, who had yet to participate in a battle, lamented his absence. “Gracious God! to be confined at such a time.” He suggested that the outcome “would have been otherwise,” had he been in command.29
And the cost. Captain Joseph Jewett lingered in agony from bayonet wounds to his chest and stomach—a day and a half later he was “sensible of being near his End, often repeating that it was hard work to Die.”30 Three hundred other Americans had been killed, hundreds wounded, and hundreds, including three generals, taken prisoner.
The rest of the bedraggled force was now trapped inside their perimeter. The victorious British and Hessian troops might have instantly overrun them, but Howe followed, a historian noted, “the dictates of prudence rather than those of vigor.”31 Sure of victory, he called his men back and began a classic siege. The cocky General Grant opined that “if a good bleeding can bring those Bible-faced Yankees to their senses, the fever of independency should soon abate.”32
* * *
With half his army trapped in a cul de sac, George Washington had full cause to despair. Yet he did not despair. He did not flinch. The next day, as the fine weather turned cold and rainy, Washington did the unexpected: he ordered two more regiments over to Long Island. The sight of 1,200 fresh men marching up from the Brooklyn ferry landing with drums beating did wonders for the morale of the weary army manning the fortifications.
