In the townhouse at the foot of Broadway, George Washington awoke that morning to the “deep thunder of distant cannon” drifting over the East River from Long Island. Continuing British troop movements from Staten Island to Long Island had finally convinced him that Howe’s invasion of Kings County was the main event. He had already begun to redeploy regiments from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and now, on the morning of the twenty-seventh, he ordered over more troops as he prepared to cross the river himself. One of the soldiers making the passage was a sixteen-year-old Connecticut private named Joseph Plumb Martin, who later recalled stuffing his knapsack with hardtack from casks standing by the Maiden Lane Ferry, just north of Wall Street, as he boarded a small boat bound for the Brooklyn shore. “As each boat started, three cheers were given by those on board, which was returned by the numerous spectators who thronged the wharves,” Martin remembered. Unbeknownst to Washington or Martin, the reinforcements from Manhattan were stepping into the trap Clinton and Howe were ready to spring on them.24
At 9 AM on August 27, with the firing of the British signal guns, the Battle of Brooklyn (also known as the Battle of Long Island) began in earnest. As Grant’s troops intensified their musket and cannon fire against the right flank of the American forward line, and as von Heister’s Hessians and Scotsmen marched with fixed bayonets on the American center, Clinton’s grenadiers and light infantry surged west and south from Bedford, firing into the American rear along the Heights. As musket balls shattered tree branches and cracked into stone walls, clusters of British and American soldiers intermingled in a murderous free-for-all. William Dancey, a British infantry captain, found himself and his men running across a field, “exposed to the fire of 300 men. . . . I stopped twice to look behind me and saw the riflemen so thick and not one of them of my own men. I made for the wall as hard as I could drive, and they peppering at me. . . . At last I gained the wall and threw myself headlong.”25
The Continental line on Gowanus Heights soon collapsed, as Clinton’s redcoats drove most of the fleeing Americans before them back toward the inner line of fortifications or toward the right flank of the American front line, where Grant was still pressing forward. On the south slope of Gowanus Heights, a similar rout was taking place, as von Heister’s men rounded up bloodied and surrendering rebels. The plain remained a killing field after the Americans laid down their arms, for some of the Germans and Highlanders vented their fatigue, rage, fear, and contempt by butchering prisoners. “It was a fine sight to see,” bragged one English officer, “with what alacrity they dispatched the rebels with their bayonets after we had surrounded them so they could not resist.” Another British officer was appalled to witness “the massacres made by the Hessians and Highlanders after victory was decided.”26
As panicking Americans ran west toward their own right flank, Washington and his field commanders sought desperately to regroup the army and make a stand there. With Cornwallis’s corps hammering down from the northeast, von Heister pouring through the Flatbush Pass from the southeast, and Grant pressing from the southwest, Lord Stirling rallied several regiments in the marshy fields near a farmhouse and a millpond that ran into Gowanus Creek. Recalling that Grant had boasted in Parliament that he could easily march from one end of the American continent to the other with five thousand British regulars, Stirling tried to calm his shaken troops. “We are not so many,” he declared, “but I think we are enough to prevent his advancing farther over the continent than this millpond.”27
But the onslaught of enemy musket fire and cannon volleys was relentless; the noose around the American front line grew ever tighter. New Yorker fought New Yorker, as the British threw Tory militia against local Continental units. Stirling came to see that the stand was hopeless and resolved on a holding action that would, he hoped, permit the bulk of the army to escape back to the inner line of defense. Leading four hundred of his best-trained troops, the Fifth Maryland Regiment (the “Dandy Fifth,” for its elegant scarlet and buff uniforms and the tidewater aristocrats who peopled its ranks), Stirling charged Cornwallis’s front six times, each time enduring a withering fire of canister and grapeshot “like a shower of hail.” One American participant remembered how the British cannon fire wreaked havoc, “now and then taking off a head.” Behind them, other Americans tried to make their escape, many of them plunging west and north across Gowanus Creek and the eighty yards of the marshy millpond. Arriving with his regiment too late to be thrown into the fray, Joseph Plumb Martin watched from the far bank: “such as could swim got across; those that could not swim, and could not procure any thing to buoy them up, sunk. . . . When [the survivors] came out of the water and mud to us, looking like water rats, it was truly a pitiful sight.” Watching the Marylanders’ last-ditch effort from a temporary command post on the rise called Cobble Hill behind the inner line of fortifications, Washington allegedly exclaimed, “Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose!”28
New York Harbor
and Its
Major Military Sites
All the survivors of the American forward line now retreated to the inner fortifications, running or limping into the trenches and stockades of forts Greene and Putnam and the line of redoubts connecting them. By early afternoon, it was over. “Long Island is made a field of blood,” a Manhattan minister wrote to his wife. Only gradually did the full horror of the disaster become clear to Washington and his battered army. The commander concluded that he had lost over a thousand men (modern estimates place American losses at about three hundred dead, several hundred more wounded or missing, and over one thousand taken prisoner). Howe reported total British and Hessian casualties as fewer than four hundred. Among Howe’s prisoners were generals Stirling and Sullivan; a third general, Nathaniel Woodhull, had been mortally wounded by his captors, allegedly after he refused their demand that he say, “God save the King.” And now Howe’s army stood poised at the gates of forts Putnam and Greene. In many instances the Americans had fought bravely, but they had been outgeneraled, outmaneuvered, and outfought. The Continental army’s first full-fledged field engagement was over. The question now was whether it could survive another one.29
But General Howe hesitated, to the disbelief of the spent Americans and the consternation of his own officers. Rather than following up his triumph with a decisive blow, Howe ordered his sappers to begin digging trenches toward the American lines, a sign that he intended to besiege the enemy in his lair rather than breach his walls with a frontal assault. Howe’s caution remains puzzling more than two centuries later. Why not follow through with another charge and defeat Washington’s army once and for all? The answer, however, is not hard to find. Howe was by nature deliberate and careful, traits that served him poorly during the New York campaign. Just as inhibiting, perhaps, was his long-standing hope that he and his brother, Admiral Richard Lord Howe, could serve as peace commissioners, persuading the American leaders to see the wisdom of ending the rebellion and resuming their proper place in the empire. Even the brief respite that siege preparations required, following the drubbing the Americans had received on Gowanus Heights, might give Congress the time it needed to come round. But the general had miscalculated—gravely. Washington had blundered at the Jamaica Pass; now it was Howe’s turn.
By the evening of the twenty-ninth, Washington had made up his mind. As a driving rain soaked his troops and as Howe’s trenches snaked slowly forward, the American commander had conferred with his generals, most of whom argued that Brooklyn was a trap whose jaws would spring shut once the British coordinated their land attack with a cannonade from Admiral Howe’s warships sailing up from their Staten Island anchorage.
One by one, the American regiments manning the line from Wallabout Bay to Red Hook on the night of the twenty-ninth were ordered to stand down and began an orderly but hasty march to the ferry landing at the foot of Brooklyn Heights, opposite the Manhattan shore. “We were strictly enjoined not to speak, or even cough, while on the march,” Joseph Plumb Mart
in recalled. “What such secrecy could mean we could not divine.” At water’s edge, the soldiers encountered a surprising sight: a flotilla of small craft—rowboats, flatboats, sailboats, sloops—that had been hastily gathered from around New York harbor and piloted to the Brooklyn shore by two Massachusetts regiments.30
The Massachusetts men—almost all of them seamen and fishermen from Marblehead, Lynn, and Salem, including several dozen black mariners—began a methodical evacuation, rowing boatfuls of soldiers half a mile to the Manhattan shore near Peck Slip, then shuttling back across for more. One rower later remembered making eleven round trips through the night. General Alexander McDougall, the old Son of Liberty and seasoned mariner, directed the embarkations from the Brooklyn ferry steps. Washington had gambled that prevailing winds would keep Admiral Howe’s ships from entering the mouth of the East River. American luck held when a southwesterly breeze, favorable to the Royal Navy, did not produce the feared onslaught of grapeshot-spewing frigates from the Upper Bay. So far, the British seemed completely oblivious to the evacuation.31
But as dawn broke on the morning of the thirtieth, thousands of troops still waited on the Brooklyn beach, and nerves began to fray. Soldiers started a disorderly stampede into the boats. Washington, a man who had spent a lifetime learning to master his formidable temper, now displayed it to good effect. Hoisting a large rock from the shore and balancing it above his head with both hands, he loomed over an overcrowded boat and threatened to “sink it to hell” unless the men cleared it. Order was restored, and the embarkations, aided by a morning fog that concealed them from potential British observers, continued. By 7 AM, as the fog lifted, the last of some nine thousand American soldiers climbed out of boats onto the Manhattan shore. At 8:30, looking across the East River, they saw the red jackets of British soldiers on the ramparts of Fort Stirling. Tory informers and British scouting parties had detected the retreat in progress by 4 AM, too late to alert and move Howe’s forces with sufficient speed to surround Washington’s regiments. A mere hour or two kept Howe from ambushing the Continental army and, arguably, ending the American Revolution on the bank of the East River.32
Almost miraculously, George Washington had saved his army. It had been his turn to execute a flawless maneuver. The Americans also recognized that they had been phenomenally lucky. “General Howe is either our friend or no general,” snorted Israel Putnam. But in lower Manhattan, Ewald Shewkirk, pastor of the Moravian Church, peered into the faces of weary and demoralized soldiers. “The merry tones of drums and fifes had ceased,” he wrote. “Many looked sickly, emaciated, cast down.”
Savoring good fortune was a luxury the Continental army could not afford. Washington redeployed his battered army up and down the length of Manhattan to await Howe’s next move. But Howe continued to hold back. On September 11, his brother the admiral hosted a secret conference on Staten Island at which he tried to persuade congressional envoys Edward Rutledge, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin to negotiate toward peace. When it became clear that Congress would not revoke the Declaration of Independence, the Howe brothers gave up further talks as futile. Warfare would resume. Once more, Washington’s men were forced to watch and wait.33
This time the Continental army did not have to wait long. In the early afternoon of September 15, the British launched an amphibious assault at Kip’s Bay, a sandy cove on the Manhattan shore of the East River some three miles north of the city. The previous night, as American sentries along the shore called “all is well” to each other, sailors on one of His Majesty’s frigates plying the river had called back, “We will alter your tune before tomorrow night.” In the morning they made good on their promise. Two forty-gun ships and three frigates opened up with a deafening broadside barrage aimed at American positions inland from the cove. The “peal of thunder” stunned Joseph Plumb Martin: “I made a frog’s leap for the ditch, and lay as still as I possibly could, and began to consider which part of my carcass was to go first.” By the time the British forces—4,000 redcoats and Hessians—landed from flatboats, Martin and his 1,500 comrades had fled.34
Hearing the artillery fire from his new command post on Harlem Heights four miles further north, Washington galloped south to find the regiments he had posted to the middle of the island retreating in disarray. Officers and enlisted men ran together, leaving guns, ammunition, coats, and knapsacks strewn across the fields and dirt roads. Stories of Hessian atrocities at Gowanus Heights had played on many minds. “‘Take the walls!’ ‘Take the cornfield!’” Washington bellowed from his steed, to no avail. When he failed to rally his fleeing troops to fire at pursuing Hessians, the general grew so enraged that he nearly allowed himself to be captured before an alert aide guided his horse to safety. “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?” he muttered in despair as his army retreated north toward Harlem Heights.35
Once again, luck and Howe’s leisurely pace favored the Americans. The king’s army moved west across what is today midtown Manhattan, seeking to bisect the island and cut off the remaining Americans who were now retreating northward from the city. But they moved too slowly, allowing Israel Putnam’s troops (guided along back roads by Major Aaron Burr) to slip through their fingers and join Washington on Harlem Heights. Nevertheless, the day had brought another near-catastrophic humiliation for the Americans. At one point during the retreat, Adjutant General Joseph Reed recalled, “the enemy appeared in open view, and in the most insulting manner sounded their bugle horns as is usual after a fox chase. I never felt such a sensation before. It seemed to crown our disgrace.” Looking ahead, Washington could see only misery. “In short, it is not in the power of words to describe the task I have to perform,” he wrote to his brother John. “Fifty thousand pounds would not induce me again to undergo what I have done.”36
By nightfall on the following day, Washington’s men could finally enjoy a flash of pride. On the sixteenth, about four hundred Americans managed to beat back several British detachments in a wooded gulley in northern Manhattan. This so-called Battle of Harlem Heights was not much more than a prolonged skirmish, but its positive outcome bolstered the morale of Washington’s badly dispirited force. “You can hardly conceive the change it has made in our army,” the general’s aide, Joseph Reed, wrote to his wife. “The men have recovered their spirits, and feel a confidence which before they had quite lost.” The victory also restored some of their commander’s badly shaken faith in his men. “They find,” Washington wrote, “that it only requires resolution and good officers to make an enemy (that they stood in too much dread of) give way.” Morale, Washington and his officers knew, was an all but exhausted commodity in the Continental army, one that had to be sustained at all costs, by small successes if not by large ones, in order for the army to continue to exist.37
Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776. Engraving by A. R. Waud, The Battle of Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776, 1876. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
On the night of September 21, John Joseph Henry, an American prisoner of war aboard HMS Pearl some four miles distant from the city, noticed “a most beautiful and luminous, but baleful sight,” seemingly “the size of the flame of a candle . . . to the east of the battery and near the wharf.” The conflagration New Yorkers feared was finally upon them. Fanned by a stiff southeasterly wind coming off the harbor, the flames quickly jumped from house to house, sparked by embers that floated from one cedar-shingled roof to the next. The wooden steeple of Trinity Church soon “resembled a vast pyramid of fire.” The British, who had been in control of the city since their offensive of the fifteenth, threw soldiers and sailors into fighting the blaze. But their bucket brigades proved largely ineffectual, and the city’s hand-pumped fire engines malfunctioned. By daylight the next morning, nearly five hundred buildings stretching through the heart of the city’s west side—a quarter or more of New York’s housing stock—had been reduced to ash.38
Thanks to prompt fire alarms and the diminished size of the city’s population, few liv
es were lost. Most of the handful of people who did perish during the fire were, in fact, summarily executed. The redcoats fighting the flames strongly suspected American sabotage, and they caught several men and one woman acting suspiciously during the fire—carrying matches dipped in “rosin and brimstone,” cutting the handles of water buckets, darting out of houses that soon were ablaze. One suspect was grabbed, bayoneted, and then hung by his feet from a tavern signpost. English soldier Lee Ashton later remembered helping to push another man, allegedly caught red-handed with matches, “into the flames.”39
Whether or not patriotic free agents decided to help amplify the destruction, the fire probably started accidentally in a tavern or outbuilding near Whitehall Slip on the East River waterfront. To be sure, Washington had pondered carefully the question of burning New York, once the city had fallen to Howe. Among his own staff and in Congress, some, including General Nathanael Greene and John Jay, himself a lifelong New Yorker, had strongly advocated torching the city in order to deprive the British of winter quarters and a “general market.” But Congress, reasoning optimistically that the Continental army might recapture the city, forbade it. “Providence, or some good honest fellow,” Washington confided in a letter to a cousin after the fire, “has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”40
New York at War Page 12
