Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought

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us and crush the rebel colonies. Our loss was nothing. We took care

to tell the Hessians that the rebels had resolved to give no quarter—

to them in particular—which made them fight desperately, and

put all to death that fell into their hands.”

But not all British officers were as brutish. One wrote that the

“Americans fought bravely and (to do them justice) could not be broken

till greatly outnumbered and taken flank, front and rear. We were greatly

shocked by the massacres made by the Hessians and Highlanders after

victory was decided.”

As the American center imploded, Cornwallis

crashed in behind Stirling’s left shoulder while Grant pressed at his

front and von Heister his left, leaving the only route of escape back over

the marshes and Gowanus Creek, eighty yards wide and running with

a strong incoming tide.

William Alexander, Lord Stirling, was not, at first sight, a man

cut from the cloth of heroes. He was “overweight, rheumatic, vain,

pompous, gluttonous, inebriate,” according to one of his biographers.

There was something comical about his lordly pretensions. His claim

to the Scottish earldom of Stirling had been rejected by the House of

Lords. Married into the powerful Livingston clan, he soon dissipated

a considerable fortune because of his lavish spending, and just prior to

the outbreak of the war he lost his fine mansion and its contents to his

creditors.

Now pressed by a different sort of creditor, Stirling decided

to make a preemptive strike with 400 of his best troops, the Marylanders,

against Cornwallis at the Vechte-Cortelyou House (sometimes referred

to as “the Old Stone House”) in order to buy time for the rest of his

command to make their escape over the creek. It was a forlorn hope, a

suicide mission, and magnificent. The Marylanders made seven attacks

against 2,000 British. Stirling, according to Cornwallis, “fought like a

wolf.” And, when the action was over, 256 Marylanders would share a

grave. Another 100 were wounded or captured—an astounding casualty

rate of almost 90 percent. Stirling himself eventually surrendered his

sword to von Heister.

By 11:00 am Howe “lay before the rebel lines.” He had prevented his

grenadiers from attacking the fortifications, writing to Lord Germain,

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“It required repeated orders to prevail upon them to desist from the

attempt.”

Why? Howe later told a parliamentary inquiry that he was

not prepared to “risk the loss that might have been sustained in the

assault,” believing he could take the position at “a very cheap rate.”

The received opinion is that his traumatic experience at Breed’s Hill

had made him gun-shy. Like most received opinions, it can benefit

from a little examination.

First, there were occasions both before and after the battle of

Brooklyn when Howe attacked or planned to attack strongly defended

high ground. For instance, just eight months after the debacle at Breed’s,

Howe, now in overall command at Boston, had planned a frontal attack

against the Americans up on Dorchester Heights, a position infinitely

better prepared and defended than the one he’d faced at Breed’s Hill. It

was only a massive storm that forced him to recall the boatloads of troops

already on their way to carry out what would have been a very costly assault.

After Brooklyn, Howe would not hesitate to attack Chatterton’s Hill

during the battle of White Plains, or assault the defended heights of Fort

Washington (thought by its commander to be pretty well impregnable).

Second, there were good reasons to hold off a final assault on the twenty-

seventh. His men, having marched all through the night and fought for

half the day, were exhausted. “Howe’s army was not the coherent, well-

supplied, well fed and fresh force it had been the night before . . . Muskets

were fouled and ammunition consumed. The troops had not eaten that

day and were burdened by over a thousand prisoners.”

Washington, on the other hand, had been sending over

reinforcements steadily as soon as he concluded the landings of the

twenty-second were not a feint. There were in the region of 9,500

troops behind the Brooklyn defenses, and the possibility of an American

counterattack must have figured in Howe’s decision. In addition, the

Hessians warned him, having interrogated John Sullivan, whom they

had captured, that a large American force was marching from Hell

Gate (the confluence of the Harlem and East Rivers), or might land on

the north shore of Long Island. One British officer had no doubt that an

immediate assault would be disastrous.

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The [American] lines could not be taken by assault; but by

approaches. We had no fascines [bundles of wood used much

like sandbags in later wars] to fill ditches, no axes to cut abatis

[entanglements of wood, functioning like the concertina wire

of later wars], and no scaling ladders to assault so respectable a

work. The lines were a mile and a half in extent, including angles,

cannon-proof, with a chain of five redoubts, or rather fortresses

with ditches, as had the lines that formed the intervals; the whole

surmount with a most formidable abatis, finished in every part.

Some commanders are lucky, and if the eventual outcome goes in their

favor, history forgives what might have been reckless, even potentially

disastrous, decisions. The losers are left wearing posterity’s dunce’s cap.

George Washington needed all the luck he could get at Brooklyn on

the twenty-seventh. He had repeatedly reinforced a precarious position

which, if captured, would have had the most shattering, perhaps fatal,

impact on the patriot cause. Even if he had been supremely confident

of his defenses to withstand frontal assault, he must have known that if

the British navy worked its way up the East River it would have made

a fine omelet of all the eggs Washington had placed in that one basket.

His choices of old Putnam as commander at Brooklyn and of Sullivan, a

man about whom Washington had already expressed deep reservations,

were perverse. Putnam’s performance at Brooklyn replicated the

puzzling lack of involvement he had shown on Bunker’s Hill that had

so much enraged William Prescott.

The firepower of the British navy was formidable. Of the two

capital ships on station, HMS Asia alone, for example, could deliver

1,024 pounds of shot in one broadside while “the strongest fort in

Brooklyn could muster only around 288lbs per volley.”

On the

twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, British ships attempted to get up

the river, but, recorded the New England Chronicle, “the wind at both

times entirely obstructed them.” On the twenty-eighth and twenty-

ninth a northeasterly roiled over New York and Brooklyn to further

frustrate the Royal Navy.

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On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth Washington convened a

council of war that comprehensively enumerated all the reasons to quit

the Brooklyn fortifications.

1st. Because our advance party had met with defeat . . . 2nd. The

great loss sustained in the death or captivity of several valuable

officers . . . 3rd. The heavy rain which fell two days and two nights

[28th and 29th] without intermission, had injured the arms, and

spoiled a great part of the ammunition . . . 4th

. . . . several large

ships had endeavored to get up, as supposed into the East River,

to cut off our communications (by which the whole army would

have been destroyed,) but, the wind being N.E., [they] could not

effect it . . . 5th. [ditto] . . . 6th. Though our lines were fortified by

some strong redoubts, yet a great part of them are weak . . . 7th

. . . .

the troops had become dispirited by their incessant duty and

watching . . . 8th. Because the enemy had sent several ships of war

into the Sound . . . there was reason to apprehend they meant to

pass over land, and form an encampment above Kingsbridge in

order to cut off and prevent all communication between our army

and the country beyond them.

The withdrawal began at 8:00 pm on the twenty-ninth. Luckily, one of

the units on hand was John Glover’s Marblehead Regiment, composed

mainly of Massachusetts fishermen. It would play a critical part in

ferrying the garrison back to Manhattan.

If Washington had made grievous mistakes, he was now about to

redeem them with one of the most masterful evacuations in military

history: at night, across difficult water in small boats, under the noses

of a numerically superior enemy and its powerful fleet. A carping critic

might say that he had no choice; eventually, imminently perhaps, the

British fleet would have penetrated the East River, and General Howe

would have stormed the patriot lines. But the resolution, the sheer

nerve, the cool head, as well as the tactical skill needed to bring it off,

were nothing short of brilliant.

Throughout the night the small boats plied back and forth between

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Brooklyn and Manhattan (essentially where the Brooklyn Bridge is

now). “We were strictly enjoined not to speak, or even cough.” recorded

Private Martin. There were scares and near misses, but Washington’s

luck held. At 11:00 pm the wind dropped, but the British fleet did not

exploit its opportunity. Washington got away with not only every last

man, but also much of his stores. And at dawn a mercifully thick fog, “so

very dense . . . that I could scarcely discern a man at six yards’ distance,”

wrote Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge, rose to shroud them—a lagniappe

to Washington from the gods of war.

The dogs of war, however, are not in the business of handing

out tidbits and were soon snapping at Howe’s heels. Not surprisingly,

Henry Clinton, true to form, was deeply disappointed in his chief, and

Commodore Sir George Collier, aboard the Rainbow, raged in his diary:

“To my inexpressible astonishment and concern the rebel army have all

escapd across the [East] River to New York! How this has happened is

surprising, for had our troops followd them close up, they must have

thrown down their arms and surrenderd; or had our ships attackd the

batteries, which we have been in constant expectation of being orderd

to do, not a man could have escapd from Long Island.”

The estimates of losses for both sides vary widely. Howe claimed

a whopping 3,200 American casualties and prisoners, while the

American returns for 8 October show 1,012 casualties and prisoners,

of whom it was claimed that only about 200 were killed, and the rest

captured and wounded. Douglas Southall Freeman, Washington’s

great biographer, estimated 312 American dead with 1,095 wounded

and captured. Sir John Fortescue put British and Hessian dead at 63

with 314 wounded.

If Howe had thought he had achieved the destruction of the

patriot army by his “indirect” method, and cheaply to boot, who could

have blamed him? He could certainly have been forgiven for claiming

so. Washington was close to despair. For example, within a few days

of the evacuation of Brooklyn the 8,000-strong Connecticut militia

shrank to 2,000, and the commander in chief wrote to Congress that

“the militia . . . are dismayed, intractable and impatient to return.

Great numbers of them have gone off; in some instances by whole

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Regiments . . . their example has infected another part of the Army.”

went farther than the army. Nathanael Greene noted that “the country

is struck with a panic.”

Washington’s army on Manhattan numbered in the region of 20,000

(of whom 16,000 were fit for duty). It was divided into three areas of

responsibility. Putnam’s division was in the city at the far southern tip;

General William Heath’s two brigades were sent up to Kingsbridge, on

the Westchester side of the Harlem River. Greene, now recovered from

his “bloody flux,” occupied the center with a largely militia division.

His area of responsibility included Kip’s Bay on the western shore of the

East River facing Howe’s army over in Brooklyn. For Washington it

was not a happy strategic position. As the ever-sensible though spelling-

challenged Colonel William Douglas put it: “I Don’t like the Chance

we run in being beet in our Communications with the Cuntry, and I

fear this Island of NYork will cost Amarica too much. If we were once

on the Main[land] they could not support their Land forces with their

Shiping, but at this Place they may guard three sides of us.”

And during

the ten days following the American evacuation of Brooklyn, Howe

exploited Washington’s anxiety by moving men from Red Hook in the

south to Hell Gate in the north. At the same time Howe the admiral

tried unsuccessfully to conclude some kind of peace agreement with a

patriot delegation that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

When those talks broke down, Howe the general went to work.

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Early on Sunday, 15 September, British warships began to bombard the

flimsy American defenses at Kips Bay, predictably against the advice of

Henry Clinton, who had advocated a landing higher up in the Bronx to

take control of Kingsbridge. “Had this been done without loss of time,”

he wrote, “while the rebel army lay broken in separate corps between

New York and that place [Kingsbridge], it must have suddenly crossed

the North River or each part of it fallen into our power one after the

other.”

The dangerous waters of Hell Gate and the American battery at

Horn’s Hook that would have threatened the transports as they moved

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upriver have been advanced as reasons that influenced Howe’s decision

to reject Clinton’s proposal. Neither is entirely persuasive. Hell Gate was

navigated a few weeks later, albeit with difficulty, and the firepower of

the British navy could have neutralized the guns on Horn’s Hook. It is

more likely that Howe knew of the weakness of Washington’s defenses

at Kips Bay. Private Martin, for example, characterized “the lines” at

Kips Bay as “nothing more than a ditch dug along the bank of the river,

with the dirt thrown out towards the water.” He also described the low

morale of the militia manning them: “The demons of fear and disorder

seemed to take full possession of all and every thing.” In addition,

Washington had come to the same reasonable conclusion as Clinton

and expected the British landing in Harlem and had, in anticipation,

placed some of his best troops there.

When the 4,000 British and Hessian vanguard hit the beaches of

Kips Bay at around 10:00 am,they were unopposed. Under bombardment

(“The breastwork was blown to pieces in a few minutes,” wrote Lord

Rawdon), the militia ran away, to Washington’s utter disgust. In a fit of

almost suicidal despair he sat immobile on his horse, “so vexed at the

infamous conduct of the troops, that he sought death rather than life,”

wrote Nathanael Greene.

An aide-de-camp had to take the bridle and

lead his despondent chief to safety.

Washington and Greene, however, had been the architects of their

own predicament. The militia failure was a failure of command. First,

unseasoned troops should never have been put in the position in which

the men at Kips Bay found themselves. Second, the physical defenses were

entirely inadequate. Third, there was a grievous absence of leadership

at all levels. Martin excoriated his officers: “The men were confused,

being without officers to command them;—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. How could the

men fight without officers?”

“The men were blamed for retreating, and

even flying,” wrote Benjamin Trumbull, chaplain to the 1st Connecticut,

“but I imagine the fault was principally in the general officers in not

disposing of things so as to give the men a rational prospect of defence

and a safe retreat should they engage the enemy.”

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Howe’s primary objective for the fifteenth, as stated in his order

book, was the Inclenberg Heights (modern Murray Hill). Even before

the landing, he had written into Clinton’s orders that he was to halt

there to allow time for his second wave (another 9,000 troops) to come

over from Brooklyn and be consolidated with his advance force.

However, the precise timing that had been so impressive during the

landings on Long Island was not repeated on Manhattan, and the second

wave did not come up until 5:00 pm. In the meantime, Clinton, who

led the vanguard, was constrained by his orders and prevented from

advancing across the island to trap Putnam’s division, then retreating

up the Hudson River shore road. The legend of Mrs. Murray—she

who plied the indolent Howe with Madeira wine in order to buy time

for Putnam’s escape—was just that: a legend (although one dutifully

trotted out in most popular histories). There were good military reasons

to consolidate on the Heights, but there is no doubt that an opportunity

to bag Putnam’s command was missed, and we do not need the fairy tale

of Mrs. Mary Murray to explain why.

Certainly one question raises its

awkward head: where was the British cavalry, those dragoons that had

done such execution at the battle of Brooklyn? In a scouting role they

would have been invaluable at this juncture, yet they seem to have been

entirely absent.

With about 10,000 Americans now safely gathered into the fortified

lines of the Harlem Heights, which stretched across the neck of the

Harlem Peninsula from the Hudson to the Harlem River, and another

6,000 with General Heath at Kingsbridge, Howe sent part of his force to

take possession of the city and moved the bulk of his army up through

McGowans Pass (modern-day 100th Street and Fifth Avenue) to take up

a position across from the Harlem lines, the two armies separated by a

valleylike depression known as the Hollow Way. At dawn the next day

Washington sent Thomas Knowlton (of Breed’s Hill renown) across

the no-man’s-land of the Hollow Way to probe the British positions. It

was like poking a stick into a hornet’s nest. Elements of the British light

infantry stormed out of their positions, forcing Knowlton to retreat.

Full of confidence, the British pursued—into a classic entrapment.

And soon the hunters became the hunted as other American units hit

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their exposed flanks. British reinforcements were brought up pell-mell,

and Washington prudently withdrew his attack before it too became

overextended. It may have been only a skirmish (the Americans lost

about thirty killed, including the valiant Knowlton; the British fourteen),

but it did wonders for the battered American morale: “This Affair I am

in hopes will be attended with many salutary consequences as it seems

to have greatly inspired the whole of our Troops,” wrote Washington.

It also seems to have given Howe the jitters, for he now took over three

weeks to consolidate his positions before attempting a flanking attack

via Throgs Neck over on the Sound on the 12 October.

The Throgs Neck landing was a humiliating failure in which ini-

tially twenty-five Pennsylvania riflemen under Colonel Edward Hand

(later reinforced by William Prescott’s Massachusetts Continentals,

among other units) held up 4,000 British at a choke point leading off

the Neck until Howe was forced to seek the more propitious landing

place of Pells Point, farther up the coast. Howe landed there on the

same day (18 October) that Washington began to march all of his now

13,000-strong army (leaving a garrison of about 2,000 at Fort Washing

ton) to White Plains. To have stayed on Manhattan would have invited

encirclement. At White Plains there was a supply depot as well as an

escape route into the Hudson Highlands.

An army on the march is horribly exposed to flank attack, and

Howe was technically in a strong position to exploit that vulnerability.

Once ashore, Clinton and Cornwallis quickly (Clinton later recorded

that at first his proposal “did not seem to be much relished”) moved 4,000

British and Hessians to Eastchester, just over a mile from Washington’s

column, but John Glover and his Marbleheads, about 750 men, executed

a classic hit-and-retreat defense, brilliantly utilizing the network of

stone walls and narrow lanes. It bought Washington invaluable time.

On 19 October Howe moved farther up the coast to New Rochelle

and, ever cautious, waited three days for 8,000 Hessians under Wilhelm

von Knyphausen, recently arrived from Europe, to join him. The delay

allowed another opportunity to slip by, as Israel Putnam noted: “The

stupidity of the British general, in that he did not early on the morning

of the 20th send a detachment and take possession of the post and stores

patriot battles 248

at Whiteplains.”

Washington arrived at White Plains on the twenty-

second, but it was not until the twenty-eighth that Howe moved his

14,000 men to confront the Americans dug in on high ground on a

line from the Bronx River on their right flank, with the left anchored

in the hills. Across the Bronx River, about a mile and a half from the

right flank of Washington’s main force, was Chatterton’s Hill, a north-

south ridge rising steeply 180 feet above the river. Only belatedly had

Washington realized the threat it could pose, and sent Colonel Rufus

Putnam to begin a hasty entrenchment of the hilltop, supported by two

regiments of militia plus another 1,000 men under General Alexander

McDougall. (It would later be further reinforced by Haslet’s Delaware

Continentals, Smallwood’s Marylanders, and Webb’s Connecticut

regiment and would become the key to the battle.)

On the whole, the American main force was in a strong position,

as Clinton reported: “[I] could not from what I saw recommend a direct

attack . . . their flanks were safe and their retreat practicable when they

pleased.” Howe, always on the qui vive for a flanking opportunity,

detached 4,000 men and twelve guns to attack Chatterton’s Hill.

Alexander Leslie and Carl von Donop came up the east slope, at first

in line, but after having taken a beating from the defenders above, they

switched to column to reduce their target profile (a lesson hard learned

in the third attack on Breed’s Hill). Colonel Johann Rall’s Hessians

stormed up the southern slope. The militia “fled in confusion, without

more than a random, scattering fire . . . The rest of General McDougall’s

brigade never came up . . . Part of the first three Delaware Companies

also retreated in disorder,” wrote Haslet, until he too was forced to give

way. It rained heavily on the twenty-ninth, which prevented immediate

pursuit, and when, on the following day, Howe prepared to attack

Washington’s main body, it had gone.

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Fort Washington remained in Howe’s rear like the last ripe plum on the

tree, and on 5 November he moved south to pick it. Washington had

always had his doubts about the wisdom of maintaining the fort at all.