As it was, no one except the commanders knew the details of the plan. Not an officer or a man knew where they were going.
The route was northeast along what was known as the King’s Highway, then at the village of New Lots the troops would swing north toward the Heights of Gowan.
The advance guard moved more swiftly, at the same time “sweeping up” any local inhabitants who looked as though they might give the alarm. When the three Loyalist guides warned that the rebels could be waiting at Schoonmaker’s Bridge over a little salt creek that emptied into Jamaica Bay, the whole column halted while skirmishers went ahead. But there was no one at the bridge and the army continued on.
Nor was there a sign of the rebels at Howard’s Tavern, which stood a few hundred yards from the entrance to the Jamaica Pass. By then it was two in the morning. The tavernkeeper and his fourteen-year-old son were rousted out of bed, closely questioned, and pressed into service as additional guides. The pass, as far as they knew, was unguarded.
Captains Evelyn and DeLancey and other mounted officers rode ahead into the pass, a winding, rocky road through a narrow gorge over-hung by trees and little wider than a bridle path.
It was only ten minutes or so after leaving the tavern when the officers came up on five dark figures on horseback, the five Americans on patrol. When the Americans, supposing the British officers to be a party of their own troops, fell in with them, all five were immediately captured without a shot fired or scarcely a sound.
The prisoners were taken to General Clinton, who succeeded in learning from them that they alone were patrolling the pass, and that indeed the pass was entirely unguarded.
When Clinton pressed harder, demanding to know how many rebel troops were at Brooklyn, one of the Americans, Lieutenant Edward Dunscomb, a twenty-two-year-old graduate of King’s College, told Clinton indignantly that under different circumstances he would never insult them in such a manner. Called “an impudent rebel” and threatened with hanging, Dunscomb said that General Washington would respond in kind and hang man for man. But Dunscomb’s courage made little difference. He and the other prisoners were taken away, and Clinton and the advance guard moved on.
By first light they were through the gorge and at the Bedford Road on the other side of the ridge. The men were told to lie down in the tall grass by the road and get some rest.
For the main body of the army the march through the pass took nearly two hours. (Wherever a tree had to be cleared to make way for the artillery and wagons, it had to be done with saws instead of axes in order to maintain all possible silence.) By the time Howe and the army reached the Bedford Road, the sun was up.
At exactly nine o’clock, with the blasts of two heavy cannon—the prearranged signal for the Hessians at the center and General Grant on the American right to commence their assaults—Howe’s army pushed on down the road toward the village of Bedford and to Brooklyn beyond.
Years later, Henry Clinton would remember Howe being extremely apprehensive. “The commander-in-chief seemed to have some suspicion the enemy would attack us on our march, but I was persuaded that, as they [had] neglected to oppose us at the gorge, the affair was over.”
Good fortune had accompanied them through the night. Nothing had gone amiss. The troops had marched nine miles in pitch darkness through unfamiliar country and in perfect order. Everything was on schedule and the day, like the day they first came ashore on Long Island, was perfectly beautiful.
II
IT WAS THREE IN THE MORNING when General Putnam was awakened by one of the guards at the Brooklyn headquarters and told the enemy was attacking on the right near the Narrows, at the Gowanus Road.
The British commander, Grant, had decided to occupy the attention of the Americans on that part of the line ahead of schedule. Three hundred British troops had stormed into the Gowanus Pass with a roar of musket fire and the Americans on guard, green militia, fled as fast as they could.
Putnam rushed to Lord Stirling’s camp outside the Brooklyn lines to order Stirling to move to meet the enemy and “repulse them,” little knowing how many of the enemy there were. Alarm guns sounded, drums rolled as troops fell out at the forts. General Samuel Parsons, who with Stirling shared responsibility for defenses on the Gowanus Road, and who, like Putnam, had been resting at the Brooklyn headquarters, mounted his horse and galloped off to arrive first on the scene. Until the year before, Parsons had been a small-town Connecticut lawyer.
I found by fair daylight, the enemy were through the wood and descending the hill on the north side, on which, with twenty of my fugitive guard being all I could collect, I took post on a height in their front at about half a mile’s distance—which halted their column and gave time for Lord Stirling with his forces to come up.
Stirling’s forces numbered 1,600 men and included Colonel Huntington’s Connecticut regiment, in which Jabez Fitch served, and Colonel Samuel Atlee’s Pennsylvania battalion, in addition to Smallwood’s Marylanders and Haslet’s colorful Delaware battalion, which were thought to be the two best units in the army. But as it happened, both their commanders, James Smallwood and John Haslet, were absent, on court-martial duty in New York.
“A little before day, as we marched towards the enemy two miles from our camp, we saw them,” wrote a nineteen-year-old lieutenant with the Delaware troops, Enoch Anderson. In what seemed no time they were in the middle of what Moses Little called “a smart engagement.”
The redcoat regiments came on “in regular order,” colors flying, field artillery out in front. Stirling drew up his lines and, in the words of another American soldier, offered them “battle in true English taste.” The British marched to within two hundred yards, then opened fire with cannon and muskets, “now and then taking off a head,” as the same soldier wrote. “Our men stood it amazingly well, not even one of them showed a disposition to shrink.” Their orders were to hold their fire until the enemy came within fifty yards. “But when they perceived we stood their fire so cool and so resolutely, they declined to come any nearer, although treble our number.”
“We gave them a fair fire—every man leveled well,” young Enoch Anderson recounted:
I saw one man tumble from his horse—never did I take better aim at a bird—yet I know not that I killed any or touched any. The fire was returned and they killed two of our men dead, none wounded. It became proper for us to retreat and we retreated about four hundred yards and were joined by Captain Atlee’s regiment.
Twice within an hour the British assaulted Parson’s troops on their high ground, and twice the American lines held. Stirling’s men were under steady cannon bombardment, but American cannon answered in kind and in the roar and smoke the American troops never flinched.
In this its first hours of battle with the enemy on an open field, the Continental Army fought valiantly, believing they were holding their own against British regulars. Addressing the troops, Stirling reminded them that it was General Grant who had boasted that with 5,000 men he could conquer all of America. But as they could not know, Grant was pressing his advantage only so much, holding back according to plan. “We had a skirmishing and a cannonade for some hours, which drew their whole attention,” Grant would later say.
AT THE CENTER, where Hessian artillery had been bombarding Sullivan’s lines along the ridges since early morning, General von Heister’s brigades could be seen drawn up on the plain to the south, but showed no sign of moving. Three Hessian brigades stood waiting in a line nearly a mile long.
Sullivan had ridden out from Brooklyn to take command at the Flatbush Pass. Seeing that the Hessians were not moving and that Stirling was in trouble on the right, he sent some of his regiments to help.
Until nine o’clock the battle seemed to be unfolding about as the Americans had expected, with the enemy attacking, or poised to attack, head-on.
But at nine came the crash of Howe’s signal guns, and suddenly Sullivan realized that a whole British army was coming at him from behind and that he was su
rrounded.
On the plain beyond the ridge, General von Heister gave the order and with drums rolling, the Hessians were in motion.
Leaving his advance guard posted along the ridge to do what they could to hold off the Hessians, Sullivan pulled back his main force and swung around to face the oncoming British ranks. And though vastly outnumbered, the Americans returned the British fire with murderous effect. Officers on both sides feared their men would be cut to pieces, and officers and soldiers on both sides often had no idea what was happening. Nor was it the Americans only who, when faced with annihilation, ran for their lives.
A British light infantry officer who led thirty of Clinton’s advance guard into the “very thick” of several hundred American riflemen, saw a third of his men go down in the most ferocious exchange of fire he had ever known. When he and a half dozen redcoats broke for the woods, more rebels sprang up out of nowhere. The fire seemed to come from every direction.
I called to my men to run to the first wall they could find and we all set off, some into some short bushes, others straight across a field…[and] in running across the field we [were] exposed to the fire of 300 men. We had literally run out in the midst [of them] and they calling to me to surrender. I stopped twice to look behind me and saw the riflemen so thick and not one 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.
In the turmoil and confusion, Sullivan struggled to hold control and keep his men from panicking. Their situation was desperate; retreat was the only alternative, and in stages of “fight and flight,” he lead them as rapidly as possible in the direction of the Brooklyn lines.
Those left to hold the ridge had by now been overrun by the Hessians. Green-coated jaegers (literally, huntsmen) and the blue-coated grenadiers with their seventeen-inch bayonets had moved up through the steep woods of the ridge—the “terrible hills”—as swiftly and expertly as any Virginia rifleman. So suddenly did they appear that the Americans had time to get off only a shot or two, or none at all. Some fought back, wielding their muskets and rifles like clubs, before being run through with bayonets. Some pleaded for mercy. “Their fear of the Hessian troops was…indescribable,” wrote General von Heister. At the very sight of a blue coat, he said, “they surrendered immediately and begged on their knees for their lives.” Those who could get away fled back down through the trees and out into the open, only to run headlong into a hail of British fire.
At the same time, the whole left side of the American line collapsed. Thousands of men were on the run, hundreds were captured. Sullivan held back, in an effort to see as many as possible to safety, and amazingly most of the men succeeded in reaching the Brooklyn lines.
Sullivan, however, was captured. An American soldier named Lewis Morris, who himself barely escaped, wrote of Sullivan in a letter home. “The last I heard of him, he was in a cornfield close by our lines, with a pistol in each hand, and the enemy had formed a line each side of him, and he was going directly between them. I like to have been taken prisoner myself.”
THE PRECISE TIME of Washington’s arrival on the scene at Brooklyn was not recorded, but it is believed he crossed over from New York at about nine o’clock, or just as Howe’s signal guns sounded.
Like General Putnam, Washington, too, had been awakened in the middle of the night with word of Grant’s early assault, and at daybreak, still apprehensive of a second, larger attack on New York, Washington had watched with increasing anxiety as five enemy warships—Roebuck, Asia, Renown, Preston, and Repulse—started for the East River with a favorable wind and tide. It was what he had most feared.
Then miraculously the wind had veered off to the north. The ships, after tacking to and fro, trying to gain headway, at last gave up. Only the Roebuck could “fetch high enough” to threaten the battery at Red Hook with a few random shots.
So Long Island it was to be, Washington saw. He immediately ordered more troops to Brooklyn and wasted no time having himself rowed across the river, Joseph Reed at his side.
Private Joseph Martin, one of those in the units ordered to march to the Brooklyn ferry, remembered the cheers of the soldiers as they embarked, and the answering cheers of the spectators who thronged the wharves to watch the excitement. “They all wished us good luck apparently.” For his own part, Private Martin could think only of the horrors of war “in all their hideousness.”
On reaching the Brooklyn side, he saw, as he never had, the blood and suffering of wounded men. “What were the feelings of most or all the young soldiers at this time, I know not,” he would remember, “but I know what were mine.”
I saw a lieutenant who…. ran round among the men of his company, sniveling and blubbering, praying each one if he had aught against him, or if he had injured any one, that they would forgive him, declaring at the same time that he, from his heart, forgave them if they had offended him…had he been at the gallows with a halter about his neck, he could not have shown more fear or penitence. A fine soldier you are, I thought, a fine officer, an exemplary man for young soldiers! I would have suffered anything short of death rather than have made such an exhibition of myself.
Accounts of Washington’s activities as the battle raged are few and somewhat conflicting. He would be remembered out in plain view on horseback watching the clash of armies through a telescope. Stories would be told of him riding among the troops exhorting them to “quit yourselves like men, like soldiers,” or saying, “I will fight so long as I have a leg or an arm.” One soldier later described him walking the lines to rally the men. Possibly he did all of that. More likely his place was a vantage point on Brooklyn Heights, and in any case what was happening was out of his hands.
By ten o’clock his army had been hopelessly outflanked. The British were within two miles of the Brooklyn lines. Defeated men by the hundreds were streaming in from the battlefield, many blood-spattered and wounded, all exhausted. Officers were missing. Washington was facing disaster and could do nothing but sit astride his horse and watch.
ONLY ON THE RIGHT did the uproar of cannon and musket fire continue, as the indomitable Stirling and his men fought on against Grant’s far greater force, still in the belief that they were holding the line.
Colonel Samuel Atlee, who commanded the Pennsylvanians, would remember actually thinking that the British were going down to defeat: “For the batteries began to play and mowed them down like grass when they retreated, and our army cried out, ‘The day is our own!’ ”
But Grant kept holding back and in the interval, his division of 5,000 had been reinforced by 2,000 marines from the British ships offshore and two companies of New York Loyalists recruited that spring and summer by Governor Tryon.
Stirling had been ordered by Putnam to “repulse” the enemy, and for lack of orders to the contrary, he and his men had held on for nearly four hours. With great pride and no exaggeration, Colonel John Haslet would describe how his “Delawares” stood with “determined countenance,” in close array, their colors flying, the enemy’s artillery “playing” on them all the while, and the enemy, “though six times their number,” not daring to attack.
But they had stayed too long. At eleven o’clock Grant’s redcoats hit hard at the center of Stirling’s line, as thousands of Hessians struck from the woods to the left. When Stirling at last pulled back, it was too late. More British were coming at him from the rear, on the Gowanus Road, the line of retreat he had been counting on. A full British division led by Cornwallis now stood between him and Brooklyn. The only escape route still open, he saw, was in the direction of Gowanus Bay, now on his left, across a tidal marsh and a creek, which at high tide was about eighty yards wide, and the tide was coming in rapidly.
Stirling ordered his men to “make the best of their way” through the marsh and across the creek. Then, he and Major Mordecai Gist and no more than 250 Marylanders attacked Cornwallis in a headlong, valiant effort to cover the retreat of the others and
perhaps even break through the redcoats who had established their line on the Gowanus Road beside a stone farmhouse.
The fighting was the most savage of the day. Driven back by a blaze of deadly fire, Stirling’s men rallied and struck again five times. Stirling himself fought “like a wolf.” The Marylanders, who until that morning had never faced an enemy, fought no less tenaciously than their commander.
Washington, watching from a Brooklyn hill, is said to have cried out as he saw the Marylanders cut down time after time, “Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose!”
Giving up at last, Stirling ordered the men to scatter and try to get back to the Brooklyn lines any way they could.
Of those trying to escape through the marshes, many bogged down in the mud and could get nowhere. Men unable to swim struggled pitifully in the swift tide of the creek and under a hail of musket fire. Some officers swam their horses across. A few of the men who could not swim held back and were captured.
An eighteen-year-old, six-month volunteer with a Pennsylvania unit, Private Michael Graham, who started the day posted with eight others on the ridge at the center of the American lines, had been ordered to retreat. With men running in almost every direction, he found himself mixed in with Stirling’s troops in their desperate flight.
It is impossible for me to describe the confusion and horror…. [I] entered a swamp or marsh through which a great many of our men were retreating. Some of them were mired and crying to their fellows for God’s sake to help them out. But every man was intent on his own safety…. At the side of the marsh there was a pond which I took to be a millpond. Numbers, as they came to this pond jumped in, and some were drowned…. I got safely into camp. Out of the eight men that were taken from the company to which I belonged the day before the battle on guard, I only escaped. The others were killed or taken prisoners.
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