At the time, I could not account for how it was that our troops were so completely surrounded.
Joseph Hodgkins, as he later recounted for his wife, had run pell-mell into the marshes while being fired on the whole way. He hardly knew who was killed or drowned or taken prisoner.
Lord Stirling, finding himself hopelessly surrounded, and determined not to surrender his sword to the British, broke through their fire to a Hessian regiment and gave himself up to General von Heister.
By noon or shortly thereafter the rout was over, the day lost for the Americans. British troops, having advanced so far so rapidly wanted to keep going and carry the attack straight to the Brooklyn works. Numbers of British officers, too, felt it was no time to stop. But Howe ordered a halt.
In his original plan, General Clinton had said that the principal attacks, while vigorous, should not be pushed too far. The only exception was the all-important flanking attack, which, he said, “should be pushed as far as it will go.”
Clinton would later write of Howe’s decision to halt: “I had at the moment but little inclination to check the ardor of our troops when I saw the enemy flying in such a panic before them.” Howe himself, recalling the mood of the men, would later write that “it required repeated orders to prevail on them to desist.”
IT HAD BEEN the first great battle of the Revolution, and by far the largest battle ever fought in North America until then. Counting both armies and the Royal Navy, more than 40,000 men had taken part. The field of battle ranged over six miles, and the fighting lasted just over six hors. And for the Continental Army, now the army of the United States of America, in this first great test under fire, it had been a crushing defeat.
“O Doleful! Doleful! Doleful!” scrawled Chaplain Philip Fithian in his diary, expressing only the obvious.
To the British it was a “glorious day”—“a cheap and complete victory” in the terse summation of General Grant. “You will be glad,” Grant wrote to General Harvey, “that we have had the field day I talked of in my last letter. If a good bleeding can bring those Bible-faced Yankees to their senses, the fever of independency should soon abate.”
Everything had gone like “clockwork.” Clinton’s overall plan had succeeded “beyond our expectations,” reported Lord Percy to his father. “Our men behaved themselves like British troops fighting in a good cause.” In the opinion of Sir James Murray, no soldiers had ever behaved with greater spirit.
In one thing only had they failed, thought Ambrose Serle. “They could not run so fast as their foes, many of whom indeed were ready to run over each other.”
In his own official reports, William Howe left no doubt about the magnitude of the victory and was no less generous than others in his praise of the army:
The behavior of both officers and soldiers, British and Hessians, was highly to their honor. More determined courage and steadfastness in troops have never been experienced, or a greater ardor to distinguish themselves, as all those who had an opportunity have amply evinced by their actions.
Howe reported his losses to be less than 400—59 killed, 267 wounded, and 31 missing. The Hessians had lost a mere 5 killed and 26 wounded.
Rebel losses, on the other hand, numbered more than 3,000, Howe claimed. Over 1,000 prisoners had been taken, while another 2,000 had been killed, wounded, or drowned.
The disparity of the losses as reported by Howe was greatly exaggerated, however. Washington, unable to provide an exact count, would later estimate in a report to Congress that about 700 to 1,000 of his men had been killed or taken prisoner.
General Parsons, who had succeeded in avoiding capture, wrote that in the course of the battle the number of American dead he and his men had collected, taken together with “the heap the enemy had made,” amounted to 60, and while the total loss was still impossible to know, Parsons judged the number of killed would be “inconsiderable.”
Some of the other officers who had been in the thick of the fight were convinced that the British had suffered more men killed than had the Americans, but that the British took the most prisoners.
Very few on the American side were ready to acknowledge just how severe a defeat it had been. In fact, American losses, though far less than what Howe had reported, were dreadful. As close as can be estimated about 300 Americans had been killed and over 1,000 taken prisoner, including three generals, Sullivan, Stirling, and Nathaniel Woodhull. Sullivan and Stirling were to be treated with marked courtesy by their captors, would even dine with Lord Howe on board the Eagle. But Woodhull died of wounds a few weeks later.
Among the swarms of prisoners in British hands were Captain Samuel Atlee and Lieutenant Jabez Fitch. Atlee was marched under guard to General Howe’s headquarters at Bedford, where he and other prisoners were subjected to “the most scurrilous and abusive language, both from officers, soldiers, and camp-ladies, everyone…demanding of the guard why we were taken, why we were not put to the bayonet.”
Jabez Fitch, who had fought through the long day and surrendered only after being surrounded, was confined with “a great number of prisoners” in a barn, where he did all he could to comfort his friend and company commander, Captain John Jewett, who had been bayoneted twice, in the chest and stomach, and was in excruciating pain. “I sat with him most of the night, and slept but very little,” Fitch wrote. “The capt[ain]…was sensible of his being near his end, often repeating that it was hard work to die.”
The father of ten children, Jewett made Fitch promise to describe the circumstances of his death to his wife. Later, Fitch would write to tell her that her husband had received his mortal wounds with a bayonet “after he was taken prisoner and stripped of his arms and part of his clothes.”
Accounts of British, Scottish, and Hessian soldiers bayoneting Americans after they had surrendered were to become commonplace. There were repeated stories of Hessians pinning Americans to trees with their bayonets. A letter said to have been written by an unnamed British officer appeared in the Massachusetts Spy describing how readily surrendered Americans were “dispatched.”
The Hessians and our Highlanders gave no quarters [the letter read], and it was a fine thing to see with what alacrity they dispatched the rebels with their bayonets after we had surrendered them so that they could not resist…. You know all stratagems are lawful in war, especially against such vile enemies to their King and country.
Numbers of individual Americans were indeed severely beaten after surrendering, or, like Captain Jewett, run through with bayonets, as reliable accounts attest, but no mass atrocities were committed. The letter in the Massachusetts Spy—a letter quoted repeatedly—was very likely a fake, fabricated as propaganda. Nor was there truth to an account in a London paper of Hessians burying five hundred American bodies in a single pit.
Some American prisoners, including Jabez Fitch, recorded acts of genuine civility and kindness on the part of their captors. Even the infamous General Grant, wrote Fitch, “was so good as to make us a present of a side of mutton.”
For their British and Hessian captors, and particularly for the Hessians, the prisoners were great curiosities, a first chance to see close up what the rebel foe looked like. “They could not have been taken as soldiers as they had no uniforms, but only torn blouses of all colors,” wrote one astonished Hessian. Lieutenant von Bardeleben, too, was surprised to see how badly clothed the Americans were. Most, he wrote, “have nothing but a wretched farmer’s costume and a weapon. Most of their officers are no better dressed and until recently were only ordinary manual laborers.”
Writing in his diary in a code, Lieutenant von Bardeleben also recorded that some of his fellow officers “shed their ideas of being heroes. The prisoners who knelt and sought to surrender were beaten.”
For most of the prisoners still worse treatment lay in store, when confined and starved in old jails, church crypts, and vile British prison ships anchored in the harbor.
IN THE REMAINING HOURS of the day, after the guns grew silent
, the Americans inside the Brooklyn defenses, expecting the British to attack full force, waited tensely hour after hour as nothing happened. All afternoon and into the night, pitiful cries could be heard from wounded men who lay among the unburied dead on the battlefield. Stragglers who had escaped capture kept coming into the lines almost by the hour, bedraggled single soldiers or clusters of three or four, many badly wounded. (“And the distressed wounded came crying into the lines!” wrote Philip Fithian.) The morning after, Mordecai Gist and nine others crossed into the camps. They were the only ones of the valiant Marylanders to have made it back.
III
ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, August 28, the situation faced by Washington and the army was critical. Having been outsmarted and outfought, they were now hemmed in at Brooklyn in an area about three miles around, their backs to the East River, which could serve as an escape route only as long as the wind cooperated. With a change in the wind, it would take but a few British warships in the river to make escape impossible. Brooklyn was a trap ready to spring.
Yet early that morning Washington ordered still more of his army over from New York, almost as though he did not comprehend how perilous his position was.
Two Pennsylvania regiments and Colonel John Glover’s Massachusetts troops—approximately 1,200 men—crossed the river and marched into the Brooklyn entrenchments with considerable show. Possibly it was this, the show, that Washington wanted, and if so, he succeeded. The sight of the new troops, wrote the Pennsylvania officer Alexander Graydon, brought a marked change. “The faces that had been saddened by the disasters of yesterday assumed a gleam of animation on our approach, accompanied with a murmur…that ‘These were the lads that might do something.’ ”
In command of the fresh Pennsylvania brigades was handsome, self-assured Thomas Mifflin, formerly of Washington’s staff at Cambridge and now, at thirty-two, a brigadier general. Mifflin immediately volunteered to survey the outermost defenses and report back to Washington, little expecting the part he was soon to play.
Joseph Hodgkins, so exhausted from the battle that he could hardly hold his head up, nonetheless took time to write home to report that “through the goodness of God,” he was still in one piece. Like everyone, he expected at any moment to be in action again. “The enemy are within a mile and a half of our lines,” he noted.
The weather had changed dramatically from the day before. Under darkening skies, the temperature dropped ten degrees.
Riflemen in the outermost defenses were ordered to keep up a steady fire at the enemy, if only to raise spirits, and the British fired back steadily on into the afternoon when the clouds opened in a cold, drenching downpour, the start of a northeastern storm that brought still further misery to the defeated army.
Afternoon, at three, an alarm [gun] in the midst of a violent rain [wrote Philip Fithian]. Drums heavily calling to arms. Men running promiscuously and in columns to the lines. All the time the rain falling with an uncommon torrent. The guns of the whole army are wetted. And after the alarm was over, which was occasioned by the regulars coming in a greater body than usual to drive our riflemen, our troops fired off their guns quite till evening, so that it seemed indeed dangerous to walk within our own lines—for we could from every part hear perpetually firing, and continually hear the [cannon] balls pass over us.
The storm and the roar of the guns continued into the night. Across the river in New York, Pastor Ewald Shewkirk wrote of the boom of cannon at Brooklyn intermixed with flashes of lightning and the roar of thunder.
The following day, Thursday, August 29, the storm continued, heavy rains fell. Troops without tents also had little or no food. Fires were nearly impossible to keep going for cooking or warmth. Private Martin got by with biscuits he had had the foresight to stuff into his knapsack before leaving New York, biscuits “hard enough to break the teeth of a rat,” as he wrote. Anyone who had a bit of raw pork to gnaw felt privileged. Nearly all were hungry and soaked to the skin. In places in the trenches men stood in water up to their waists. Muskets and cartridges were almost impossible to keep dry. Soldiers, unable to stay awake any longer, fell asleep standing upright in the rain or sitting without cover in the mud.
Washington, who had had little or no sleep, sent off a brief, somewhat incoherent report to Congress at four-thirty in the morning, saying his people were much “distressed.” Of the defeat of the day before he said only that there had been “engagement” with the enemy and that he had heard nothing from General Sullivan or Lord Stirling. “Nor can I ascertain our loss.” Nor did he report that in the night the British had started “advancing by approaches,” as it was known. Instead of risking an open assault, they were digging trenches toward the American lines and throwing up embankments that already were no more than six hundred yards from Fort Putnam.
Yet for all the miseries it wrought, the storm was greatly to Washington’s advantage. Under the circumstances, any ill wind from the northeast was a stroke of good fortune. For as long as it held, Lord Howe’s ships had no chance to “get up” where they could wreak havoc.
But who knew how long such good fortune might serve? And what if his luck ran out? (“But lest some unlucky event should happen unfavorable to my reputation,” he had told Congress when accepting his command, “I beg it may be remembered by every gent[leme]n in the room that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command I [am] honored with.”)
He was now advised that the old ships that had been sunk in the East River could not be counted on as a serious barrier against British warships, and especially the smaller ships, which could come up through that part of the East River between Governor’s Island and Brooklyn where there were no barriers at all.
With the situation as grim as it could be, no one was more conspicuous in his calm presence of mind than Washington, making his rounds on horseback in the rain. They must be “cool but determined,” he had told the men before the battle, when spirits were high. Now, in the face of catastrophe, he was demonstrating what he meant by his own example. Whatever anger or torment or despair he felt, he kept to himself.
Since he first arrived in New York in April, the essence of Washington’s policy had been to keep close watch and make decisions according to circumstances. Sometime before noon, having heard General Mifflin’s report on the progress made by the British with their “approaches” during the night, as well as the strongly expressed views of Joseph Reed, and having looked things over himself, he made a momentous decision.
A secret and deliberately deceiving urgent message went off to General Heath at King’s Bridge. Every flatbottomed boat or sloop, almost any watercraft available, was to be rounded up “without delay” for the reason that “we have many battalions from New Jersey which are coming over to relieve others here.” The message was signed by Mifflin.
Washington would later recall emphasizing that there be no “ceremony” in carrying out the order—meaning that whatever boats would serve should be confiscated on the spot.
Heath assigned the roundup to Colonel Hugh Hughes, a New York schoolteacher, who, in pursuit of his mission over the next twenty-four hours, would scarcely ever dismount from his horse.
At four in the afternoon, with still no letup in the rain, Washington called a meeting with his generals at the Livingston mansion, on the brow of Brooklyn Heights overlooking the river.
Mifflin, who had advised Washington that he must either fight or retreat immediately, asked to be the one to propose the retreat, with the understanding that if it were agreed on, he and the Pennsylvania regiment would serve as the rear guard in the outermost defenses, and thus hold the line until the rest of the army had departed. This would be the most dangerous assignment of all and he insisted it be his, Mifflin told Washington, lest by proposing retreat his reputation should suffer.
In the words of the minutes of the meeting: “It was submitted to the consideration of the council whether, under all circumstances, it would not be el
igible to leave Long Island and its dependencies [fortifications] and remove the army to New York.”
Only one man expressed doubts: General John Morin Scott, a leading New York attorney and ardent patriot-turned-soldier.
“As it was suddenly proposed, I as suddenly objected to it,” Scott later wrote, “from an aversion to giving the enemy a single inch of ground, but was soon convinced by the unanswerable reasons for it.”
Of the reasons put forward—ammunition spoiled by heavy rains, the miseries and discouragement of the exhausted troops, the enemy’s advancing by approaches, the precarious situation of an army divided in half—the most serious was the looming threat of the British fleet suddenly in command of the East River. As Joseph Reed wrote in explanation, with Lord Howe trying every day to “get up” against the wind, “it became a serious consideration whether we ought to risk the fate of the army, and perhaps America, on defending the circle of about three miles fortified with a few strong redoubts, but chiefly open lines.”
The decision was unanimous. Orders went out and by evening the plan was rapidly unfolding.
At Dorchester the year before, Washington had taken advantage of the night to catch Howe by complete surprise. On Long Island, Howe had sent 10,000 men through the night to catch Washington by surprise. The night of Thursday, August 29, it was Washington’s turn again.
THE ORDERS CAME AT SEVEN. The troops were to be “under arms with packs and everything.” It was to be a night attack on the enemy, they were told.
To Alexander Graydon, who was with the Pennsylvania regiments assigned to the rear guard, it seemed a desperate measure, almost suicidal. “Several nuncupative wills were made upon the occasion, uncertain as it was, whether the persons to whom they were communicated would survive, either to prove or to execute them.” Graydon concentrated on summoning his own courage.
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