The Staten Island meeting lasted several hours, during which Lord Howe did most of the talking. “It is desirable to put a stop to these ruinous extremities, as well for the sake of our country as yours,” said the resplendently uniformed admiral. Was there no way of “treading back this step of independency?” There was not, he was told, and the meeting came to nothing, as expected.
But it had at least brought a pause to enemy movements. The British had suspended operations during what could have been a golden opportunity to attack, as one perfect, late-summer day followed another.
Washington’s war council met again on September 12 and this time resolved to abandon the city. The main part of the army was to move north to King’s Bridge as rapidly as possible, while some 4,000 troops under General Putnam remained to hold off an attack. The sick were to be moved first. Cannon and tons of supplies and ammunition had to be hauled from the city, a mammoth undertaking. Every available horse and wagon was pressed into service.
On the afternoon of Friday the 13th, the British were on the move again. Clearly some “grand military exertion” was under way, in Joseph Reed’s words. The warships Roebuck and Phoenix, and the frigates Orpheus and Carysfort—four ships mounting 148 cannon—proceeded up the East River with six troop transports, to anchor in Bushwick Creek. Fired on “briskly” by American batteries, the ships received no serious damage, nor bothered even to return the fire.
On Saturday the 14th, Washington received another directive from John Hancock. After further consideration, Congress had now decided to leave the timing of an evacuation of New York entirely to the commander-in-chief. He and the army were to remain not “a moment longer” than he thought necessary.
Washington replied at once:
We are now taking every method in our power to remove the stores, etc…. they are so great and so numerous that I fear we shall not effect the whole before we meet with some interruption…. Our sick are extremely numerous and we find their removal attended with the greatest difficulty.
Yet by late afternoon the larger part of the army had moved north to King’s Bridge and Harlem Heights. Washington and his staff would depart from the Mortier house that night and head north.
SURVEYING THE SHORE of Kips Bay with his telescope, from the deck of the Roebuck, General Henry Clinton could see entrenchments “lined with men whose countenance appeared respectable and firm,” as he later wrote. The invasion of New York was about to begin, and Clinton was again to lead the attack.
Kips Bay was not his choice. He had adamantly opposed the plan, insisting that the Harlem River and King’s Bridge were the key to victory. If York Island was a bottle, then Harlem was the neck. Close it off, Clinton argued, and Washington and his rebel army would be trapped, the war won.
Though overruled, Clinton continued to press his opinions almost to the last hour. Even if the landing at Kips Bay were to succeed, he said, it would still be necessary to drive the rebels from Harlem and from King’s Bridge.
General Howe and his brother the admiral were not unmindful of Clinton’s logic, but the captains of the ships in the East River feared the infamously treacherous currents at Hell Gate, at the confluence of the East River and the Harlem.
William Howe issued a final order to the troops saying an attack on the enemy was “shortly intended,” and recommending “an entire dependence upon their bayonets, with which they will ever command that success which their bravery so well deserves.” There was no ringing call for valor in the cause of country or the blessings of liberty, as Washington had exhorted his troops at Brooklyn, only a final reminder of the effectiveness of bayonets.
The invasion was set for Sunday the 15th. Had Howe and the rest of his command known more, and waited one more day, the American evacuation would have been complete, and they could have walked into New York without a worry.
On the opposite shore, at Kips Bay, Private Joseph Martin was among the Connecticut troops posted in shallow trenches to help secure the retreat of the rest of the army. As night came on, sentinels by the water’s edge reported regularly on the half hour, “All’s well.” From one of the British ships, Private Martin heard a voice answer, “We will alter your tune before tomorrow night.”
II
ACCORDING TO THE OFFICIAL ROSTER, the Connecticut brigade commanded by Colonel William Douglas numbered 1,500 men. But a third or more were sick, and only about half of those fit for duty were manning the trenches by Kips Bay. They had been awake all night and had had little or nothing to eat in twenty-four hours. Many were the greenest of green American troops, farm boys who had joined the ranks only the week before. Some who had no muskets carried homemade pikes fashioned from scythe blades fixed to the ends of poles.
Colonel Douglas, a New Haven shipmaster and merchant who had fought gallantly at Brooklyn, thought New York untenable. Still, in the expression of the time, he was a thorough soldier. “I think if we will stand by each other, and not run like cowards, with God’s blessing, [we] may keep them off,” he had written to his wife.
In the course of the night, five British frigates had maneuvered into position off Kips Bay, and in the gray half-light before dawn Douglas and his men could see their dark hulls anchored in a row, broadside to the shore about two hundred yards out, so close that they loomed much larger and more menacing than they had ever looked before. Private Martin would remember being able to read the name of the 44-gun Phoenix “as distinctly as though I had been directly under her stern.”
The sun rose on a warm late-summer morning with clear skies and a fine, southwest breeze. “We lay very quiet in our ditch…till the sun was an hour or two high,” Martin wrote. “We heard a cannonade at the city, but our attention was drawn toward our own guests.”
The distant roar was an exchange of fire on the other side of York Island, as more of the British fleet, taking advantage of the ideal winds and a running tide, moved into the Hudson, making it appear that the attack was to come there.
The five ships off Kips Bay lay “entirely quiet” as the day grew oppressively hot. Then four long columns of enemy flatboats could be seen emerging from Newtown Cove across the river, brimming with red-coated troops. “When they came to the edge of the tide,” wrote Martin, “they formed their boats in line…until they appeared like a large field of clover in full bloom.”
At about ten o’clock, a first wave of more than eighty flatboats pushed off into the river. On board were 4,000 British and Hessian soldiers, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder. Lord Rawdon, who was with General Clinton in the lead boat, later wrote that the Hessians, unaccustomed to “this water business” and fearful of being fired on when packed so closely, began singing hymns, while the redcoats responded in their own fashion, “by damning themselves and the enemy indiscriminately with wonderful fervency.”
The crossing went slowly, almost noiselessly, until all at once, the ships standing broadside to Kips Bay went into action, and the quiet of the nearly three weeks since the Battle of Brooklyn came to a thunderous end.
Just three days earlier, at Staten Island, Admiral Lord Howe had spoken solicitously of putting “a stop to these ruinous extremities,” if only the Americans would give up “independency.” Now, at about eleven o’clock, he lay aside the olive branch in a manner that none of the three members of Congress, or anyone, could have imagined, or that any of those present at Kips Bay would ever forget.
The fury let loose was impossible to conceive, wrote a British midshipman. “So terrible and so incessant a roar of guns few even in the army and navy had ever heard before,” recorded Ambrose Serle.
It continued without stop for a full hour, a total of nearly eighty guns pounding point-blank at the shore and shrouding the river with acrid smoke. Joseph Martin, who had made a “frog’s leap” into a ditch, thought he might die of the sound alone.
The barrage pulverized the meager breastworks, buried men under sod and sand, and kicked up such dust and smoke that there was no possibility of firing back at the enem
y.
When the guns at last ceased, the first wave of flatboats emerged from the drifting smoke into the sunlight and made for shore. By then the Americans had fled as fast as their legs would carry them.
Colonel Douglas had told his men to save themselves and run, but the order was hardly necessary. The fire from the enemy ships, he wrote, was as “hot” as ever could be imagined, “but they mostly overshot us. The brigade was in such a scattered [position] that I could not collect them and I found the whole army on a retreat.”
From the lead landing craft, Lord Rawdon saw the rebels break instantly, “happy to escape” to the nearest woods. “We pressed to shore,” he wrote, “landed, and formed without losing a single man.”
Not all the Americans got away. As another British officer would write, “I saw a Hessian sever a rebel’s head from his body and clap it on a pole in the entrenchments.”
Clinton and his advance corps pressed inland unopposed for a quarter of a mile, to secure high ground known as Inclenberg. There they halted and waited.
FROM HIS NEW COMMAND POST on the crest of Harlem Heights, four miles to the north, Washington had heard the roar of cannon at Kips Bay and seen smoke rising in the distance. In an instant he was on his horse and racing south at a gallop, down the post road. Reining up at a cornfield about a mile inland from Kips Bay, he found men “flying in every direction.” It was everything he had feared and worse, his army in pell-mell panic, Americans turned cowards before the enemy.
In a fury, he plunged his horse in among them, trying to stop them. Cursing violently, he lost control of himself. By some accounts, he brandished a cocked pistol. In other accounts, he drew his sword, threatening to run men through. “Take the walls!” he shouted. “Take the corn field!” When no one obeyed, he threw his hat on the ground, exclaiming in disgust, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”
When an advance party of Hessians appeared, and the fleeing men refused to make a stand, Washington is said to have flogged some of their officers with his riding crop. A few soldiers turned and fired on the enemy, killing and wounding several. When a number of other Americans surrendered, with their hands uplifted, the Hessians shot or bayoneted them.
Two Continental brigades, a force of more than 2,000 under Generals Samuel Parsons and John Fellows, arrived in support, but at the sight of men fleeing in panic all around, they, too, turned and ran, strewing the ground with muskets, cartridge boxes, canteens, knapsacks, hats, and coats—this at the sight of fewer than a hundred enemy soldiers.
“The demons of fear and disorder,” said Joseph Martin, “seemed to take full possession of all and everything that day.” All, that is, but Washington, who, in a rage, heedless of his own safety or the chance of being captured, rode to within a hundred yards of the enemy. Only with difficulty were two of his aides able to grab the bridle of his horse and get him to leave the field.
More British troops were landing. By late afternoon, another 9,000 would be ashore at Kips Bay. When word came that the rebels had abandoned New York, a British brigade headed rapidly south and the city was theirs.
They were welcomed with open arms. “Nothing could equal the expressions of joy shown by the inhabitants, upon the arrival of the King’s officers among them,” wrote Ambrose Serle. “They even carried some of them upon their shoulders about the streets, and behaved in all respects, women as well as men, like overjoyed Bedlamites.” At old Fort George on the Battery, a woman pulled down the flag of the Continental Army and trampled it under foot before raising the Union Jack.
Serle had watched the whole scene from Lord Howe’s flagship. His contempt for the rebels had never been greater: “Thus this town and its environs, which these blustering gentlemen had taken such wonderful pains to fortify, were given up in two or three hours without any defense, or the least appearance of a manly resistance.”
For the remnants of the American army who had gotten away, it had been a close call. Henry Knox had managed to escape at the last minute only by seizing a boat on the Hudson. Israel Putnam and several thousand of his troops had set off on a forced march up the post road, a route that would have taken them up the east side of the island and straight into the invading British army had Putnam not been convinced by a young aide, twenty-year-old Lieutenant Aaron Burr, to head north by less traveled roads along the Hudson.
Leading his soldiers through the sweltering afternoon, rugged “Old Put” was at his best, riding up and down the long line exhorting them to stay together and keep moving, to get past the British before they had the island sealed off from the East River to the Hudson. At one time the two armies were passing each other less than a mile apart, only a stretch of woods dividing them.
Another young officer who made the march, Captain David Humphreys, would later write of General Putnam:
Having myself been a volunteer in his division and acting adjutant to the last regiment that left the city, I had frequent opportunities that day of beholding him, for the purpose of issuing orders, and encouraging the troops, flying on his horse covered with foam, wherever his presence was necessary. Without his extraordinary exertions…it is probable the entire corps would have been cut to pieces.
Putnam and his exhausted men marched into the main camp at Harlem after dark to rousing cheers. They had been given up for lost. When Knox turned up later, he, too, was greeted with shouts of welcome, even an embrace from the commander-in-chief.
WASHINGTON WOULD CALL the conduct of those who had fled at Kips Bay “shameful,” “scandalous,” “disgraceful and dastardly.” Nathanael Greene wrote of the “miserable disorderly retreat” and described Washington’s behavior as he tried to rally the terrified men as close to suicidal. “Fellows’s and Parsons’s whole brigade[s] ran away from about fifty men,” Greene reported to a friend, “and left his Excellency on the ground within eighty yards of the enemy, so vexed at the infamous conduct of the troops that he sought death rather than life.”
Washington’s anger may also have been partly with himself, as the attack at Kips Bay had been nearly as great a tactical surprise as the enemy’s night march through the Jamaica Pass. He had been made to look a fool by Howe still again.
The Connecticut militia, already in disgrace for deserting in such appalling numbers, were tagged now with cowardice. The Connecticut “runaways” were held to blame for the whole fiasco, which only made worse the hard feelings between the troops of New England and those of the other states that had plagued the army almost from the beginning.
Not all judgments were so harsh, however. Other things had to be weighed in the balance, wrote General Heath. “The wounds received on Long Island were yet bleeding; and the officers, if not the men, knew that the city was not to be defended.” A Connecticut chaplain, Benjamin Trumbull, who only a short while before had delivered a rousing sermon calling for courage and heroism in battle, wrote in his diary:
The men were blamed for retreating and even flying…but I imag[in]e the fault was principally in the general officers…to give the men [a] rational prospect of defense and a safe retreat, should they engage the enemy. And it is probable many lives were saved…though it was not honorable. It is admirable that so few men are lost.
In fact, many lives were saved, and even veteran troops would have fled under such a murderous cannonade as at Kips Bay. For the Connecticut men to have stayed would have been truly suicidal.
Henry Knox attributed the failure at both Brooklyn and Kips Bay to inadequate leadership by ill-trained, inexperienced officers, and a woefully overworked commander-in-chief. “The general is as worthy a man as breathes, but he cannot do everything and be everywhere,” Knox reflected in a letter to his brother.
We ought to have men of merit in the most extensive and unlimited sense of the word. Instead of which, the bulk of the officers of the army are a parcel of ignorant, stupid men who might make tolerable soldiers but [are] bad officers.
There should be military academies established to “teach th
e art of war,” Knox wrote, “and every other encouragement possible to draw persons into the army that may give luster to our arms.”
Again, as on Long Island, the enemy effort had gone like clockwork. But why their commanders had delayed in crossing the island, why they had not pushed straight on to the Hudson, remained a puzzle. Had they advanced another mile or so, they could have cut the island in two, just as Nathanael Greene had predicted, sealing off any chance Putnam and his troops had to escape.
In explanation, a romantic story spread—a story that would become legendary—that a Mrs. Robert Murray, a Quaker and an ardent patriot, had delayed William Howe and his generals by inviting them to afternoon tea at her country home at Inclenberg, later known as Murray Hill. “Mrs. Murray treated them with cake and wine, and they were induced to tarry two hours or more,” the story went, and thus Mary Lindley Murray was credited with saving part of the army, perhaps even the cause of liberty. She would be portrayed as a veritable Circe charming the gallant Britons with her feminine wiles. Possibly she did invite the officers to tea, and she may have been extremely charming, but she was also a woman in her fifties and the mother of twelve children.
More to the point, Clinton’s delay at Inclenberg was according to plan. His orders had been to hold the line there until General Howe and the rest of the invading force had landed later in the afternoon.
The British, quite understandably, considered the invasion an immense success. Howe had wanted to seize and occupy New York as quickly as possible and at the least cost in bloodshed, and all that had been accomplished. New York, the key to British strategy, was at last in British hands. Howe and his generals were entirely satisfied with the day’s work, and by nightfall their troops had crossed the middle of the island to the Hudson and pressed north to within striking distance of the rebel lines by the Harlem River.
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