Many of these brave soldiers, including brothers William and Samuel McMillan, bore the brunt of the vicious German and Highlander juggernaut. Born in Scotland and raised in Harford County, Maryland, the McMillan brothers were fierce supporters of the Revolution, and both served in the militia before becoming noncommissioned officers in Smallwood’s Battalion. Caught in the vortex of the melee, William later wrote, “My captain was killed, first lieutenant was killed, second lieutenant shot through [the] hand.” The Hessians also killed two corporals and two sergeants in the company, “one in front of me [at the] same time my bayonet was shot off my gun.” McMillan described the harrowing nature of the battle, including a “perty severe fight.” He went on to give the details of when things started to collapse, saying, “We were surrounded by healanders [Scottish Highlanders] one side, hessians on the other.” Eventually, “my Brother and about—50 or 60 of us was taken.”
Private John Hughes and Captain Barton Lucas, the commanding officer of the 3rd Company, barely escaped with their lives; in all, only seven of the sixty-man company survived. The remainder were killed or captured, including Gist’s close friend William Sterrett. The entire Maryland Line, including Gist, thought that Sterrett was killed in action. A death notice appeared in the Maryland Gazette, and Gist wrote to express his sympathy to Sterrett’s sister Polly, who later became Gist’s wife. In reality, Sterrett was stripped of his belongings and taken prisoner by the Hessians. The Americans were cut off from the retreat by Cornwallis, and Gowanus Creek remained the only avenue of escape for any not crushed between the British and Hessian forces. The waters of the bay were at high tide, making the creek and adjoining marshes nearly impassable. The men had to wade and swim through waist- and often neck-deep water, while trying to evade the British fire. In the heat of the battle, one American looked back at Gist and claimed he and his determined band of Marylanders were all that stood between the British and the Continental Army’s annihilation, “Major Gist [and his men] kept the ground, while the rest of the brigade crossed a creek. . . . The major and his party were drove, and I expected never to see them again.”
Standing next to Smallwood, who had just returned from a court-martial held in Manhattan, and peering through his spyglass from a nearby hill located behind fortifications in the American lines, George Washington was visibly moved by the courage and great sacrifice of the Marylanders. According to one account, “Gen. Washington wrung his hands, and cried out, ‘Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!’”
To cover the retreating Americans as they swam for their lives, Smallwood asked Washington for permission to bring up two cannons drawn from recently acquired reinforcements. Captain Thomas’s Maryland Independent Company, including Lieutenant Jack Steward, had arrived in Brooklyn with Smallwood earlier that morning, and they, along with a regiment of Connecticut soldiers, provided covering fire.
According to sixteen-year-old Connecticut Private Joseph Plumb Martin, who maintained a valuable diary throughout the Revolution and who fought alongside the Marylanders in several battles, the men came “out of the water and mud, to us, looking like water-rats.” Many Marylanders suffocated or drowned. Smallwood added, “Most of those who swam over, and others who attempted to cross before the covering party got down, lost their arms and accoutrements in the mud and creek, and some fellows their lives.” In an effort to prevent more drowning, Captain Samuel Smith, in command of the 8th Company in Smallwood’s Battalion, made the swim not just once, but several times. “He and a sergeant swam over and got two slabs into the water on the ends of which they ferried over all who could not swim.”
Ramsay could not swim, but his great height of six-foot-three saved his life. He had to “hold up his chin to keep the water from running into his mouth.” Ramsay’s brother-in-law, Ensign James Peale, lost his shoes while swimming the morass. Another one of the Marylanders who survived near-drowning was original cadet Ensign Bryan Philpot. His son later retold his father’s ordeal: “[My father spoke] of the retreat after the battle in which he was obligated to swim a creek, and of the difficulty with which he escaped drowning from the struggles of a soldier who was also in retreat.” He added, “[My father] describe[d] his feelings on first going into an engagement and [I have] heard him tell of a wounded soldier who was sitting by a tree by his side during a battle when a cannonball shot away the top of his head.” Another soldier reported that the body of the decapitated man went flying through the air and knocked down one of the officers. Despite the omnipresent slaughter, some Marylanders managed to escape across the marsh and creek, including the intrepid Major Gist. He recalled, “A party retreated to the right through the woods, and Captain Ford and myself, with 20 others, to the left, through a marsh; nine only of us got safe in.”
Many others did not make the crossing and were killed or captured—which was also a virtual death sentence. Smith summed up the depth and breadth of their sacrifice: “The men were surrounded, and almost all killed, for the Hessians gave no quarter on that day. The loss of the regiment was about 250; the residue got off, as best they could.” The Marylanders lost many men whose names remain unrecorded. One known officer who lost his life that day was Captain Edward Veazey, an original member of Smallwood’s Battalion who raised his own company. Another Marylander chronicled the carnage: “Captain Veazey is dead. Lieutenants Butler, Sterrett, Wright, Fernandis and deCoursey, with about 250 of our battalion are missing.” The Marylanders had sustained some of the highest losses of any of the units that had entered the battle.
Those who escaped with their lives that day included William Chaplin, who was born in Colchester, England, and ran a plantation in Maryland. Chaplin, who still harbored loyalty to the Crown, was one of the lucky ones, as most of the men from his company were wounded or killed.
The Marylanders’ brother regiment, the Delaware Blues, suffered fewer casualties during the battle, but its commander, Colonel John Haslet, reported that the regimental colors were brought back “torn with shot.” With his ranks reduced, Stirling attempted to make his way off the battlefield but “soon found it would be in vain to attempt to make my escape, and therefore went to surrender myself to General De Heister, commander in chief of the Hessians.” Cornwallis later praised him, noting, “General Stirling fought like a wolf.”
The Marylanders’ desperate, doomed charge on Cornwallis brought salvation for what was left of Stirling’s command and the right wing of the American army, giving them a precious window of time in which to escape. It also tied up Grant’s and Cornwallis’s forces, which united could have been used to assault the American defenses on Brooklyn Heights. The Marylanders who participated in that unorthodox assault became known as the Maryland 400, or the Immortal 400. With their blood, the Immortals bought “an hour, more precious to American liberty than any other in its history.” The Marylanders’ stand chewed up daylight on the afternoon of August 27 and bought Washington time, preventing the British from uniting the various wings of their army to make a combined assault on the Brooklyn defenses during the day. Each hour that ticked by was an hour closer to darkness. Howe had a new army. This was their first battle, and night assaults were difficult for even the most experienced army in the eighteenth century.
Had Howe pressed the attack on the forts that afternoon, his victory likely would have been total. The war might have ended that day. It was one of the few times in the Revolution when all the circumstances were aligned for a crushing British victory. The British would have captured the bulk of the American army, including possibly even Washington and his top commanders. That could have snuffed out the Revolution, turning it into little more than a footnote in the history of the British Empire. However, a series of circumstances and actions gave Washington’s forces another chance to survive.
Howe assumed he had time and the weather on his side. He had not only won a great battle: he was also convinced that he had trapped the bulk of the American army on Brooklyn Height
s and that there was ample time to destroy it with minimal British losses. The Royal Navy was in position to prevent Washington’s retreat across the East River, leaving the Americans effectively bottled up in their fortifications. Washington’s army—and arguably the outcome of the entire war—remained at risk.
Chapter 10
Escape from Long Island
After the Immortals’ ultimate sacrifice, the British drove what was left of Stirling’s brigade to the forts on Brooklyn Heights, “The enemy came within 150 yards of our fort, but were repulsed with great loss. We expected another attack today, but they are preparing, by their movements to give us a cannonade. . . . I hear the thunder of cannon and the roar of musketry, so I believe the attack has begun,” wrote one of the few surviving Marylanders.
All night, stragglers from the Heights of Gowanus trickled into the American fortifications on Brooklyn Heights. The toll of the Battle of Brooklyn, also known as the Battle of Long Island, was staggering. By Smallwood’s reckoning, 256 Maryland men and officers were killed or missing. The victorious British army sprawled out over a mile and a half before the American defenses, but it was exhausted after a night of marching and a day of battle. The men were tired and hungry. The British had defeated Washington’s forward defense, but their victory could have been crushing. Perhaps mindful of the severe losses sustained on Bunker Hill, and of the delay caused by the Marylanders’ stand, General William Howe made his fateful decision and ordered his men to halt instead of storming the American defenses. “It required repeated orders to prevail upon them to desist from the attempt.”
Connected by over a mile of trenches, the five American forts that occupied high ground would have been difficult to take by direct assault. One British officer summed up the situation, noting, “We had no fascines to fill ditches, no axes to cut abatis, and no scaling ladder to assault so respectable a work. Lines were a mile and a half [in] extent, including angles, cannon-proof, with a chain of fine redoubts, or rather fortresses with ditches, as half a line the intervals; the whole surmount with a most formidable abatis finished in every part.” Consisting of sharpened logs that faced outward, an abatis was the eighteenth-century equivalent of barbed wire. Men needed to pierce it with axes before any assault could go forward. While the defenses weren’t insurmountable, overcoming them would take time and expose assaulting parties to fire. Howe looked upon his men as a precious resource that he didn’t want to spend foolishly. After the battle at Bunker Hill, he wrote, “When I looked to the consequences of it, in the loss of so many brave Officers, I do it with horror—the Success is too dearly bought.”
Rather than command a headlong frontal assault, Howe ordered his men to begin preparations for a formal siege. Half of his men acted as trench guards, while the other half started digging zigzagged trenches that methodically pushed toward the American lines. To finish off the Patriots, Howe planned to use his brother’s warships in the East River to seal the fate of the American army. As Howe’s coup de grâce unfolded, dark clouds rolled in. Cold rain fell in sheets, filling the trenches with ankle- to waist-deep water. Hail fell as lightning flashed, and a massive nor’easter pelted the American and British lines. American Private Joseph Plumb Martin recalled, “There fell a very heavy shower, which wet us all to the skin and much damaged our ammunition.” The entire battlefield became a sea of mud. The rain hindered the work on the trenches and also created conditions for another timely weather event.
In the midst of the downpour, the strain of battle began to take a toll on the citizen-soldiers. John Hughes, a twenty-six-year-old Marylander from Frederick County who served in Captain Barton Lucas’s 3rd Company, recalled that Lucas found the losses particularly difficult to bear. In an application for a pension11 made after the war, Hughes stated “that at the Battle of [Brooklyn] his Capt. Barton Lucas became deranged in consequence of losing his company . . . all of whom except seven were killed or taken prisoner.” Other nervous soldiers fired their weapons indiscriminately. “Troops fired off their Guns quite till Evening so that it seemed indeed dangerous to walk within our own lines,” said one of the men.
11. Beginning in the early part of the nineteenth century, surviving American veterans of the Revolutionary War could apply for a pension. The veterans would typically go to the local courthouse and swear under oath the details of their military service. The level of detail varied from cursory to exhaustive. At times, the local officials would also ask questions such as the names of the applicants’ officers or the names of other men in their units. Supporting affidavits from other veterans were sometimes attached. This book drew extensively on these raw, boots-on-the-ground stories of the Revolution.
From within the walls of a spacious mansion on Brooklyn Heights known as the Four Chimneys, George Washington convened a council of war and looked out upon his waterlogged troops from the windows of the estate. It had rained “so much that the Trenches, Forts, Tents, & Camp . . . overflowed with water.” As the deluge continued and lightning arced across the sky, he asked his seven general officers from the Brooklyn Heights defenses what their next move should be. Washington’s officers doubted whether an evacuation was possible. The East River was a mile wide and had swift currents. Not realizing that the storm winds had prevented the Royal Navy from sailing upriver and getting behind the American defenses in Brooklyn Heights, the generals believed their forces were vulnerable to attack by land and sea if they tried to cross over to Manhattan. In light of the dangers, General Israel Putnam argued that the men should remain behind their fortifications and fight.
Washington put an end to the debate by ordering an evacuation. Realizing the importance of secrecy and knowing that a single traitor could cause the downfall of the entire operation, he ordered that nobody be told the true nature of the plan outside a small circle of his principal lieutenants. All available boats were to carry additional reinforcements to Brooklyn, bringing his total force up to ninety-five hundred. Fortunately, these reinforcements included mariners and fisherman from Marblehead, Massachusetts, led by Colonel John Glover. Clad in short blue coats and white waterproof trousers, the Marblehead Mariners were expert sailors, ideal for coordinating the amphibious evacuation. The remaining Marylanders along with Haslet’s Delaware Regiment received the honor of forming the rear guard.12 Smallwood recalled that his men “had but one day’s respite” when Washington ordered them to “the advanced post at Fort Putnam, within two hundred and fifty yards of the enemy’s approaches.”
12. Also in the rear guard was the 1st New York, with its 120 grenadiers, each of whom carried six hand grenades, which were about the size of a cricket ball and filled with gunpowder.
About 7:00 p.m., the evacuation began. Purposely keeping the men in the dark about the withdrawal, the officers ordered them to gather their arms and packs and told them that they were going to conduct a night attack against the enemy. Initially, the East River was swirling, and the tide was rough, making it impossible for boats to cross. Somehow, ninety-five hundred men and their equipment would have to pass over the East River under the eyes of the British.
Fortuitously, around 11:00 the wind changed and blew in a favorable direction for the Americans. In the beginning, only ten boats were available for the evacuation. They miraculously found more men, but the vessels would have to be stuffed to the gills, crammed with men and equipment in order to get everyone over before daybreak. When the boats were fully loaded, the gunwales rode only three inches above the water. After the shift in the weather, the river was “remarkably still, the water smooth as glass.” An eerie silence prevailed upon Brooklyn. Using cloth-covered oars to muffle the sound, Glover and the Marblehead Mariners made countless two-mile round-trips across the river, delivering Americans to safety. When the wind became more favorable overnight, they put up sails as well to propel the boats as quickly and quietly as possible.
Near 2:00 a.m. the surreal silence was broken along the battlefield by a booming
explosion. It is possible the detonation was an accidental discharge of a cannon that the Americans had spiked to prevent its use by the British. One eyewitness recalled, “The effect was at once alarming and sublime.” When no further fire erupted, the ferrying operation continued.
An hour later, a misdirected order almost blew the entire evacuation. General Thomas Mifflin, a former Quaker from Pennsylvania who was the American army’s first quartermaster general, ordered his rear guard out of position earlier than requested. Hundreds of men were about to flood the ferry site.13 Still on the Brooklyn side, General Washington confronted Mifflin, saying, “Good God! General Mifflin, I am afraid you have ruined us by so unseasonably withdrawing troops from the line!” Fortunately, the British did not notice their absence, and the men returned to their positions without incident. The evacuation went on.
13. Today, the spot is near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge next to an elegant riverside restaurant.
Shortly before sunrise, panic began to set in at the embarkation point. While many of the Americans had successfully made it across the river, all too many remained behind in Brooklyn. As light broke, it was difficult if not impossible to hide what was happening from the enemy. Crowds of men surged toward the remaining boats. Washington himself took control of the situation. One of his aides recalled that the commander in chief picked up a large stone, raised it over his head, and ordered the disorderly men to leave the boat. Otherwise, he would “sink it to hell.” Word spread of Washington’s leadership, and the retreat proceeded in a more orderly fashion.
On the British side, Howe’s forces became suspicious. Around 4:00 a.m., Captain John Montresor, Howe’s chief engineer and a veteran of the French and Indian War, led a patrol that stumbled upon empty American breastworks. In addition, a Tory woman sent her black slave to alert the British, but the slave was captured and detained by Hessian soldiers for several hours. Somehow, word of neither incident reached Howe.
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