1776

by David McCullough

  ***

  IT WAS APPROXIMATELY four o’clock and still dark when a young officer on horseback, Major Alexander Scammell, came riding through the outer defenses looking for General Mifflin.

  Scammell was twenty-nine years old and well liked. A Harvard graduate and an attorney in civilian life, he was quick-witted, charming, six feet two inches tall, and had been serving as an aide-de-camp to General Sullivan.

  Scammell told Mifflin the boats were ready at the river landing and that Washington was anxiously waiting for the arrival of the last remaining troops. Mifflin said Scammel had to be mistaken. He could not imagine that Washington meant his own vanguard. Scammel insisted he was not mistaken, saying he had ridden from the extreme left where he had ordered all the troops he met to march for the ferry, that they were then on the move, and that he would continue on to give the same orders.

  Mifflin then ordered General Edward Hand to form up the regiment and move out as soon as possible.

  But Scammell was mistaken. He had misunderstood Washington. The order was a blunder of exactly the kind that could spell disaster.

  The troops left the trenches and started for the river “without delay,” until just beyond the Dutch church, within a half mile of the landing, where the column halted.

  Washington, astride his horse in the middle of the road, demanded to know what was going on. General Hand was explaining when Mifflin rode up. Faces were hard to see in the dark, but Hand would remember Washington exclaiming, “Good God! General Mifflin, I am afraid you have ruined us!”

  Mifflin responded “with some warmth” that he was only obeying Washington’s orders as delivered by Major Scammell.

  Washington said it was a “dreadful mistake,” that they had come too soon, that things were in “much confusion at the ferry,” and they must turn at once and go back to their posts.

  For the weary troops who had held the lines through the night, counting the hours until they could be relieved and escape with the others, and who waited now in the dark, it was a moment of extreme difficulty, “trying business to young soldiers,” as Alexander Graydon wrote. “Whoever has seen troops in a similar situation, or duly contemplates the human heart in such trials well knows how to appreciate the conduct of these brave men on this occasion.”

  They returned to the lines as ordered, and in the words of General Hand “had the good fortune to recover our stations and keep them for some hours longer, without the enemy perceiving what was going forward.”

  ***

  AT THE FERRY LANDING all this time troops and supplies and artillery were being loaded aboard one boat after another as quickly as humanly possible and sent on their way. Everyone worked furiously. A Connecticut soldier manning one of the boats would remember making eleven crossings in the course of the night.

  But the exodus was not moving fast enough. Some of the heavy cannon, mired in mud, were impossible to move and had to be left behind. Time was running out. Though nearly morning, a large part of the army still waited to embark, and without the curtain of night to conceal them, their escape was doomed.

  Incredibly, yet again, circumstances—fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often—intervened.

  Just at daybreak a heavy fog settled in over the whole of Brooklyn, concealing everything no less than had the night. It was a fog so thick, remembered a soldier, that one “could scarcely discern a man at six yards distance.” Even with the sun up, the fog remained as dense as ever, while over on the New York side of the river there was no fog at all.

  At long last Mifflin and the rear guard and the troops at Fort Stirling were summoned. “It may be supposed we did not linger,” wrote Alexander Graydon.

  Major Tallmadge, who with his regiment was among the last to depart on the boats, would write later that he thought he saw Washington on the ferry stairs staying to the very end.

  Graydon estimated that it was seven in the morning, perhaps a little later, when he and his men landed in New York. “And in less than an hour after, the fog having dispersed, the enemy was visible on the shore we had left [behind].”

  In a single night, 9,000 troops had escaped across the river. Not a life was lost. The only men captured were three who had hung back to plunder.

  IV

  Friday, August 30th. In the morning, to our great astonishment, found they had evacuated all their works on Brookland…with not a shot being fired at them…neither could our shipping get up for want of wind, and the whole escaped…to New York.

  The immediate reaction of the British was, as Major Stephen Kemble recorded in his diary, one of utter astonishment. That the rebel army had silently vanished in the night under their very noses was almost inconceivable. The surprise for the British was no less than it had been the morning of March 5, at Boston, when they awakened to see the guns of Ticonderoga on Dorchester Heights. The great difference now was a feeling of relief, not dread. All at once the whole of Brooklyn and its elaborate defenses were theirs for the taking and the rebels were on the run.

  “We cannot yet account for their precipitate retreat,” wrote General Grant. Like many of the British, Grant failed to understand how the Americans, having labored for months on their massive fortifications, could so readily abandon them.

  General Howe had performed most admirably and deserved his success, Grant thought. The lesson of Brooklyn, Grant decided, was that if pushed the Americans would never face the King’s troops again.

  Lord Percy agreed. “They feel severely the blow of the 27th,” he wrote to his father, “and I think I may venture to assert that they will never again stand before us in the field. Everything seems to be over with them, and I flatter myself now that this campaign will put a total end to the war.” To Lord Germain as well, he predicted, “This business is pretty near over.”

  General Clinton, justifiably proud of his role in the triumph, wrote to his sister that he expected to be home by Christmas.

  As many officers as could came to see the rebel works and enjoy the view from Fort Stirling. “This and the parts adjacent is the most beautiful and fertile spot I have yet seen in America,” recorded Ambrose Serle, who was disturbed only by the reek of the unburied dead still strewn about in the fields.

  As for the rebels and their flight, Serle, like many of the British, thought they had “behaved very ill as men.”

  But there were those, including General Grant, who saw that the Americans had made a daring and superbly executed move. They had “wisely” gotten out when they did, General Clinton would later comment, and “very ably effected the retreat of their whole army.” Charles Stedman, an officer under Lord Percy, would later write a widely respected history of the war—one of the few histories by someone who was actually in the war—in which he called the retreat “particularly glorious to the Americans.” Further, he saw, as apparently Grant did not, the peril the Americans would have faced in the event of a change in the wind. Had the Phoenix and the Rose, with their combined 72 guns, fetched up into the East River as they had done before on the Hudson, Stedman emphasized, any chance of escape would have been cut off “most completely.”

  ***

  AS COMMENDABLE as Washington’s leadership during the retreat had been, good luck had played a very large part, and wars were not won by withdrawals, however well handled. Nor could a successful evacuation compensate for the losses suffered in dead and wounded and the thousand or more who had been taken prisoner by the enemy.

  The Battle of Brooklyn—the Battle of Long Island as it would be later known—had been a fiasco. Washington had proven indecisive and inept. In his first command on a large-scale field of battle, he and his general officers had not only failed, they had been made to look like fools.

  Almost from the moment he took command in New York, Washington had put himself in an impossible position. He had failed to recognize that whether the British were to attack Manhattan or Long Island, he was in a trap either way. General Lee had seen clearly that “whoever comma
nds the sea must command the town,” and from the moment Washington chose to ignore that warning, he was in trouble.

  Dividing his army, he had counted on his ability to respond to circumstances as need be, as though moving his forces back and forth over the East River would always be his choice to make. On the very eve of the British attack on Long Island, he was still baffled over whether it was the real thing and, if so, what he ought to do.

  For the British everything went as planned, from the landing at Gravesend Bay to the night march of 10,000 men through the Jamaica Pass to the battle itself. For Washington almost nothing went as planned. The assumption that the British would make an all-out frontal assault at Brooklyn, as at Bunker Hill, and as they had seemed ready to repeat at Dorchester Heights, was the heart of the American strategy, and it was largely wishful thinking. So quickly, so completely was Washington outmaneuvered, the battle was virtually over before it began. It was as though in all his anguish over where and how he might be outflanked by water, he forgot that it could happen on land.

  How a man so characteristically insistent that things be done just so, David McCullough who took such care about details, could have let the Jamaica Pass stand unguarded is impossible to explain—and particularly when he had spent the full day at Brooklyn, August 26, studying the situation.

  Washington never accounted for his part in what happened at the Battle of Long Island, and for many the brilliant success of the night escape would serve both as proof of his ability and a way to ease the humiliation and pain of defeat. The Americans could also rightly claim that they had been vastly outnumbered by a far-better-trained army, and that given the odds against them, they had, in several instances, shown exemplary courage and tenacity.

  General Putnam was blamed for not ordering Stirling to withdraw sooner. Sullivan was blamed for knowing too little about the terrain. Putnam and Sullivan were both faulted for leaving the Jamaica Pass unattended. Colonel Samuel Miles, the one supposed to be in charge of the left flank, later claimed to have had a hunch the enemy would make use of Jamaica Pass, yet he had done nothing about it. Stirling, for all his bravery, was criticized for trying to fight the British on the open field in their own fashion.

  Many, including Henry Knox, would insist that had Nathanael Greene, with his familiarity with every detail of the Heights of Gowan, been present, the British would have met stiff opposition at the Jamaica Pass and things would have gone differently. Possibly they could have. Greene’s illness and consequent absence was without question one of Washington’s severest blows.

  Washington would hold Sullivan largely to blame, for too little vigilance at the Jamaica Pass, thus implying that in his view Greene would never have allowed a British surprise to succeed there.

  But in fact a British victory had been certain all day, no matter what the Americans did. The struggle might have lasted longer, the cost to the British might have been greater, but outnumbered by such superior troops and without control of the sea, Washington and his army never really had a chance—and this quite apart from the far greater experience of the British command.

  General Howe’s decision not to continue the attack the afternoon of the battle would be a subject of endless speculation and debate. Among Howe’s severest critics was Captain John Montresor, who, the morning of August 30, had been the first to discover that the Americans had vanished in the night. To Montresor there was no question that Howe should have pressed the attack and that to have failed to do so was a grievous mistake. “Never pursues his victories” was Montresor’s curt assessment of William Howe.

  General Clinton, too, seemed to feel that with the Americans “flying in such a panic” Howe had as good a chance as he would ever have to finish them off and end the war at a stroke. But Clinton would never say so when questioned. Rather he would write that had he been in Howe’s position, he, too, would have “judged it prudent” to hold back.

  In testimony before Parliament, General Cornwallis would refuse to say that the Brooklyn lines could have been taken by an immediate attack, and said that at the time he never heard anyone claim they could have been.

  The Americans had wanted another Bunker Hill. Howe, remembering Bunker Hill, had no desire to squander lives with another bloody frontal attack on an army dug in on a hill, if, with a little patience, that same hill could be taken by less costly means. “It was apparent the lines must have been ours at a very cheap rate by regular approaches,” he would say in explanation. “I could not risk the loss that might have been sustained in the assault.”

  Had Howe pressed on the afternoon of the 27th, the British victory could have been total. Or had the wind turned earlier, and the British navy moved into the East River, the war and the chances of an independent United States of America could have been long delayed, or even ended there and then.

  ***

  WHEN NEWS OF THE BATTLE, together with Howe’s exaggerated estimates of American losses, at last reached London, it caused a sensation. A victory so grand, said the press, “fully controverted” all the “full-mouthed predictions” of the opponents of the war. Edmund Burke, Charles Fox, and others in Parliament opposed to the war were as downcast as prominent Tories were jubilant. News to “enliven our countenances,” the Tory historian Edward Gibbon called it.

  All Britain was in “an ecstasy which I cannot express,” a friend wrote to Henry Clinton. Bells were rung in London and in rural hamlets, windows lighted with candles. The King was reported to have paused during a stroll in Kew Gardens to express his “great satisfaction” with the report of General Howe, upon whom he was to confer the Order of Bath.

  ***

  IN CONGRESS the defeat was spoken of privately as an “unfortunate beginning” at best, and more candidly as a “disaster.” But there was no panic.

  Elsewhere in the country early reports of the battle were taken at first as “Tory news.” Afterward, great anxiety, if not panic, set in. “All in solicitude,” recorded the Reverend Ezra Stiles at his home in Newport. “Tories rejoicing. Sons of Liberty dejected.”

  Newspapers put heavy emphasis on Washington’s daring night retreat, calling it renewed cause for confidence in the army and in Washington most of all. The escape from Brooklyn was “a masterpiece,” read a report in the New England Chronicle. “The manner in which our retreat was performed,” reported the Virginia Gazette, “reflects the highest credit upon our commander-in-chief, and the officers in general.”

  While one writer in the New England Chronicle declared, “Providence favored us,” another in the Massachusetts Spy assured his readers that the defeat on Long Island and consequent distress were “loud speaking testimonies of the displeasure and anger of Almighty God against a sinful people.”

  We have thought God was for us, and had given many and signal instances of his power and mercy in our favor, and had greatly frowned upon and disappointed our enemies; and verily it has been so. But have we repented and given him the glory? Verily no. His hand seems to be turned and stretched out against us—and strong is his hand.

  In New York the gloom of defeat hung heavy. The high spirits of the soldiers that had been counted on for so long to compensate for, even overcome, whatever advantages the enemy might have, were gone. The army that had crossed in the night from Brooklyn was, in the light of day on August 30, a sorry sight to behold—filthy, bedraggled, numb with fatigue, still soaked to the skin, many of them sick and emaciated. The army that had gone off to Brooklyn cheering was no more.

  “It was a surprising change,” Pastor Shewkirk noted in his diary, “the merry tones on drums and fifes had ceased…. It seemed a general damp had spread, and the sight of scattered people up and down the streets was indeed moving.”

  They had been swiftly, overwhelmingly defeated. “A hard day this, for us poor Yankees” was young Enoch Anderson’s unadorned summing up of the Battle of Brooklyn.

  But as resounding as the British victory had been, it was not a decisive victory. The war had not been ended at a
stroke by a superior force of professional soldiers. Washington and his 9,000 troops had survived to fight another day.

  ***

  FOR THE FIRST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS in New York, nearly all were collapsed in sleep, including the commander-in-chief. Not until Saturday, August 31, could Washington summon the strength even to notify Congress of the escape. He had been “entirely unfit to take pen in hand,” he explained. “Since Monday scarce any of us have been out of the lines till our passage across the East River was effected yesterday morning, and for forty-eight hours preceding that I had hardly been of[f] my horse and never closed my eyes.”

  Presently he was “much hurried and engaged in arranging and making new dispositions of our forces,” he said. He would save for another letter the extremity of the concern he felt.

  Part III

  The Long Retreat

  These are the times that try men’s souls.

  —Thomas Paine,The Crisis

  December 1776