Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  He began his Patriot service by raising a company of grenadiers in New Jersey, and became colonel of New Jersey’s First Militia Regiment. He was awarded his brigadier’s rank after storming and seizing an armed British transport ship off Sandy Hook in January 1776.

  Briefly serving as commander of New York City (before Washington came down from the Boston area), Stirling began the defensive work that produced Forts Lee and Washington on opposite sides of the Hudson, and Fort Stirling on the Brooklyn Heights.

  He was involved in the Battle of Long Island that transpired the same summer of 1776, and would figure, largely in his various supportive capacities, at White Plains, Princeton, Trenton, Metuchen (his one well-remembered defeat), Brandywine, at Germantown, and Monmouth, where he distinguished himself for his command of the left wing.

  He then presided at the court-martial of General Charles Lee, whose long-simmering disaffection with Washington had come to open confrontation between the two Virginia residents when they met Sir Henry Clinton’s rear guard, under the command of Lord Cornwallis, at Monmouth, New Jersey, on June 28, 1778.

  Soon after, it was Stirling who warned Washington of a malicious whispering campaign (the “Conway Cabal”) undermining the latter’s reputation and involving certain friends of potential rival Horatio Gates. Later, in 1779, Stirling would be most supportive of another Virginia Lee—Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee—in his attack on Paulus Hook.

  By some accounts, Stirling might have saved the day—and early criticism of George Washington—at the Battle of Long Island, had his senior commanders paid greater heed to his advice. It seems that Stirling recognized the danger of a British flanking movement by way of Jamaica Pass and urged its stoppage with a heavy guard.

  His advice discarded, he acted as best he could…apparently by ordering at least a skeletal guard of five to be posted there the morning the British force marched through the very same gateway leading to their victory.

  Whatever the case, no commander could ask for a better historical epitaph than the accolade “Lord Stirling” would collect from his British adversaries in recognition of his brave stand with a forlorn rear guard later that very day.

  Stirling was taken prisoner, but up until that one moment, said one British officer, he “fought like a wolf.”

  Escape from Brooklyn

  THE ELEMENTS OF THE PROBLEM FACING GEORGE WASHINGTON IN AUGUST OF 1776 were as clear and precise as those in a mathematical problem. Dispose of the factors one by one and a solution would be reached.

  The problem was moving an army of nine thousand men across a mile-wide river in a single night without allowing the nearby, numerically superior enemy to take notice of the evacuation.

  The factors needed to solve the problem were fairly obvious:

  Find boats, lots of boats, and crewmen to guide them across the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

  Seek favorable winds and calm waters, making possible the use of sailing craft as well as oar-powered boats for the passage.

  Keep the entire operation a secret until completion—no lights and no noise.

  American Colonel Benjamin Talmadge ably summed up the endangered Continental Army’s quandry when he wrote: “To move so large a body of troops, with all their necessary appendages, across a river a full mile wide, with a rapid current in the face of a victorious, well disciplined army, nearly three times as numerous…and a fleet capable of stopping the navigation, so that not one boat could have passed over, seemed to present most formidable obstacles.”

  Keep in mind that August 29 was a midsummer date, meaning one of the year’s shortest nights.

  Having decisively lost the Battle of Long Island to a British-Hessian host just days before, however, Washington couldn’t wait for more favorable conditions. He had to withdraw his bruised, outnumbered army quickly, or possibly suffer an even more disastrous defeat with his back to the wide river and no room for retreat or maneuver. Fortunately, British General Sir William Howe once again was slow to follow up on his victory, a bad habit of his…but he could make his next move at any moment.

  Outgeneraled by Howe so far, Washington now began to turn tables on his foe. In fact, he was turning positively cagey. Having settled upon his desperate plan in his own mind, Washington found a clever way to prepare his men for the evacuation without revealing, even to them, that there would be an evacuation. He passed the word that he was bringing in reinforcements from New Jersey, and his men, entrenched on the Brooklyn Heights, had better pack up for a reshuffle of units on the front lines.

  In the meantime, Washington had ordered two subordinates to round up every boat they could find, especially flat-bottomed craft that could carry heavy loads and horses. The commander in chief had previously been using ten bargelike vessels to ferry his troops back and forth, but now he needed an entire fleet of barges, boats, sailing craft—whatever could be found…without the British discovering what was afoot.

  A small fleet of boats indeed was found, but today’s historians don’t really know where or how. According to George Athan Billias, biographer of the Marblehead (Massachusetts) mariner John Glover, “At least one sloop was known to have been pressed into service, but little else is known about the other craft used in the evacuation” (General John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners, 1960).

  We do know that Washington assigned two Massachusetts regiments to the job—Glover’s Fourteenth and Israel Hutchinson’s Twenty-seventh—and an outfit made up of mariners from Salem, Lynn, and Danvers. “These Massachusetts mariners were pitting their seamen’s skills against three factors that might make a shambles of the operation—time, tide, and wind,” said Billias.

  On such a midsummer’s short night, it would be a race against the clock, a race that could be adversely affected by wind and tide. “If wind conditions were not just right, sailing vessels could not be used in the evacuation at all; and if boats had to be rowed against the tide, each trip would take longer.”

  As events turned out, the “boatlift” began promptly at ten o’clock, with New York’s General Alexander McDougall acting as a beach-master, organizing the quiet shuffle into the boats. Despite the darkness, the small boats smoothly made their two-mile round-trips until about midnight, but then an ebb tide and contrary winds knocked the sailing craft out of the game—“The evacuation seemed destined for disaster at this point; the number of rowboats on hand was not sufficient to carry off the rest of the men in a single night.”

  A more favorable wind soon returned but, as Billias noted, precious time had been lost. By the dawn, most of the nine thousand men had been delivered to the Manhattan shoreline, but not all. For those remaining on the Brooklyn side of the East River, the race against the clock seemed lost.

  Or was it? Thanks to a thick fog blanketing the river banks, the boatlift was able to continue without interruption from the British. Said a British officer later: “In the Morning, to our Great Astonishment, [we] found they had evacuated all their Works…without a Shot being shot at them.”

  For the moment, Washington and his army were out of danger. In the Battle of Long Island, General Sir William Howe had fooled Washington, but now Washington had fooled Howe.

  Pamphleteer, Soldier, Politician

  GEORGE WASHINGTON CALLED HIM “A BRAVE SOLDIER AND DISTINGUISHED patriot.” Indeed, he contributed to the birthing of a nation in countless ways.

  Packing career after career into his fifty-four years, Scotsman Alexander McDougall was one of those early Patriots—key figures in the Revolution—who are hardly known today. In McDougall’s particular case, though, we have to ask if many others gave so much, so repeatedly, so many different ways… before being largely forgotten.

  A privateer out of New York in the French and Indian War, for the British of course, he later became a controversial pro-liberty, antiestablishment pamphleteer.

  As a result, he served time in jail. So many followers came to visit him, he had to draw up a visitor’s schedule. The number forty-
five, stemming from the title of a political tract, became so closely associated with McDougall that forty-five maidens visited him, as did forty-five men who joined him on his forty-fifth day of confinement in eating forty-five pounds of steak taken from a forty-five-month-old steer. All that was back in 1770, and somewhere in that crowd, quite obviously, there lurked an early public relations genius, perhaps McDougall himself. (Then, too, Scots-born Alexander McDougall certainly was aware of “Bonnie Prince” Charlie’s Rebellion of Forty-Five—1745.)

  In previous years, after emigrating to New York with his parents from the Hebrides Islands of Scotland, he had been a milk delivery boy in the city. In his adult years, he had his hands full as a ship owner, merchant, planter’s agent, venture capitalist, twice-married husband, and father. He was a wealthy entrepreneur by the 1770s, and he didn’t have to become a revolutionary. He didn’t have to attack the policies of colonial New York and the British Parliament. He didn’t have to lift a finger, or take the risks…except for his own belief in, and early commitment to, the cause of liberty.

  Indeed, as a leader of the New York Sons of Liberty in the tumultuous 1770s, this burly, blunt-spoken entrepreneur soon saw his life going in new, often painful, directions.

  In 1771, he was back in jail for his antiestablishment writings—called seditious writings by his accusers. In 1773, he was an organizer of a Boston-like “tea party” that dumped British tea into New York’s East River.

  He soon was at the forefront of those urging formation of a continental congress. In late 1774, fittingly, he was on hand in Philadelphia as an observer of the First Continental Congress. Before all the revolutionary shouting was over, in fact, he himself briefly would serve as a delegate to this historic body. But first, in 1775, he served in the New York Provincial Congress. That year also, he was a member of the Committee of 100, appointed to draft the blue-print for a New York state government. Still, in 1775 he also became a colonel and regimental commander in the New York militia.

  He lost a son in the ill-fated Quebec campaign of 1775–1776.

  Newly appointed in 1776 as colonel of the New York First Continentals, he (and his men) helped build the defenses of New York and then took part in the Battle of Long Island across the East River from Manhattan. With that battle lost, he provided crucial help in the secret, nighttime evacuation of Washington’s army from Brooklyn. As the man in charge of loading the hastily assembled, makeshift fleet, he left on one of the very last boats to spirit the Americans to relative safety back in Manhattan.

  Neither 1776 nor his military career was quite over yet, with the Revolutionary War now at hot pitch. Somewhere around this time, he successfully advised Washington to have his Continentals load their muskets with buckshot. Soon, McDougall and his brigade were in the Battle of White Plains…were credited, in fact, with holding the line against redcoats and Hessians at Chatterton’s Hill until outflanked because of another unit’s failure to hold.

  Then following Washington’s line of retreat through New Jersey to Pennsylvania, McDougall became ill and was inactive for a month. But he rebounded in early 1777 and was placed in charge of military stores in the Hudson Highlands, where, with only a relatively few men, he rebuffed a British raid and safeguarded the vital supplies. Over the next few years, McDougall often would be posted in the same area—with improved defenses at West Point one of his major goals and achievements.

  In the meantime, though, there would be many interruptions for the ever-reliable Scotsman. Late in 1777, for instance, he and his brigade were called back to George Washington’s side for the campaign against General Sir William Howe outside of Philadelphia—McDougall’s brigade then became the spear-head for Nathanael Greene’s flank attack in the Battle of Germantown and, when that failed, covered Greene’s retreat.

  Soon to win appointment by the Continental Congress as a major general, McDougall also provided valuable service in formal inquiries into the conduct of fellow general officers, notably that of “Mad” Anthony Wayne in the disaster of Paoli, Pennsylvania, that same fall. McDougall, now in command of a division, next joined Greene in fighting the Battle of Fort Mercer in nearby New Jersey, another loss for the Americans. As Washington took his army into winter quarters at Valley Forge, McDougall once again was laid low by illness—he spent the next two months recuperating in Morristown, New Jersey.

  By the following spring, though, he was well enough to return to the Hudson Highlands for a short time, to spend the summer months with the Continentals in Connecticut, then return late in the year to his improvements at West Point. He would be in command of West Point itself over the next four years—always with a few more interruptions.

  In 1780, McDougall spent seven weeks in Philadelphia lobbying the Continental Congress for an improved financial package for the army’s general officers. Unsuccessful in the venture that year, he returned early in 1781, elected as a member of the Congress—from New York, of course. Now both an army general and a delegate, he lasted for thirty-seven days before his dwindling personal finances forced him to return to paid army service, however small the stipend to be earned. Indications are that Congress was relieved to be rid of a military man in its midst.

  Another interruption soon came about—a court-martial stemming from feuding with a superior officer. As one result, Washington relieved McDougall from his command at West Point. The court-martial on seven counts produced a reprimand on only one of them; the rest were dismissed. For now, however, McDougall was on the outs with key figures among his fellow generals—“Lord Stirling,” president of his court-martial; Henry Knox, McDougall’s replacement as commander at West Point; and William Heath, the superior officer McDougall had feuded with in the first place.

  Washington still thought enough of him to offer him a division command in the field, but McDougall’s health forced him to decline. His financial health was failing as well—he and his wife now sold garden produce to help make ends meet. In late 1782 and early 1783, he reappeared before Congress as part of a three-man delegation again seeking pension relief for Continental Army officers. The Congress, as it had before, pleaded no funds. But later that year, pressured by officers meeting at Newburgh and New Windsor, New York, Congress found the means to give the officers a choice between half-pay for life or full pay for five years.

  Meanwhile, joining hands with Knox, McDougall became a founder of the Society of Cincinnati as the Revolutionary War ended, and served as the first president of its New York chapter. On another gratifying note for this veteran revolutionary, he was able to march into New York with Washington when the British evacuated the city in November 1783.

  Before his death just three years later at fifty-four, McDougall once again would see brief service as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He also served in the newly created state senate of New York and—at last returning to his beginnings as a New York businessman—as first president of the Bank of New York. Overall, through many difficult and tumultuous years, noted Washington at the time of McDougall’s death in 1786, the transplanted Scotsman had been “a brave soldier and distinguished patriot.” As Washington could have added, in twentieth-century terminology, few others could claim a revolutionary résumé quite so replete.

  New York Lost

  WAS THIS OUR UNFLAPPABLE GEORGE WASHINGTON WHOM WE SEE IN ALL THOSE stiff portraits of his day? The remarkable, seldom-discouraged commander in chief we read about in all the histories? On Manhattan Island one day in September 1776, near today’s busy intersection of Forty-second and Lexington, close to the future Grand Central Station, there he was, shouting, throwing his hat on the ground, lashing with his cane at men and officers streaming past him in frenzied retreat.

  He shouted, Job-like, in pain and bewilderment: “Are these the men I am to defend America with?”

  In his day, the nearby crossroads connected the Post Road and Bloomingdale Road. Boldly moving at noontime, in broad daylight, the British had landed four thousand men on the beaches of the East Riv
er, at a spot known as Kip’s Bay. A heavy bombardment by the fleet offshore tore up the river embankment, created a thunderstorm of incessant noise, and succeeded in unnerving the Connecticut and New York militia stationed along the beach area, but did little physical damage.

  Soon, nearly one hundred flatboats filled with troops left the big ships and headed for shore. The four divisions of British and Hessian soldiers landed roughly at the spot where today’s East Thirty-fourth Street runs to the river. The militia by now had melted away, and the British drove inland with hardly any opposition.

  Once again, disaster loomed for George Washington and his unseasoned army. The fact was, he again had made mistakes in his troop dispositions. Defending a thirteen-mile-long island against a numerically superior enemy in total control of the surrounding waters, he had divided his forces into three basic groups.

  General William Heath and nine thousand men were to the north, at King’s Bridge. This was the escape hatch for if and when Washington must quit Manhattan altogether. Below, at the southern end of Manhattan, were General Israel Putnam and five thousand men. Finally, stationed at the center of the island and able, in theory, to move either direction as circumstance might dictate, were General Nathanael Greene and another five thousand men.

  The entire piecemeal arrangement invited British attack, but what else was the American commander to do? New York commanded the entrance to the Hudson River, strategically important as a veritable “highway” running far to the north; New York was a political and propaganda plum for whichever side held the city, and Congress had told Washington to hold the city as long as he could.

  For the British, New York was a highly desirable objective for all the same reasons, plus the fact they needed a safe and reliable base of operations after being forced to abandon Boston. Now, in the weeks after taking over Long Island and Brooklyn east of the East River, they could consider various options in planning their attack on Manhattan Island. They could (a) attack at King’s Bridge and thus put a cork in Washington’s only escape route out of Manhattan; (b) go ashore from the Hudson River in the vicinity of today’s Harlem, high on the western side of the island; or (c) land a major contingent on the eastern banks of Manhattan, right in the middle.