New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  For their part, patrician merchants and lawyers—“men of sense, coolness and property,” as one of them put it—looked on uneasily. Also angered by British policy, such men sought to channel and contain the boisterous energies of the Liberty Boys. Temporary boycotts, formal petitions, newspaper essays and pamphlets, letters to lobbyists in London: these were the weapons wielded in New York’s elite circles, not tar and feathers or hurled stones. The lingering perception that class interest might split the patriot movement in which they themselves were invested, and even threaten the established social order, troubled patricians in New York. The wealthy young lawyer and landholder Gouverneur Morris, a devoted patriot but also a social conservative, noted privately in 1774 that “the mob begin to think and reason. . . . They bask in the sunshine, and ere noon they will bite, depend on it. The gentry begin to fear this.”7

  But the most urgently troubling social division in New York by mid-decade was that separating those who contemplated war from those who recoiled from the prospect of breaking the empire. Despite its demons of discord, New York was the most loyal of the colonial seaports. Fort George at Manhattan’s tip remained the headquarters for the British Army and “the grand Arsenal of America”—the closest thing the Crown enjoyed to an administrative center for the colonies, and a source of patronage and employment for hundreds of New Yorkers. For many, a final breach with the mother country was unthinkable, a catastrophe that would turn the world upside down. But by September 1774, William Smith Jr., lawyer and member of the royal governor’s council, a man who loved American liberty and the British crown equally, noted that respect for the king was waning in the streets of Manhattan. “You now hear the very lowest orders call him a knave or a fool,” he observed. “The first act of indiscretion on the part of the army or the people . . . would light up a civil war.”8

  By the time Washington arrived in April 1776, New Yorkers had already gotten their first tastes of such a war. The previous summer, a popularly elected Provincial Congress and a new revolutionary city government had wrested power from the old colonial authorities and raised militia regiments loyal to the Continental Congress. To avoid ambush, the hundred redcoats in Fort George evacuated to new quarters aboard the sixty-four-gun man-of-war Asia out on the Upper Bay. In August, when patriot militiamen (including a young King’s College student, Alexander Hamilton) confiscated artillery from the royal Battery at the island’s tip, the Asia fired some retaliatory cannonballs and grapeshot into lower Manhattan, damaging several buildings and spurring a mass panic in which eight thousand people—a third of the population—fled the city for safer environs elsewhere.9

  As the situation grew tenser, revolutionaries decided that the intimidation of suspected loyalists should be a central tactic in the port’s defense. Militia officer Isaac Sears gladly assisted in rounding up, disarming, and interrogating Tories in Queens, where his men demanded that they take an oath of loyalty to the Continental cause, which, as he put it, “they swallowed as hard as if it was a four pound shot that they were trying to get down.” Unrepentant loyalists faced rougher treatment. A friend watched in horror as architect Theophilus Hard-enbrook “was taken from his house by a desperate mob, who tore all his clothes from his body, rode him round the city in a cart, pelted and beat him with sticks” until he was almost dead. Patriot authorities made sure that some of the more recalcitrant Tories were sent to the dreaded Simsbury mines, a warren of subterranean tunnels in Connecticut once mined for copper and now converted into a prison for loyalists.10

  While the patriots’ harsh measures intimidated some loyalists, they also had a potent opposite effect, pushing many New Yorkers to throw in their lot with the king. Some of the city’s ablest and most influential men had already removed themselves and their families to country houses beyond the easy reach of city radicals. Much of the farmland across the water in Queens, Kings County, and Staten Island, moreover, remained home to loyalists and neutrals—Anglican congregations devoted to the king, conservative Dutch farmers wanting no part of changes promoted by city hotheads, “skulkers” in the coastal marshes waiting to make quick money supplying goods or information to the king’s troops. Washington realized that his army would “have internal as well as external enemies to contend with.”11

  In late June, a group of over a dozen Tories and two of Washington’s own soldiers were detected in a plot to kidnap or possibly assassinate the general. New York’s mayor David Mathews, an alleged plotter, was arrested and sent to Connecticut, but never tried; Thomas Hickey, one of Washington’s bodyguards, was quickly court-martialed and hanged. To be sure, beyond the perimeter of Washington’s own quarters as well as within it, sincere patriots populated the city and its hinterland. But so did spies, saboteurs, and eager recruits waiting to participate in an English invasion. Civil war might indeed be the outcome of these deepening fault lines.12

  George Washington did not know New York City or its surrounding terrain; neither did most of his officers. By the summer of 1776, his ragtag army supposedly numbered over 30,000 men, but it was seriously weakened by continual desertions, the withdrawal of soldiers returning home after fulfilling their enlistment terms, a dearth of experienced and competent officers, a woeful lack of supplies and armaments, and diseases the soldiers had carried with them from Massachusetts, plus new ones (including syphilis) they contracted in New York. The discipline and training of the average soldier left much to be desired; most, their commander noted, “regarded an officer as no more than a broomstick.” The army’s strength in men fit to fight fluctuated between about 13,500 and 23,000. Washington seriously questioned the ability of this underdisciplined citizen soldiery to withstand fire from the world’s finest professional army.13

  Sure that Howe was coming, but uncertain where and when the British would attempt a landfall, Washington spread his troops out across Manhattan and its adjoining territories, placing some of them in the array of outlying fortifications begun by Lee and completed by generals Israel Putnam and Lord Stirling. (Stirling, a New Jersey patriot whose given name was William Alexander, sported the noble title in support of his dubious claim that the Crown owed his family vast tracts of colonial land.) American troops now occupied trenches, earthworks, redoubts, and batteries on Governors Island, at Red Hook on the nearby Long Island shore, at King’s Bridge overlooking the Harlem River, and at the fortresses (soon named Fort Washington and Fort Lee) placed high above each bank of the Hudson to prevent the British from sailing up the river. Washington also made sure that Fort Stirling, the wood and earth stockade his troops built on the plateau known as Brooklyn Heights, was well equipped with artillery. The Heights commanded lower Manhattan across the mouth of the East River, as well as the entire expanse of the port’s harbor.14

  At the beginning of July, a Maryland private named Daniel Mc-Curtin happened to be peering out from the upper story of a Manhattan townhouse when he saw a sight that astounded him: “The whole Bay was full of shipping as ever it could be. I declare that I thought all London was afloat.” General Howe’s force was finally arriving; no longer would the king be represented in New York only by the handful of redcoats cooped up on ships in the harbor. By August, 32,000 soldiers—British redcoats and German mercenaries hired by George III from the principality of Hesse-Cassel—plus about 8,000 sailors and 2,000 royal marines would be on Staten Island and aboard the armada of thirty warships and four hundred transports crowding the bay, preparing for battle. It was the largest expeditionary force ever mounted by a European nation up to that time, larger than the Spanish Armada. Loyalists flocked to their standard. Staten Island’s militia pledged fealty to the king en masse; five hundred men, well versed in the local terrain and roads, switched sides in an instant by raising their right hands.15

  As New Yorkers chose sides, a rider galloped into the city on July 6, bearing momentous news from Philadelphia. The Continental Congress had declared the colonies to be independent states, a move Washington had been pressing for some time. In compl
iance with Congress’s instructions and his own elation, the commander in chief had all regiments drawn up, and on July 9, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud to the army. The troops responded “with loud huzzas.” That night, a crowd of soldiers and civilians gathered at Bowling Green outside the northern wall of Fort George and toppled the gilded lead equestrian statue of George III that New Yorkers had erected in 1766 in gratitude for the repeal of the Stamp Act. Most of the lead was carted off to Connecticut to be turned into musket balls; one patriot quipped that the king’s troops “will probably have melted majesty fired at them.”16

  A moment of rebirth was at hand; soldiers would now be fighting for their own country. But no rebirth strengthened the ailing, ramshackle American army. “The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be slaves or freemen,” General Washington told his soldiers in a written address. “The fate of unborn millions will now depend (under God) on the courage and conduct of this army. . . . We have therefore resolved to conquer or die.” Only one thing was certain as Washington and his men watched and waited: the next battle would be fought, for the first time in history, by the army of the United States of America. Whether the new nation would survive that battle was an open question.17

  On the pleasant, sunny morning of August 22, 1776, fifteen thousand British and German soldiers boarded flatboats along the Staten Island shore for the short passage across the Narrows to the beach at Gravesend in Kings County. Here the troops lined up in formation, awaiting further orders. One after the other, the regiments peeled off and marched briskly up the farmer’s path called the King’s Highway, each unit distinguished by its insignia, flag standards, and brightly colored uniforms: English regiments of foot in their red wool jackets and white leggings, Black Watch Highlanders with their blue wool bonnets (officers sporting black ostrich feathers in theirs), Hessian Jaegers (riflemen) in their smart green jackets faced with red. Bringing up the rear was a baggage train of wagons carrying the army’s supplies: ammunition, food, rum, tents, cooking equipment, bedding, and furniture for a mobile fighting force superior in numbers to all but the largest American towns. A few lines of American skirmishers took shots at the advancing enemy, then melted away into the countryside. “They climb trees, they crawl forward on their bellies for one hundred and fifty paces, shoot, and go as quickly back again,” a Hessian officer complained, but this morning the resisters did little damage. Conducted with exemplary discipline and textbook precision, General Howe’s invasion of Long Island was underway.18

  New Yorkers topple the statue of George III at Bowling Green, July 9, 1776. Engraving by John C. McRae, Pulling Down the Statue of George III by the “Sons of Freedom,” at the Bowling Green, City of New York, July 1776, ca. 1875. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

  Five miles to the north, on the long brush-and forest-covered ridge known as Gowanus Heights (stretching from what is today Sunset Park east to Bushwick), several hundred American soldiers waited nervously. Here the uniforms were even more varied, to the point of confusion: some companies of a single Massachusetts regiment wore blue jackets, other companies green or gray. Many wore no uniform at all, but a medley of ragged and threadbare civilian garments. These men, spread along five miles of the ridge’s crest and the three principal roads that cut through it, constituted a first line of defense.

  Behind Gowanus Heights lay the inner line of American fortifications on Long Island: a three-mile network of trenches, earthworks, and stockades manned by another five thousand soldiers, stretching from Fort Defiance at Red Hook to Fort Greene near Gowanus Creek and on to Fort Putnam overlooking Wallabout Bay on the East River, all of them protecting Fort Stirling on the summit of Brooklyn Heights above the shoreline village of Brooklyn, facing Manhattan. While the outer line of troops would hope to keep any attacking British forces well away from this interior line of fortifications, the string of forts was Washington’s last true defense for the heights that commanded Manhattan. Now Howe’s army was on the march toward them all, across the fields and farms of Kings County.

  By that evening, British and Hessian regiments under Charles Lord Cornwallis had taken the village of Flatbush, where Dutch farm families welcomed them with open arms and the Dutch Reformed pastor invited them to raid the wine collection of David Clarkson, one of the few local “rebels.” Over the next three days, Pennsylvania riflemen sent out from the American lines skirmished inconclusively with the enemy around Flatbush.

  Washington remained wary. Convinced that the Long Island assault might well be a feint to divert him from an impending main attack on northern Manhattan, he redeployed some regiments from Manhattan to Kings County but continued to spend most of his time at his command center in a townhouse at No. 1 Broadway, in the shadow of Fort George. On August 25 he replaced his Long Island field commander, General John Sullivan, with his own second-in-command, Israel Putnam. All three generals were convinced that defending Gowanus Heights and three of the roads that passed through its center was the key to holding Long Island and preventing Howe from approaching Manhattan from the east. If held back here, the redcoats would never threaten the interior line of fortifications that stood precariously close to the city itself. “At all hazards prevent the enemy’s passing the wood and approaching your works,” Washington ordered.19

  But Sullivan, Putnam, and Washington had committed a fatal blunder, one that exposed their near-total inexperience as battlefield commanders. They had posted troops on three roads—the Martense Lane Pass, the Flatbush Pass, and the Bedford Pass—that ran through Gowanus Heights toward the villages of Brooklyn, Bedford, and the inner defensive line. But somehow they had neglected to position more than a light patrol on a fourth road, the Jamaica Pass, “a deep winding cut” that also ran through Gowanus Heights, further to the east.20

  One officer did perceive how the Jamaica Pass utterly jeopardized the American hold on Gowanus Heights and the inner line behind it. Unfortunately for the Continental army, that officer was General Sir Henry Clinton, Lord Howe’s second in command. Moody and petulant, Clinton quarreled often with Howe and other staff officers over campaign strategy. As the son of a former royal governor of New York Colony, Clinton had spent part of his youth in the city, and he felt that his superior knowledge of the city’s terrain and surroundings entitled him to direct the New York campaign. Clinton argued doggedly for a main assault against northern Manhattan to cut the rebels off from the mainland—the assault Washington feared—but he failed to convince the cautious Howe, who preferred an offensive through Kings County to secure Brooklyn Heights and the commanding artillery positions that could sweep the city.

  Now, with the Long Island campaign in motion, Clinton was the first to see an opportunity for a brilliant victory—one that might even end the war in a single sharp blow. Clinton grasped that the unguarded Jamaica Pass exposed Washington’s army to a classic textbook maneuver. If Howe’s troops could get through the pass undetected and then move west behind the backs of the Americans on Gowanus Heights, they would flank the Continental regiments there, cut them off from their inner line of defenses, and subject them to a total rout. Taking the wooden stockades at Fort Putnam and Fort Greene would then be a mere mopping-up operation, leaving the door wide open for an assault on the vulnerable Fort Stirling. Clinton lobbied hard for his plan, this time finally managing to sway the skeptical Howe. The assault was set for the night of August 26. Sir Henry himself would have the honor of leading an advance guard of four thousand through the Jamaica Pass.21

  By 9 that evening, under a full moon, Clinton’s force, followed by corps commanded by Howe, Hugh Earl Percy, and Cornwallis, started moving up the King’s Highway from the hamlet of Flatlands toward the Jamaica Pass. Fourteen thousand men were on the march; their column, complete with baggage wagons and horse-drawn field pieces, stretched along the road for two miles. Behind them they left campfires burning to deceive the distant Americans. Tory scouts from the nearby village of New Utrecht guided the army
off the road through adjoining fields so as to minimize the risk of being discovered by American pickets or patrols.

  Moving slowly and quietly, with frequent stops so paths could be cleared through underbrush using saws rather than noisy axes, the column reached Jamaica Pass by 3 AM, when the redcoats easily surprised and captured the only American force posted to defend the crucial passage—five mounted officers. The cold night march exhausted and irritated its participants, who could hardly believe that the Americans would not discover the maneuver and ambush them. Captain James Murray of the King’s Fifty-seventh Regiment of Foot complained of “halting every minute just long enough to drop asleep and to be disturbed again in order to proceed twenty yards in the same manner.” But as the sun rose at 5:30, the army, having covered eight miles, reached its destination: the village of Bedford, directly in the rear of the still-oblivious front line of Continental regiments spread along the crest of Gowanus Heights.22

  By then, as the sound of distant cannon and musket fire told the tired British regiments, the battle had already begun. Howe and Clinton had decided on a three-pronged assault. As Clinton’s main assault force flanked Gowanus Heights, five thousand troops under Major General James Grant would divert the Americans by attacking the right (western) end of their forward line near the Martense Lane Pass, while General Philip von Heister would launch a similar feint by leading Hessian and Highlands regiments in a frontal assault on the American center ranged along the Heights. The gunfire must have initially puzzled Howe and Clinton, for the three attacks were supposed to commence simultaneously, in response to signal cannons to be fired at 9 AM. But Grant’s troops had literally jumped the gun. During the night, hungry scouts from one of his regiments had been spotted by American pickets as they hoisted watermelons from a field next to the Red Lion Tavern, just west of the Martense Pass. By dawn, Grant’s men had been exchanging fire with Pennsylvanians in the woods on the American right flank for several hours.23