Conceived in Liberty (238 page)

Among the three of them, Washington, Sullivan, and Putnam managed to leave the Jamaica Pass and the left wing of the ridge undefended—an arrangement that had passed muster with Washington. Learning of this gap in the American lines, Howe executed a brilliant tactical maneuver; while the center and left of the British forces frontally attacked the ridge, Howe, guided by Tories, moved through the Jamaica Pass in a flanking maneuver during the night of August 26 and surprised, encircled, and fell upon Sullivan’s forces. Washington could easily have learned of this flanking
maneuver in one of two ways: by recognizing the significance of a previous shift of British troops toward the eastern flank or by employing cavalry in his patrols. But he did neither. Furthermore, old Putnam, after learning of the penetration of the Jamaica Pass, failed to notify his commanders. Consequently, Sullivan’s division was smashed and Sullivan himself captured, as was General Stirling, commander of the American right wing. Nearly 2,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or captured in the Battle of Long Island, while the British lost only 300 men. Instead of pulling out his forces as quickly as possible, Washington compounded his series of blunders by rushing six more regiments into Long Island and assuming personal command.
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By pressing his advantage, General Howe could have annihilated Washington’s army then and there; but again, against the pleas of his commanders, he failed to move, allowing the Americans to regroup on Brooklyn Heights. For three days, he stalled and failed to mount an attack which could easily have overrun the entrapped American army. And neither did his brother’s fleet ships shell the Americans into submission.

On the night of the twenty-ninth, Washington at last decided to move, mounting a mass evacuation of his army from Brooklyn. The evacuation proceeded successfully in a fleet of small boats. He has been extravagantly praised for a heroic retreat, but it could never have taken place had Admiral Howe bothered to station his ships in the East River. Furthermore, instead of moving his troops to the mainland, Washington sailed into another potential deathtrap: Manhattan Island. The fleet of fishermen from Salem and Marblehead, however, assuredly performed a heroic job of shuttling the entire force of 9,500 men and their equipment across the river in a night of poor weather.

The morale of the Americans was in great disrepair as a result of the defeat on Long Island. Entire regiments deserted and left for home. Respect for Washington’s military acumen among his officers had plummeted; one of his most brilliant officers, Col. John Haslet of the Delaware Regiment, wrote, “Would to Heaven General Lee were here is the language of officers and men.”

Once again, Washington remained where he could be encircled and smashed, and once more Howe dawdled and did nothing; his brother opened another round of futile peace talks with the Americans, releasing the sympathetic General Sullivan to convey terms to the Continental Congress, terms which the Americans, now committed to independence, predictably spurned.

General Greene, Col. Joseph Reed, Washington’s adjutant, and other
officers strongly urged a speedy evacuation of New York, and even the burning of that largely Tory city to the ground. Congress vetoed the idea of destroying New York, but Washington refused to evacuate, instead, as a supposed compromise, ineffectually stringing his men out across Manhattan Island. Once again, he was courting potential disaster by splitting his none-too-strong forces. Putnam’s division was stationed in New York City at the southern tip of Manhattan Island; Gen. William Heath’s forces were put on the northern tip of Manhattan; and a small force under Greene, over his strenuous protest, was placed in the middle of south-central Manhattan, at the East River, near what is now Thirty-fourth Street.

Characteristically, Gen. Howe did not land in northern Manhattan and trap the Americans; rather he waited until Washington was beginning to move his forces that direction and then landed in the southerly part at Kip’s Bay and Turtle Bay on September 15. Again, he was terribly sluggish and failed to march across Manhattan to cut off Putnam’s retreat. Even so, the energetic but bumbling Putnam would not have escaped were it not for Burr, who conducted the troops up a little-known road near the Hudson River on the west side of the island. The properly wild flight north by Greene’s small force of militia was unsuccessfully impeded by the explosive rage of Washington, who himself was almost captured during a foolish attempt to rally them for a stand in the south. The next day, however, American troops, in an open skirmish in front of Harlem Heights, fought well, giving a boost to drooping American morale.

Again General Howe failed to pursue his advantage, allowing Washington to fortify Harlem Heights and Fort Washington in northern Manhattan. Almost incredibly, Howe spent another month erecting defensive fortifications in New York City! As Professor Alden puts it, “Howe... allowed day after day of good campaigning weather to pass while he threw up defenses against a weak and retreating enemy.”
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Of course, instead of fortifying Manhattan, Washington should have taken the opportunity to flee north to the mainland, but in all fairness, it must be noted that in making this decision he was bowing to the wish of Congress to hold New York and its environs.

Again, he foolishly split his forces, now numbering 16,000, to hold indefensible fixed positions. Greene was sent off with a rather small force to hold Fort Constitution on New Jersey’s shore opposite Fort Washington. The rest of the army was divided between Fort Washington and Kingsbridge, across the Harlem River from the northernmost tip of the island, guarding the exit route to the mainland. Meanwhile, supplies grew increasingly short and soldiers were deserting in droves.

On September 22, while Howe was dithering in New York City, the British executed Capt. Nathan Hale, a twenty-one-year-old school teacher from Connecticut who had volunteered to spy behind enemy lines. He had been betrayed by a Tory relative and was hanged without even the formality of a trial or benefit of clergy; his last-minute letters to his family and fianceé were torn up in front of his eyes. Before dying, the gallant young Hale uttered his famous words: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

When Howe finally moved on October 12, he blundered once again. He landed nearly his entire force on the mainland to the east of Kings-bridge to outflank and encircle the American troops. However, he landed in what is now the Bronx, at Throg’s Neck, a virtual island linked to the mainland by a narrow causeway controlled by American troops. Washington was about to decide to fight off this flanking action (rather than to retreat) when, on October 14, Charles Lee, rushing up from South Carolina, reached the army to the undisguised joy of the American officers and men. He was immediately placed in charge of the hot spot on the American left flank, facing Howe’s army. He began a strong and vigorous denunciation of Washington’s decision to stay and fight on Harlem Heights, a decision that most of Washington’s generals had supported. He urged the “absolute necessity” of quickly getting off Manhattan—where the Americans were in imminent danger of being surrounded by the British—and moving on to defensible ground. His pressure forced an American council of war on October 16, and Washington and the council were finally persuaded of this view. Lee’s wisdom and determination here proved momentous, for the troops were thereby enabled to leave Manhattan in the nick of time, saving the American cause and probably the American republic. This high judgment of Lee’s last-minute achievement was voiced by many contemporaries, including Joseph Reed and Washington’s close friend and admirer the Marquis de Lafayette.

But Washington seems to have been incapable of making a completely correct military decision—even after pressure and lengthy reconsideration of his initial blunders. Agreeing to retreat, he yet overruled Lee in one of the most disastrous decisions of the war: he left 2,000 men at Fort Washington. Totally isolated and soon to be surrounded by the formidable British force, the 2,000 were doomed to certain capture.

Meanwhile, after stumbling around in an impossible position at Throg’s Neck and losing six precious days, Howe withdrew his entire force on October 18 to Pell’s Point, three miles to the northeast—where he should have landed originally—and slogged north past Yonkers toward White Plains. On the same day Washington’s army left Manhattan. Howe could easily have sliced west and dispatched the long line of them; instead, he lingered at New Rochelle in Mamaroneck on the east coast of Westchester
for an entire week, thoughtfully allowing Washington to gather and entrench his entire army on the hills overlooking White Plains. Howe’s intended flanking movement could now never materialize. As the English historian Trevelyan acidly put it, “The sun had set and risen more than forty times, since General Howe broke up his summer cantonments on Staten Island. In seven weeks—with an irresistible army and a fleet which there was nothing to resist—he had traversed, from point to point, a distance of exactly thirty-five miles.”

On October 28, the British finally attacked Chatterton’s Hill, on the right wing of the American position at White Plains. The British won the hill after several hundred casualties on both sides, but failed to pursue the routed Americans. More egregious was Howe’s failure to launch a simultaneous attack on the main positions of the Americans with the bulk of his forces. Instead, the Americans were allowed to rest and regroup, and, at Lee’s urging, to fall back to more defensible positions on North Castle Heights, five miles to the north. After never having engaged the full body of his forces, Howe decided on November 5 not to attack the Americans and to withdraw southwestward to Dobbs Ferry on the Hudson. The Continental Army was safe at last.

While Howe was graciously saving the American army from Washington’s repeated blunders, the Americans were confronting another grave threat in the north. The American forces had retreated from Canada in complete disarray in the spring, settling at the southern tip of Lake Champlain. In mid-June, Congress had ordered Washington to place the command of the forces in the north under Gen. Horatio Gates, probably second only to his friend Lee as the best general in the American army. Congress did not have the courage of its convictions, however, and retained the less competent General Schuyler in overall command in the north. After Gates arrived in the north in early July, he and Schuyler, over Washington’s and Putnam’s objections, decided to withdraw southward from the crumbling fortifications at Crown Point to Fort Ticonderoga. Schuyler took overall command at Albany, while Gates remained in charge of the troops at Ticonderoga. A buildup of militia raised the number of American effectives at or near Ticonderoga to nearly 6,500.

In the meanwhile, General Carleton was gathering 10,000 redcoats at the northern end of Lake Champlain, preparatory to a strike southward to join General Howe and cut New York in two. While Carleton was building a fleet to sail down Lake Champlain, Gates brilliantly prepared the American defenses, combatting smallpox in the camp, greatly raising troop morale, and swiftly constructing a defensive fleet, which he placed under the command of Benedict Arnold.

Gates had ordered Arnold to deploy his Champlain fleet defensively
and to avoid engaging the more powerful British fleet, but from October 11 to October 13 the rash and headstrong Arnold foolishly got his force into a slugging match off Valcour Island, in the northern part of the lake, and Carleton’s fleet smashed the Americans, sinking eleven of sixteen ships. Arnold himself only managed to escape capture by miraculously slipping through British naval and allied Indian lines.

Carleton pressed his advantage by swooping down to capture Crown Point. He then appeared before Ticonderoga, but Gates had built the fortifications too well, and winter was fast setting in. Confronted by these formidable obstacles, Carleton turned back to Canada about the same time Howe withdrew from White Plains. The British menace from the north was over for another year, and, as it turned out, the delay was fatal to the British cause.

Benedict Arnold, sharply and properly criticized by his contemporaries for his overwhelming losses on Lake Champlain, has nonetheless been extravagantly praised by historians for delaying Carleton until he was forced to turn back north. But if he had used his fleet defensively in harrying raids, he would have delayed Carleton even longer and avoided the destruction of his own fleet. The real credit for forcing the delay on Carleton belongs to Gates: it was he who ordered the construction of the fleet, which forced Carleton to construct his, and he who had fortified Ticonderoga. Gates, not Arnold, was the true hero of the repulse of the British in the north.
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*
See the excellent article on the Howes’ disloyalty by Ira D. Gruber, “Lord Howe and Lord George Germain: British Politics and the Winning of American Independence,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(April 1965), pp. 225–43.

*
On Washington’s almost fatal errors in this campaign, see Ward,
The War of the Revolution,
I:227–30.

*
Alden,
The American Revolution,
p. 102.

*
George A. Billias, “Horatio Gates: Professional Soldier,” in Billias, ed.,
George Washington’s Generals.
pp. 86–89.

Washington’s army was now safe. It was clear that Howe would turn back to capture the force left at Fort Washington, yet, despite the urging of Charles Lee, no decision was made to evacuate that isolated and indefensible position. General Greene, in overall command of both forts at Fort Constitution (renamed Fort Lee in honor of Charles Lee) made his worst blunder of the war by maintaining that Fort Washington could be held. He was supported in this by the bumbling General Putnam and by Col. Robert Morgan, commander of Fort Washington. The dithering Washington left the decision to Greene and himself took most of his forces into New Jersey on November 12 to counter an expected British thrust there. Lee was left behind at North Castle, and Heath at Peekskill, to guard against any British move north. When Greene decided to reinforce Fort Washington with almost 1,000 more men rather than evacuate, Lee lamented, “Then we are undone.”