New York at War (17 page)

By the evening of the twenty-ninth, Washington had made up his mind. As a driving rain soaked his troops and as Howe’s trenches snaked slowly forward, the American commander had conferred with his generals, most of whom argued that Brooklyn was a trap whose jaws would spring shut once the British coordinated their land attack with a cannonade from Admiral Howe’s warships sailing up from their Staten Island anchorage.

One by one, the American regiments manning the line from Wallabout Bay to Red Hook on the night of the twenty-ninth were ordered to stand down and began an orderly but hasty march to the ferry landing at the foot of Brooklyn Heights, opposite the Manhattan shore. “We were strictly enjoined not to speak, or even cough, while on the march,” Joseph Plumb Martin recalled. “What such secrecy could mean we could not divine.” At water’s edge, the soldiers encountered a surprising sight: a flotilla of small craft—rowboats, flatboats, sailboats, sloops—that had been hastily gathered from around New York harbor and piloted to the Brooklyn shore by two Massachusetts regiments.
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The Massachusetts men—almost all of them seamen and fishermen from Marblehead, Lynn, and Salem, including several dozen black mariners—began a methodical evacuation, rowing boatfuls of soldiers half a mile to the Manhattan shore near Peck Slip, then shuttling back across for more. One rower later remembered making eleven round trips through the night. General Alexander McDougall, the old Son of Liberty and seasoned mariner, directed the embarkations from the Brooklyn ferry steps. Washington had gambled that prevailing winds would keep Admiral Howe’s ships from entering the mouth of the East River. American luck held when a southwesterly breeze, favorable to the Royal Navy, did not produce the feared onslaught of grapeshot-spewing frigates from the Upper Bay. So far, the British seemed completely oblivious to the evacuation.
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But as dawn broke on the morning of the thirtieth, thousands of troops still waited on the Brooklyn beach, and nerves began to fray. Soldiers started a disorderly stampede into the boats. Washington, a man who had spent a lifetime learning to master his formidable temper, now displayed it to good effect. Hoisting a large rock from the shore and balancing it above his head with both hands, he loomed over an overcrowded boat and threatened to “sink it to hell” unless the men cleared it. Order was restored, and the embarkations, aided by a morning fog that concealed them from potential British observers, continued. By 7 AM, as the fog lifted, the last of some nine thousand American soldiers climbed out of boats onto the Manhattan shore. At 8:30, looking across the East River, they saw the red jackets of British soldiers on the ramparts of Fort Stirling. Tory informers and British scouting parties had detected the retreat in progress by 4 AM, too late to alert and move Howe’s forces with sufficient speed to surround Washington’s regiments. A mere hour or two kept Howe from ambushing the Continental army and, arguably, ending the American Revolution on the bank of the East River.
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Almost miraculously, George Washington had saved his army. It had been his turn to execute a flawless maneuver. The Americans also recognized that they had been phenomenally lucky. “General Howe is either our friend or no general,” snorted Israel Putnam. But in lower Manhattan, Ewald Shewkirk, pastor of the Moravian Church, peered into the faces of weary and demoralized soldiers. “The merry tones of drums and fifes had ceased,” he wrote. “Many looked sickly, emaciated, cast down.”

Savoring good fortune was a luxury the Continental army could not afford. Washington redeployed his battered army up and down the length of Manhattan to await Howe’s next move. But Howe continued to hold back. On September 11, his brother the admiral hosted a secret conference on Staten Island at which he tried to persuade congressional envoys Edward Rutledge, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin to negotiate toward peace. When it became clear that Congress would not revoke the Declaration of Independence, the Howe brothers gave up further talks as futile. Warfare would resume. Once more, Washington’s men were forced to watch and wait.
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This time the Continental army did not have to wait long. In the early afternoon of September 15, the British launched an amphibious assault at Kip’s Bay, a sandy cove on the Manhattan shore of the East River some three miles north of the city. The previous night, as American sentries along the shore called “all is well” to each other, sailors on one of His Majesty’s frigates plying the river had called back, “We will alter your tune before tomorrow night.” In the morning they made good on their promise. Two forty-gun ships and three frigates opened up with a deafening broadside barrage aimed at American positions inland from the cove. The “peal of thunder” stunned Joseph Plumb Martin: “I made a frog’s leap for the ditch, and lay as still as I possibly could, and began to consider which part of my carcass was to go first.” By the time the British forces—4,000 redcoats and Hessians—landed from flatboats, Martin and his 1,500 comrades had fled.
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Hearing the artillery fire from his new command post on Harlem Heights four miles further north, Washington galloped south to find the regiments he had posted to the middle of the island retreating in disarray. Officers and enlisted men ran together, leaving guns, ammunition, coats, and knapsacks strewn across the fields and dirt roads. Stories of Hessian atrocities at Gowanus Heights had played on many minds. “‘Take the walls!’ ‘Take the cornfield!’” Washington bellowed from his steed, to no avail. When he failed to rally his fleeing troops to fire at pursuing Hessians, the general grew so enraged that he nearly allowed himself to be captured before an alert aide guided his horse to safety. “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?” he muttered in despair as his army retreated north toward Harlem Heights.
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Once again, luck and Howe’s leisurely pace favored the Americans. The king’s army moved west across what is today midtown Manhattan, seeking to bisect the island and cut off the remaining Americans who were now retreating northward from the city. But they moved too slowly, allowing Israel Putnam’s troops (guided along back roads by Major Aaron Burr) to slip through their fingers and join Washington on Harlem Heights. Nevertheless, the day had brought another near-catastrophic humiliation for the Americans. At one point during the retreat, Adjutant General Joseph Reed recalled, “the enemy appeared in open view, and in the most insulting manner sounded their bugle horns as is usual after a fox chase. I never felt such a sensation before. It seemed to crown our disgrace.” Looking ahead, Washington could see only misery. “In short, it is not in the power of words to describe the task I have to perform,” he wrote to his brother John. “Fifty thousand pounds would not induce me again to undergo what I have done.”
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By nightfall on the following day, Washington’s men could finally enjoy a flash of pride. On the sixteenth, about four hundred Americans managed to beat back several British detachments in a wooded gulley in northern Manhattan. This so-called Battle of Harlem Heights was not much more than a prolonged skirmish, but its positive outcome bolstered the morale of Washington’s badly dispirited force. “You can hardly conceive the change it has made in our army,” the general’s aide, Joseph Reed, wrote to his wife. “The men have recovered their spirits, and feel a confidence which before they had quite lost.” The victory also restored some of their commander’s badly shaken faith in his men. “They find,” Washington wrote, “that it only requires resolution and good officers to make an enemy (that they stood in too much dread of) give way.” Morale, Washington and his officers knew, was an all but exhausted commodity in the Continental army, one that had to be sustained at all costs, by small successes if not by large ones, in order for the army to continue to exist.
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Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776. Engraving by A. R. Waud,
The Battle of Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776,
1876. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.

On the night of September 21, John Joseph Henry, an American prisoner of war aboard HMS
Pearl
some four miles distant from the city, noticed “a most beautiful and luminous, but baleful sight,” seemingly “the size of the flame of a candle . . . to the east of the battery and near the wharf.” The conflagration New Yorkers feared was finally upon them. Fanned by a stiff southeasterly wind coming off the harbor, the flames quickly jumped from house to house, sparked by embers that floated from one cedar-shingled roof to the next. The wooden steeple of Trinity Church soon “resembled a vast pyramid of fire.” The British, who had been in control of the city since their offensive of the fifteenth, threw soldiers and sailors into fighting the blaze. But their bucket brigades proved largely ineffectual, and the city’s hand-pumped fire engines malfunctioned. By daylight the next morning, nearly five hundred buildings stretching through the heart of the city’s west side—a quarter or more of New York’s housing stock—had been reduced to ash.
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Thanks to prompt fire alarms and the diminished size of the city’s population, few lives were lost. Most of the handful of people who did perish during the fire were, in fact, summarily executed. The redcoats fighting the flames strongly suspected American sabotage, and they caught several men and one woman acting suspiciously during the fire—carrying matches dipped in “rosin and brimstone,” cutting the handles of water buckets, darting out of houses that soon were ablaze. One suspect was grabbed, bayoneted, and then hung by his feet from a tavern signpost. English soldier Lee Ashton later remembered helping to push another man, allegedly caught red-handed with matches, “into the flames.”
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Whether or not patriotic free agents decided to help amplify the destruction, the fire probably started accidentally in a tavern or outbuilding near Whitehall Slip on the East River waterfront. To be sure, Washington had pondered carefully the question of burning New York, once the city had fallen to Howe. Among his own staff and in Congress, some, including General Nathanael Greene and John Jay, himself a lifelong New Yorker, had strongly advocated torching the city in order to deprive the British of winter quarters and a “general market.” But Congress, reasoning optimistically that the Continental army might recapture the city, forbade it. “Providence, or some good honest fellow,” Washington confided in a letter to a cousin after the fire, “has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”
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American soldiers encamped in the woods of northern Manhattan may have smirked grimly at news of the partial destruction of Howe’s city, but the autumn only brought them more defeats. In mid-October, the Americans did manage to repel redcoats and Hessians who came up the East River in flatboats and landed at Throg’s Neck and Pell’s Neck in the Bronx in an attempt to cut Washington off from his escape route into Westchester County. The attacks convinced Washington of the folly of keeping the main body of his army on Manhattan, and in late October he evacuated most of his men over the Harlem River to the hills at White Plains. There, on October 28, Howe administered another defeat, driving the Americans from the hills, but again without gaining a decisive victory. Washington retreated further north to a more defensible position on hills near the village of North Castle.

New York’s great fire of September 21, 1776, as imagined by a Parisian artist. Redcoats bayonet and beat suspected American arsonists. Engraving published by Chez Basset,
Representation du feu terrible a Nouvelle Yorck,
ca. 1778. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

Howe’s control of Manhattan now sealed the fate of the nearly three thousand soldiers the American commander had unwisely left at Fort Washington, overlooking the Hudson near the island’s northern tip. On November 16, English, Scottish, and German regiments scaled the ridges (today’s Washington Heights) on which the fort perched and, after a prolonged musket and artillery barrage, secured its surrender; 2,800 hungry men and boys, many clad in rags, marched out into captivity. This time, although many of the prisoners were beaten and looted, there were no bayonetings. The Hessians instead found themselves laughing in disbelief at the forlorn appearance of their prisoners. “A great many of them were lads under fifteen and old men,” reported an English officer, “and few had the appearance of soldiers.” Four days earlier, Washington had led his Westchester survivors across the Hudson. Soon they were heading toward the Delaware River, at a healthy distance from Howe’s victorious main army, but with a confident Cornwallis hard on their heels.
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