The night the army slipped away

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 35 for his account.

By the last week of August 1776, William Howe had landed 20,000 men on Long Island, flanked the American line through the undefended Jamaica Pass and smashed it. Nearly two thousand Americans were killed, wounded or captured, against three hundred British. Washington’s army stood penned on Brooklyn Heights with the East River at its back, and Howe, instead of finishing it, sat for three days. On the night of the twenty-ninth, Washington at last ordered a mass evacuation. The man who ran it was Colonel John Glover, whose Marblehead regiment of sailors and fishermen, with Colonel Israel Hutchinson’s men from Salem, rowed boat after boat through the dark. The orders were silence, and the wagon wheels were muffled. A fog came down before morning and hid it. Rothbard cares about two things. The retreat could never have happened had Admiral Howe, Howe’s brother, put his ships into the river, and Rothbard thinks the brothers’ Whig sympathies explain why he did not. And it was the fishermen, who, in his words, performed a heroic job of shuttling 9,500 men and their equipment across in a night of poor weather. Washington stepped into the last boat himself. When the British woke on the thirtieth, the army had vanished.