35. The Invasion of New York

The decision of the colonies for independence came at the beginning of a severe military crisis. Until then, there had been no organized or regularized fighting on the soil of the thirteen states other than the siege of Boston. By the end of June, Lee and the army of the Southern Department had beaten off the invasion of Charleston by General Clinton; but in July the main British army was ready to invade New York. The long-range British strategy was to invade friendly New York City and then conquer the Hudson Valley in a two-pronged thrust from Canada and the city, isolating radical New England from the softer and more pliable middle colonies. This strategy posed a formidable threat to the American cause.

The mighty British invasion force began to assemble off New York City in late June 1776. It was headed by the Howe brothers, Gen. Sir William Howe in charge of land forces and his brother Admiral Richard Lord Howe, newly appointed overall commander-in-chief of the American theater. By the end of June, 130 British ships were stationed in New York Bay, and General Howe quickly seized an undefended and strongly pro-Tory Staten Island to use as his base of operations. By mid-August, a truly formidable force of over 32,000 regular soldiers, including 8,000 Hessians, was poised on Staten Island; it was the greatest expeditionary force that the world’s strongest military power, Great Britain, had ever mounted. The army was supported by a fleet of thirty warships and hundreds of transports, manned by more than 10,000 seamen. Floating the expedition had cost the British treasury the vast sum of 850,000 pounds.

To oppose this vast force, Washington had a largely untrained army of 19,000 men. Surely the prime necessity for the American force was to pursue guerrilla war and avoid open contact with the British. Yet Washington decided on conventional resistance from fixed positions and elected to hold a city that Charles Lee had correctly warned could not be defended. First to urge Washington to abandon New York—and to irritate him in the process—was the brilliant young Maj. Aaron Burr, aide-decamp to General Putnam.

Compounding his blunders, Washington chose to divide his forces between Manhattan and the southwestern tip of Long Island. The idea was to fortify Brooklyn Heights, commanding the city from the East River, but both Long Island and Manhattan were death traps. The mighty British fleet need only have sailed up the East River to cut off the force on Long Island, and up the Hudson to land troops in northern Manhattan to surround and annihilate the American force there.

If the British commanders had applied even moderate intelligence or devotion to their task, they could probably have wiped out Washington’s army then and there and perhaps have won the war on the spot. The British, including General Howe, realized that to win on land they would have to mobilize their superior armed forces quickly and destroy the American army in one blow. Speed was of the essence; the strike had to come before the Americans had a chance to mobilize their resources and before France and Spain could send full-scale aid. Furthermore, the Howes and their commanders realized that the key, especially in conducting counter-revolutionary warfare against a hostile populace, was not so much to gain territory, which could turn out to be futile, but to destroy the enemy army. Washington’s absurd decision to dig in at New York provided the Howes a golden opportunity for a smashing victory.

Yet they failed notably to take up this opportunity to crush the American forces. This and later failures were so enormous as not to be put down as mere blunders. Historians have generally recognized that a deliberate policy must have been involved, and have concluded it was based upon a general British desire to avoid annihilating the American forces so as not to preclude a peaceful political reconciliation. Yet it should be clear that the government—especially King George and Lord Germain, the colonial secretary—were out to crush the Americans militarily, and as quickly as possible. They put no stock in peaceful negotiations or a political solution.

The deliberate policy, it appears, was the choice, not of Great Britain, but of the Howe brothers themselves. Both ardent Whigs, and both strongly opposed to the war with America, the Howes took it upon themselves, in a move tantamount to treason, to avoid crushing the Americans and to hold out the olive branch of peace. Admiral Howe apparently convinced his brother of this policy upon his arrival off New York in mid-July, and from then on General Howe pursued continuous acquisition and possession of territory rather than decisive blows against the Continental Army. Happily, Washington’s stupidity was partially offset by the Howes’ virtual treason to the British counter-revolution.*

On arriving off New York, Lord Howe delayed military action while offering peace terms to Washington, even though he was authorized by the Crown only to accept surrender by the rebels. For over a month, he tried to negotiate with the rebels, but the Americans, happy in their independence, were long past conciliatory terms.

General Howe was finally ready to launch his attack against New York in late August. But the important failure by the Howes was not the delay, which was used to build up British forces, but the strategy employed in the attack itself. General Sir Henry Clinton sensibly urged a landing in northern Manhattan to cut off nearly the entire American army; yet Clinton’s suggestion was ignored. Instead, General Howe virtually refused to entrap and decimate the American troops, electing only to push them out of New York City. On August 22, Howe and a force of 20,000 landed on Long Island across the Narrows from Staten Island. Their landing was unopposed, the Americans sensibly taking their stand behind a ridge, the Heights of Guan, defending the approaches to the fortifications at Brooklyn Heights on the East River. The only competent American general in the area, Nathanael Greene, had fallen ill and could not command the 8,000 or so troops stationed on Long Island. Washington had replaced Greene with Gen. John Sullivan, who by his rashness had turned the retreat from Canada into a virtual rout. As the British landed, Washington had second thoughts and flightily replaced Sullivan with the still more incompetent General Putnam, leaving Sullivan in command of the American center. The confusion was compounded by Washington’s failure to clearly allocate command authority between Putnam and Sullivan. Major Aaron Burr again only succeeded in irritating Washington by having the temerity and wisdom to urge that the troops be pulled out of Brooklyn while there was still time.

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.* 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.”* 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.*

* 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.