If warfare were boxing, General Sir William Howe had George Washington on points in early September 1776. Having driven the rebels off Long Island in eight days, Sir William now spent two weeks in peace negotiations with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin at Colonel Christopher Billopp’s stone mansion in Tottenville, Staten Island, now called Conference House. Howe’s secretary wrote, “They met, they talked, they parted. Nothing now remains but to fight it out…”
Washington had reorganized his army, with 5,000 men in New York City, below Chambers Street in lower Manhattan; 5,000 along the East River; and 9,500 on Harlem Heights, the bluffs running from the Hudson at 135th Street to Point of Rocks at 127th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue to the Harlem River at 155th Street. On September 12, Congress authorized Washington to withdraw from New York City. The army began moving supplies to Harlem Heights via the West Side’s Bloomingdale Road and the East Side’s Post Road.
On September 13, 1776, Sir William ordered the landing. During the evening of September 14, 1776, H.M.S. Roebuck (forty guns), H.M.S. Phoenix (forty guns), H.M.S. Orpheus (thirty-two guns), H.M.S. Carysfort (twenty-eight guns), and H.M.S. Rose (thirty-two guns) came up the East River to Kip’s Bay at 34th Street and dropped anchor about 200 yards offshore, outside musket range.
September 15, 1776 dawned bright and clear and soon became hot and muggy. The American militia had no cannon at Kip’s Bay. Most were untrained recruits. Some had been in service for barely a week. Some who were without muskets carried pikes (scythe blades fastened to a pole). They had not been fed in twenty-four hours. Most had been on duty all night.
Meanwhile, British landing barges—big sixteen-oared rowboats, each capable of carrying fifty to sixty men—had assembled in Newtown Creek, across the river. Seven battalions of redcoats and three battalions of blue-coated German mercenaries—between 2,500 and 3,000 men—boarded them and, when ready, began rowing toward Kip’s Bay.
At 11:00 a.m., the five warships gave the Americans a full broadside. Eighty-six cannon balls went sizzling into the trenches, followed by volley fire—single shots, one after the other, so one cannonball was in the air at all times. Within minutes, the shoreline was fogged over with black powder smoke. The British and Germans landed and formed. Then the drums began beating and, marching in cadence, closed up with lines dressed, they advanced out of the smoke in superb order. Nearly all of those Americans who had not run for the woods before ran now.
Howe’s men fanned out with “clockwork competence.” By noon, his left, Hessians under Colonel von Donop, held a line from the East River at 23rd Street to Sunfish Pond around 27th Street and Park Avenue. Lieutenant General Lord Cornwallis’s Guards and Grenadiers held the center, a convex curve from the Sunfish Pond to Inclenberg (now Murray Hill, as far west as Madison Avenue at 34th Street) to Lexington Avenue and 40th Street. Brigadier General Leslie’s light infantry held the right from 40th Street to the East River.
From 2:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m., Howe waited while his barges ferried an additional 9,000 men across the East River. Howe was concentrating his command within the perimeter before advancing to his objectives. This is a nearly fool-proof rule for conducting a water-borne infantry landing. Yet Howe had not anticipated the Americans’ sudden collapse and had no contingency plan for a rapid advance across Manhattan, river to river, which might have cut off the rebels in lower Manhattan.
When the naval bombardment began, George Washington and his staff had ridden for the sound of the guns. He galloped down to a crossroads near 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue to find his militia running uptown. This shocked him, for he saw no British skirmishers or signs of pursuit. He received reports from his officers and issued orders. Meanwhile, a fresh American column had come from the West Side. He ordered its commanders to form a battle line at the crossroads, near a farm.
As the officers began moving their men, the formation suddenly fell apart and the soldiers began running away. Washington rode up and down the line, trying to rally them and, pointing to the farm, shouting, “Take the wall! Take the cornfield!” Then some seventy of General Leslie’s light infantrymen appeared on Inclenberg about a quarter-mile away. The rest of the Americans now took to their heels.
George Washington went berserk with rage. His extraordinary temper was no less powerful for his heroic, life-long struggle to control it. An innate power of profanity was enhanced, as is the way with farmers, by varied, forceful, and quite imaginative cloacal and venereal expressions. When Washington was in full cry, as one eyewitness wrote, “the very leaves shook on the trees.” Now he tore off his hat and flung it to the dust. He cursed violently, roaring that his men were not men at all but scum, and that the war itself was impossible with cowards for soldiers. He slashed at them with his riding crop, even beat at them with the flat of his sword.
No one paid any attention. Within ten minutes, Washington and his aides stood alone on a road littered with equipment—muskets, powder horns, hats, knapsacks, coats, and canteens—his men had dropped to speed their passage. They would run all the way to McGowan’s Pass (today a few hundred yards west of Fifth Avenue, around 106th Street on the Central Park’s East Drive.) Exhausted by his rage, Washington slumped in the saddle, staring dazedly at the ground. His aides waited silently until the light infantry had advanced nearly within musket shot, and then one took the bridle of Washington’s horse and led him away.
Among the officers Washington had met at the crossroads was General Israel Putnam, whom he had ordered to evacuate New York City. Putnam was a short, stocky, fifty-eight-year-old veteran of the French and Indian Wars. Rough-spoken, warm-hearted, and colorful, he was nearly uneducated and knew little of logistics or strategy. But he rode like a centaur and, on the battlefield, was a superb leader of troops, energetic and enterprising, renowned for his roaring ways and iron courage. As Bruce Bliven Jr. wrote in Battle for Manhattan, “…it was axiomatic that, at the sound of shooting, Old Put would naturally wheel his horse and head in the direction of the fray.” His men worshipped him and his adventures were legendary: almost getting burned at the stake by Indians, shipwreck off the Cuban coast, and his still-famous ride to escape capture by British dragoons, whom he evaded by taking a short cut—down a precipitous flight of steps, carved in a cliff face near Pomfret, Connecticut—at full gallop.
Within three hours, Putnam’s staff had drafted, published, and carried the evacuation orders to the units in New York City. By 4:00 p.m., a column was marching north. At one point, it stretched from 23rd Street to Chambers Street. Putnam kept them moving, galloping his foam-flecked horse up and down the line, barking orders, and roaring at the men to keep up the pace. Roughly speaking, they marched up Eighth Avenue to Columbus Circle and onto the Bloomingdale Road (today’s Broadway as far as 105th Street) to Harlem Heights.
At 5:00 p.m., Howe sent a Hessian brigade toward the city. Royal Marines landed near the Battery to raise the flag. And the rest of the British forces marched north along the Post Road toward McGowan’s Pass, even as Putnam was whipping his forces up the Bloomingdale Road, little more than the breadth of Central Park away, each column unaware of the other.
At 96th Street and Fifth Avenue, Washington posted Colonel William Smallwood’s Marylanders across the Post Road. Recruited from Baltimore and Annapolis, they were largely old friends who had gone to war together and good shots, too. General Leslie’s light infantry approached up the Post Road. Smallwood’s men opened fire. The British paused and then fired back. As the exchange continued, Leslie sent troops west along the New Bloomingdale Crossroad, which ran across Central Park to intersect with the Bloomingdale Road at what is now Broadway and 91st Street.
Leslie’s men reached the Bloomingdale Road. Putnam’s column had nearly passed except his rear guard, the Second Connecticut, who skirmished with the British light infantry while the rest of the column plodded north, and then withdrew as did Smallwood’s command.
At dawn on September 17, Washington wrote to Congress that he was confident of victory if attacked, provided his men acted “with tolerable resolution.” As he wrote, Colonel Thomas Knowlton of Connecticut was leading 120 of his Rangers—tough, hand-picked troops—up a hill south of the Hollow Way, a valley running from Morningside Heights to the Hudson approximately on the line of 125th Street. This hill is now the site of Columbia University, Barnard College, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. At a farm on 106th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, Knowlton’s men were spotted by British pickets who fired an alarm.
Knowlton dispersed his men along one of the farm’s stone walls as four hundred British light infantrymen marched in column up the Bloomingdale Road. Knowlton pointed to a spot on the road, about fifty yards south of the wall, and ordered his men not to show themselves or fire until the first British soldiers had reached it. The column swung briskly past the mark, Knowlton gave the order, and his men stood up and opened fire.
The British formed a firing line. For half an hour, as Bliven wrote, they shot it out, “practically face to face.” Then, off to the east, roaring drums and skirling bagpipes signaled the advance of the Royal Highland Regiment of Foot, known as the Black Watch, kilts and all. Knowlton now ordered his men to fall back, each firing in turn to cover one another’s withdrawal.
Washington joined his adjutant-general, Colonel Joseph Reed, Philadelphia lawyer turned staff officer, to watch the skirmish from Harlem Heights. As Knowlton’s men reached the Hollow Way, roughly where the 125th Street I.R.T. station stands, the British light infantry paused on a rise near Grant’s Tomb.
Then, a British bugler, in full view of the Americans, “put his horn to his lips and blew the fox hunter’s signal for the end of the chase, of a fox gone to earth.” The Americans had run away—again. Washington, a fox-hunting man, understood the insult immediately. Reed later told his wife, “It seemed to crown our disgrace.”
Washington ordered Knowlton to take his rangers and three rifle companies and try cutting off the British light infantry by taking Morningside Heights—particularly, a rocky rise where the General Grant Houses stand now, on the block bounded by 123rd and 124th Streets, Broadway, and Amsterdam Avenue. Other American troops, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Crery, would distract the British by skirmishing in their front.
Around 11:00 a.m., as Knowlton led his men onto the ledge, he was seen and fatally wounded by an enemy marksman. His men then launched a ferocious attack. Then Crery began advancing in earnest. The skirmish became a small battle.
Leslie’s men withdrew in good order. At a buckwheat field near Broadway between 119th and 120th Streets, they stood and fought. By now, Leslie had reinforcements: a company of Hessian riflemen, two artillery pieces, the Black Watch, a regiment of Grenadiers, and a battalion of Hessian grenadiers.
By noon, both sides were fighting in formal lines, drawn up in regular array. The American line stood from Riverside Church to Teachers College, just north of 120th Street. The British were strung along 119th Street. They slugged it out for two hours, until the Americans began pushing the British back. Then the redcoats began withdrawing, as Colonel Reed reported, “rather abruptly.” Some Americans, “made reckless by the sight of Highlanders and the British on the run,” chased them as far as 111th Street. Washington ordered that the Americans break off the engagement. The shooting stopped. Then the rebels realized they had beaten some of the world’s finest soldiers in a stand-up fight, and they began cheering.
Over the next two months, Washington withdrew his army to comparative safety in White Plains. Sir William Howe, relieved of command, left New York forever in 1778. But George Washington would return in November, 1783, triumphant on a white horse.
New York Press, August 3, 1999