Lt. Ragg in Captivity

The Battle of Brooklyn on 27 Aug 1776 didn’t end well for the Continental Army. Gen. Sir William Howe’s forces inflicted heavy casualties and drove the Americans off Long Island.

At eight o’clock that evening, Gen. George Washington’s military secretary, Robert Hanson Harrison (shown here), wrote to John Hancock as chair of the Continental Congress:

a Smart engagement ensued between the Enemy and our Detachments, which being unequal to the force they had to contend with, have sustained a pretty considerable loss—At least many of our Men are missing, among those that have not returnd are Genls [John] Sullivan & Lord Stirling—

The Enemy’s loss is not known certainly, but we are told by such of our Troops that were in the Engagement and that have come in, that they had many killed and wounded—Our party brought off a Lieutt, Sergt, and Corporal with 20 privates prisoners.

Sullivan and Stirling were prisoners, but at least they survived. Hundreds of other Americans were dead.

Continental commanders hoped this would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory for the Crown, like Bunker Hill. Gen. Henry Knox wrote to his wife Lucy, “The enemy lost nearly 1000 kill’d among whom was General [James] Grant and Capt. [Andrew] Neilson of the 52d.”

In fact, Gen. Howe reported only 63 dead from the Crown forces, and fewer than 400 casualties in all. Gen. Grant was fine; a lieutenant colonel of the same name died.

Later American writers seeking actions to praise in that battle had to content themselves with gallant ways to lose. The noble sacrifice of the Marylanders holding off the enemy! The sly evacuation across the river to Manhattan!

Among the few solid successes Knox could firmly claim was, “We took a Lt. Ragg whom I knew at Boston and 25 Grenadiers of the marines.” And even that overstated the details slightly. Harrison’s numbers were closer.

Lt. John Ragg had led Sgt. David Wallace, Cpls. Thomas Pike and Edward Gibbon, and twenty marine privates into captivity because he and his superiors had mistaken the Delaware Continentals for Hessians.

Behind the American lines, on 29 August Gen. William Heath ordered Lt. Nathan Umstead to conduct those prisoners of war to Fairfield, Connecticut.

A month later, Thaddeus Burr of the Fairfield committee of inspection wrote back to Gen. Washington, reporting that they had sent Ragg and his servant, Pvt. Benjamin Jones, on to Middletown. The other twenty-one men were taken to Wallingford and “placed in the Parishes in the interior part of the County agreable to Rules of Congress.”

There was just one more thing, Burr told the commander-in-chief: Who would pay for “the charges of marching them”? The committee had fed those prisoners for eleven days and paid “a Sergeant and Six from our Battery…a penny a Mile” to lead them on to Wallingford. How was the town to be reimbursed £14.6.½?

The Washington Papers editors wrote, “No reply to that letter has been found.”

TOMORROW: The last of Lt. Ragg.

Two Lieutenants and the Battle of Brooklyn

On the afternoon of 27 Aug 1776, British and Hessian soldiers under Gen. James Grant advanced on a Continental force, including men from Delaware and Maryland, under Gen. William Alexander, Lord Stirling (shown here).

Lt. John Ragg of the British marine grenadiers led twenty men forward from the right flank of the Crown forces. His orders were “to speak to” the commander of a unit in blue coats, thought to be Hessians, and tell them to stop firing at their own side.

Meanwhile, Lt. William Popham was one of the American officers trying to hold the left side of their line with a company of “awkward Irishmen and others.” Coming from the Delaware regiment, those soldiers were dressed in blue coats.

You can guess what happened. As Popham told it, “Capt. Wragg [sic] and 18 men, supposing us to be Hessians by the similarity of our dress, approached too near before he discovered his mistake.”

The Delaware Continentals took the marines as prisoners. The Americans stripped the British of their guns, Popham taking charge of Ragg’s weapons.

Decades later Popham reported:

I was immediately ordered with a guard to convey them across the creek in our rear to our lines. On descending the high ground we reached a salt meadow, over which we passed, though not miry, yet very unfavorable to silk stockings and my over-clothes.

Popham was a Princeton College graduate eager to look like a gentleman.

As the party crossed the meadow, the British started to fire cannon in their direction. Lt. Ragg stopped moving, “in the hope of a rescue.”

Popham ordered Ragg to “march forward instantly, or I should fire on him.”

Ragg started moving again. But then a new obstacle appeared:

When we got to the creek, the bank of which was exceedingly muddy, we waded up to our waists. I got in after my people and prisoners, and an old canoe that had been split and incapable of floating except by the buoyancy of the wood, served to help those who wanted help to cross a deep hole in the creek, by pushing it across from the bank which it had reached.

I had advanced so far into the mud, and was so fatigued with anxiety and exercise, that I sat down on the mud with the water up to my breast, Wragg’s fusee, cartouch-box, and bayonet on my shoulder; in which situation I sat till my charge were all safely landed on the rear.

Gen. Grant continued to press forward with his 7,000 men, more than twice the British force in the Battle of Bunker Hill. However, that was just a diversion.

Gen. William Howe had sent many more of his troops on long flanking march to the right. They moved through an unguarded pass and hit the Americans from an unexpected direction. In fierce fighting, almost the whole Continental force was driven back to Brooklyn Heights.

Stirling ordered most of his men back as well, keeping a contingent of Maryland soldiers as the rear guard. He led them in two counterattacks on the Crown forces while other Americans withdrew as best they could.

At the end of the day, the Continentals had lost more than 2,000 men. Nearly all the Maryland rear guard was dead. Stirling was a prisoner.

Gen. Howe reported 64 killed, 293 wounded, and 31 missing—including Lt. Ragg and his marines.

TOMORROW: The end of Lt. Ragg’s war?

The Continentals from the Lower Counties

From the start of nationhood Americans have spoken of the “thirteen colonies,” but really it was more like twelve and a half.

The Penn family were proprietors of both Pennsylvania and Delaware and always appointed the same man to govern both.

Though Delaware had an older history of European settlement, Pennsylvania became much bigger and wealthier. The “Lower Counties on the Delaware” had their own legislature, but many people treated that area as a mere adjunct.

Delaware didn’t rate its own part of the “Join, Or Die.” snake that Benjamin Franklin printed in 1754, for example. (Though I should also note that all of New England was one piece.)

Under the Stamp Act, the British government appointed John Hughes to collect the tax in both Pennsylvania and Delaware.

The First Continental Congress’s Articles of Association in 1774 still referred to “the three lower counties of Newcastle, Kent and Sussex on Delaware,” as did the Second’s commission for a commander-in-chief in 1775.

We might say that Delaware made itself a full-fledged state by participating in the American resistance. The three counties sent representatives to the Stamp Act Congress and then the Continental Congresses. Deriving their authority from the people through a legislature meant those men were separate from the Pennsylvania delegation. By late 1775, John Adams was writing of “Thirteen Colonies.”

Delaware also raised its own troops to support the Continental Army in January 1776. Not many, since it was a small colony: about 800 men in one big regiment under Lt. Col. John Haslet. In the summer of 1776 those Delaware Continentals marched north to New York.

One young officer in that regiment was Lt. William Popham (1752–1847, shown above). He arrived in New York City on 21 August, and a few days later the Delaware Continentals crossed to Long Island. They were grouped with Marylanders under Gen. Stirling.

A few days later, Popham wrote:

I marched toward the ground occupied by our army, in the summit of the high ground in front of Gowanus, near the edge of the river, where the enemy were landing from their ships, one or two lying near the shore to cover the landing. Many shots were exchanged between us and the enemy.

About 12 o’clock Gen. Stirling came to the east brow of the hill and ordered the Delaware regiment up. Here we received the first order to load with ball, and take care that our men (who were awkward Irishmen and others) put in the powder first.

We then marched up and joined the army which was drawn up in line, my regiment and my company on the left. The whole bay was covered with the enemy’s shipping. The firing continued all the time of the enemy’s landing, and we lost several men.

The British and Hessians began to spread out and march toward the American positions. Haslet saw how “the enemy began to send detachments as scouts on our left.” Though the Continentals held the high spots, the Crown forces outnumbered them and might try to outflank them.

One more thing about the Delaware regiment: They wore blue coats with red facings, not unlike the Hessians.

TOMORROW: Two lieutenants meet.

Lt. Ragg in the Assault on Brooklyn

In June 1776, Lt. John Ragg of the marines was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with the rest of the British military force evacuated from Boston.

In July, Ragg was in the fleet of forty-five ships that started unloading British soldiers onto Staten Island, New York.

More troop transports and Royal Navy warships arrived from other parts of the empire. By the end of July, Adm. Lord Richard Howe was overseeing more than one hundred ships while Gen. Sir William Howe commanded 32,000 soldiers.

Those numbers continued to grow in early August. Among the new arrivals were 8,000 Hessian soldiers.

On the morning 22 August, 4,000 redcoats moved onto Long Island. This was significantly more than the British force in the Battle of Bunker Hill, but it was only an advance guard, about a tenth of Howe’s entire land army.

The Americans drew back. By the end of that day, the British had landed 15,000 men at Gravesend Bay, with 5,000 more to follow a couple of days later.

The two armies dug in warily for the next two days. The Americans held the Brooklyn and Guan Heights, guarding the main passes.

Late in the evening of 26 August, Gen. James Grant (1720–1806, shown above) sent a force of about 4,000 British and Hessian men forward against the Continentals. The first major skirmish was around the Red Lion Inn. The British captured the American commander, Maj. Edward Burd, and sent his forces fleeing.

Gen. Samuel Holden Parsons of Connecticut managed to gather Continental troops along the Gowanus Road and to send for reinforcements. Gen. Stirling arrived with about 1,500 men from Maryland and Delaware. Under his command, the Continentals moved back toward the Red Lion Inn.

Meanwhile, Gen. Grant’s Crown troops were also growing, up to 7,000. That force included the 2nd battalion of marines.

According to a letter written on 4 September by a British officer to a friend in Aberdeen, and published in the Scots Magazine, the marine battalion “was sent from our right to support Gen. Grant.”

In the fighting on 27 August, those marines came under “several fires” from a unit dressed in blue uniforms with red facings. Those were the colors of some Hessian regiments while most of the Continental Army had no uniforms at all, so the British officers assumed that was friendly fire.

Lt. Ragg and twenty men from his grenadier company were “sent out to speak to” those Hessians.

TOMORROW: They weren’t Hessians.

Looking at Brooklyn Then and Now

While speaking in Morristown last week, I had the pleasure of meeting Jason R. Wickersty, a National Park Service ranger.

He just wrote an article about the Battle of Brooklyn for the latest issue of Hallowed Ground, the magazine of the Civil War Trust: “Lost Battlefield: The Disastrous Battle for New York.”

Wickersty provides a straightforward account of what led up to that major battle and how it turned out. Here’s a taste:

The opening gambit came on August 22, 1776. Covered by the guns of five men-of-war, 15,000 British and Hessian soldiers made an amphibious landing at Gravesend Bay on the southwestern shore of Long Island. The plan, conceived by General Henry Clinton, was to split the army into three divisions. Two divisions would make feints directly against the Americans entrenched on the wooded hills of the Heights of Guana (in the area of Greenwood Cemetery and Prospect Park today). The largest division, 10,000 men personally under the command of General Clinton, would take an unguarded pass on the left of the American line and turn the flank by surprise.

When battle was joined on August 27, the plan worked perfectly. The British smashed through American positions, sending the mostly raw troops fleeing for their lives. Washington watched helplessly from Brooklyn Heights as a regiment of Marylanders sacrificed themselves in repeated charges to buy time for the routed army to escape, lamenting, “What brave fellows must I lose this day!”

Wickersty also took the photograph above of one place where the Maryland regiment fought, now public basketball courts. That change illustrates the theme of this magazine—that some important American battlefields have already been “lost,” in the sense of not being commemorated as parkland or visible memorials.

Of course, the process of putting those lands back into productive use started early. Most of the earthworks that surrounded besieged Boston were plowed under within a generation or two; the Dana family of Cambridge was unusual in preserving a few in what is now a city park. A few decades after the war, there was new public interest in putting up memorials, such as the big obelisk for Bunker Hill and the smaller obelisk at Concord’s North Bridge. Meanwhile, America’s population, and especially its urban population, was growing tremendously.

The idea of preserving great swaths of landscape more or less as they looked during the time of a battle—our modern idea of “hallowed ground”—is made possible by our move away from an agricultural economy. And it’s worked best in rural or semi-rural areas. A place like Charlestown or Brooklyn has been changed for good. Fort Stanwix is an exceedingly rare example of recreating an eighteenth-century landscape within a city, and that city had to hit hard times first.

Brooklyn, in contrast, has been bustling for decades, and never more vibrant than today. Indeed, Brooklyn has fed far more into American culture than that disastrous battle of 1776, and our image of it probably has a lot to do with public basketball courts.

Washington “lamenting the disappointment”

Most Americans viewed the British evacuation of Boston in March 1776 as a triumph. The colonies’ third-largest port had been liberated without major loss of life or property. Most British forces in North America had withdrawn from the thirteen colonies represented in the Continental Congress.

The Congress even voted to have a medal struck for Gen. George Washington, a rare honor (full story here).

But how did Washington himself view the development? On 27 March, he wrote a letter to neighbor Landon Carter about the British action:

Upon their discovery of it [i.e., the fortification on Dorchester Heights] next Morning great preparations were made for attacking us with their whole force but not being ready before the Afternoon and the Weather getting very tempestuous much Blood was Saved, and a very important blow (to one Side or the other) prevented—

That this remarkable Interposition of Providence was designed to answer some wise purpose I have no doubt of but as the proposed end of the Manouvre was to draw the Enemy to an Ingagement under disadvantageous circumstances—as a premeditated Plan was laid for this purpose—and seemd to be succeeding to my utmost wish—and as no Men could be better disposed to make the Appeal than ours seemd Upon that occasion I can scarce forbear lamenting the disappointment as we were prepared for them at all points and had a chosen Corps of 4000 Men with Boats ready to push into Boston upon a signal given if the Enemy should have sent out large detachments—

However they thinking (as we have since been informed) that we had got too formidably Posted before the Storm abated (for we Workd through the whole of it) to be much hurt by them, and apprehending great annoyance from us resolved upon a precipitate retreat & accordingly Imbarkd in as much hurry, and as much confusion as ever Troops did on the 17th Instt not having got their Transports half fitted & leaving Kings property in Boston to the amount as is supposed of thirty of £40,000 in Provisions, Stores, &ca among which many Pieces of Cannon some Mortars & a number of Shot Shells &ca are left—

On 31 March, the general repeated his language in a letter to his brother John Augustine Washington:

I can scarce forbear lamenting the disappointment, unless the dispute is drawing to an Accomodation, and the Sword going to be Sheathed.

Washington had wanted a battle for two reasons:

• He hoped to hurt the British forces as much as at the Battle of Bunker Hill, thus convincing the government in London that the war would be too costly to continue.
• He viewed that sort of battlefield victory as the only way for a military leader to gain honor and fame.

Over the next two years Washington kept setting up situations which he thought would force the British army to attack his troops head-on so the Continentals could inflict heavy casualties: at Brooklyn, on Manhattan, at Brandywine. Most of the time the Continental Army came off worse from those confrontations.

Only after Valley Forge did the American commander abandon his hope of battlefield glory in favor of outlasting the king’s forces—what his generals called his Fabian strategy. Washington learned that it was more disappointing to lose a big battle than not to fight it.

Newly Discovered Map of New York in Late 1776?

Earlier this month DNA Info New York reported that British map dealer Andrew Adamson says he might have found an unusual hand-drawn map of New York from 1776. The story goes:

A few years ago, Adamson was looking through archives at the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office in Somerset, England, when he came across a “very brown and dusty plan” that showed New York City and its surrounding areas.

“What was of immediate interest was the inclusion on the map of British troop positions, including General [William] Howe’s headquarters at Newtown, Long Island,” Adamson told DNAinfo New York via email. [The label “Head Quarters” seems to appear near the center of the detail above.]

Based on those troop positions, Adamson surmised that the map showed British-occupied New York in the summer of 1776, the period between the Battle of Brooklyn and the Battle of Harlem Heights. Adamson said he believes the document was part of a working military field map at the time.

Also of interest to Adamson was a second, smaller piece of paper at the center of the map that shows Manhattan in great detail. He said he believes this sheet is a drawing by Bernard Ratzer — a famous cartographer of that period — that was copied and used to make a larger, well-known Ratzer map of New York that was published in 1776. . . .

The rest of the map Adamson found was less carefully drawn, and he believes the smaller piece of paper was used as a starting point for other surveyors to sketch out the rest of it. He also believes the document is one portion of what was once a much larger map, since its edges are frayed.

The hand-drawn map, which belongs to a branch of the British government, still has to be authenticated.

Adamson’s firm, Heritage Charts, sells reproductions of the Ratzer map. A couple of years ago the Brooklyn Historical Society had its copy of that map conserved, and Barnet Schechter, author of The Battle for New York and George Washington’s America, spoke about it; that lecture is available as a podcast.

Top Ten Turning-Points?

All Things Liberty recently featured new co-editor Don Hagist’s list of “Top 10 Battles of the Revolutionary War.” The only certainty about that sort of list is that it won’t please everybody, and indeed I was among commenters asking about other “turning-point” battles that didn’t make the cut.

In a lot of those Revolutionary War lists, I’ve observed, most of the turning-points turn one way—usually for the Americans. But surely the Crown forces enjoyed some turning-points as well. Otherwise, the Americans wouldn’t have needed to turn anything. Don’s list does include some British triumphs, though not a couple that I think are significant.

It turned out, as Don explained his thinking in comments, that he went looking for battles that changed the course of campaigns. In other words, the arrival of the British in New York in 1776 and their victories at Brooklyn and White Plains all furthered a successful campaign, but the turning-point came at Trenton, where the Continentals finally slowed the British advance.

Thus, Don’s list included the first British attack on Charleston, South Carolina, in 1776, when their campaign was defeated; but not the second in 1780, when they took over America’s principal southern port, captured 5,000 Continental soldiers, and established a second garrison within the U.S. of A. that lasted to the end of the war.

I realized I approach turning-points differently, looking for events that changed people’s thinking about the war. But before I continue quibbling, I have to acknowledge that Top Ten lists require cutting things out. It’s all very well to complain that a movie critic left your favorites off her Top Ten Films of the Year, but to play the same game you have to cross out as many items as you add.

So I’ll start by striking the first battle off Don’s chronological list: the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Obviously significant in starting the war, it was nevertheless not a turning-point. It just solidified what each side thought about the situation. For months Gov. Thomas Gage knew his political authority stopped at the gates of Boston; the siege militarized the isolation that already existed.

Before 19 Apr 1775, Massachusetts Patriots were already convinced that the royal authorities were out to destroy their ability to defend themselves. The royal forces already believed most New Englanders were a swarm of rebellious zealots. I’m not sure the actual fighting changed many minds. Some provincial militiamen were pleasantly surprised they could shoot regulars, but they’d been hearing stories about their region’s triumph at Louisbourg for months. After the battle, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s communications didn’t emphasize the battlefield victory but the new set of grievances, which they said confirmed what they’d been warning about the Crown all along.

I think the Battle of Bunker Hill (#2 on Don’s list) was a turning-point—even though the immediate result in the field also looks small. The British took control of a second peninsula in Boston harbor, but one that the provincials had occupied for less than twenty hours, and then sat on it for nine months. But that bloody fight made both sides rethink things. The Americans were scared, then gradually reassured about their ability to inflict damage on a regular army. The British commanders became convinced that there was no reason to stay in Boston. It took months for the London government to approve their plans to leave, and then winter came on, but the Battle of Bunker Hill really decided the first campaign of the war and changed people’s thinking.

Unfortunately, I think Gen. George Washington came away from hearing about Bunker Hill with the wrong thinking. As I wrote back here, he thought the key to the war would be another Bunker Hill—another big battle with lots of enemy casualties that would make the London government pull back. He kept proposing that strategy to his generals around Boston, he hoped the fortification of Dorchester Heights would lead to such a battle, he waited for the same thing at Brooklyn, and so on.

Which brings me to the Battle of Brandywine on 11 Sept 1777. That battle didn’t fit Don’s “turning-point” criteria because it was part of Gen. William Howe’s successful campaign to take Philadelphia; he never had to turn around. The battlefield isn’t part of our National Park Service system, probably because the Americans lost. (It’s a Pennsylvania state park instead.) But boy, did it change people’s thinking!

Brandywine was the battle Washington wanted: a direct confrontation with Howe. Huge numbers in the field. The British attacking the Continental position, leaving themselves open to heavy casualties. And it all went horribly wrong. Howe surprised Washington by sneaking around to the left. The Continentals had to fall back. Within weeks, the Crown forces were in Philadelphia.

Now when a country loses its largest city and capital to the enemy a year and a half after declaring independence, that’s bound to change people’s thinking. Combined with the news of Saratoga (#6 on Don’s list), Brandywine made some members of the Continental Congress rethink whether Washington should remain commander-in-chief. And frankly, when they had hastily evacuated to Lancaster and York, who could blame them? Washington himself was rethinking. We remember the winter at Valley Forge for Gen. Steuben’s training of the Continental core, but that was also when Gen. Washington came around to his “Fabian” strategy. That’s why I see Brandywine as a very big turning-point.

Of course, that won’t please everybody.

Washington “holding aloft a large stone”?

On the night of 29-30 Aug 1776, the Continental Army evacuated almost all of its troops from Long Island to Manhattan Island as the bigger and stronger British military closed in.

Some authors continue to treat the success of this evacuation as a sign of Providence looking out for the American cause. Of course, Providence hadn’t seen fit to give the Continentals a victory in the preceding Battle of Brooklyn, and wouldn’t offer many more victories for quite a while. In 1776 the evacuation was seen mostly as a desperate and ignominious retreat.

Among the anecdotes of the evacuation is this about Gen. George Washington, from Henry Stiles’s History of the City of Brooklyn, published in 1867:

It is related, on the authority of Col. Fish, one of Washington’s aids, Judge Daggett of New Haven, and others, that the crowd and confusion among the troops who were, at this juncture, huddled on the beach, was extreme, and bordered on a panic; and that Washington, annoyed and alarmed at its probable consequences, sprang to the side of a boat into which the men were crowding, and, holding aloft a large stone with both hands, ordered them, with an impassioned oath, to leave the boat instanter, or he would “sink it to hell.” It is needless to say that the towering figure and wrathful eye of their revered general restored the scared troops to their senses, and the embarkation proceeded with more order than before.

That dramatic story shows up in many subsequent histories of the event, including recent ones. But is it reliable? Would Gen. Washington have risked either a precious boat or his even more precious credibility in case his threat didn’t succeed? Was he so upset as to lose his temper in front of his men?

As his first authority, Stiles cited “Col. Fish, one of Washington’s aids.” The commander didn’t have any aides de camp named Fish, but Nicholas Fish (1758-1833, shown above, courtesy of the New York Society Library) was part of the Continental Army administration later in the war.

However, when Fish died, the Knickerbocker, or New York Magazine, stated:

Colonel Fish was Aid-de-Camp to Brig. Gen. John Morin Scott, and he and his corps went into service, “as six months’ men,” on the 21st Nov. 1776…

Thus, according to his obituary Fish wasn’t in the American army until almost three months after the evacuation from Brooklyn.

Stiles’s second authority is “Judge Daggett of New Haven.” I think that’s David Daggett (1764-1851), a Connecticut jurist and Congressman. Daggett was only eleven years old during the Battle of Brooklyn. He was growing up in Attleboro, and never served in the Continental Army.

Stiles said Fish, Daggett, and “others” told the same story, so the anecdote was evidently widespread. However, none of the many men who were supposedly present at the moment appears to have left a firsthand account.

Seeking a Mass Grave in Brooklyn

In other news tied to the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776, the New York Times reported on Sunday about local historian Bob Furman’s attempts to locate the grave(s) of the 200+ Maryland soldiers who died resisting the British advance.

However, one recurring theme of that article is skepticism from other historians about the feasibility or importance of that quest, given how much Brooklyn has changed over the centuries:

The Marylanders’ story is among the more underappreciated chapters of the Revolutionary War. Vastly outnumbered, they launched a series of counterattacks that stymied rapidly advancing British forces, enabling thousands of American soldiers to evade encirclement and certain death or capture. Had the British not been checked, it is possible that the Continental Army would have been smashed, forcing Washington to surrender and effectively bringing the war to an abrupt, inglorious end. “These soldiers saved the Revolution,” Mr. Furman maintains.

Other experts don’t go as far but agree that many historians have shortchanged the Marylanders. . . . As many as 256 Maryland soldiers, almost two-thirds of the regiment, were killed. According to several accounts, the British forced local civilians to gather the bodies shortly after the battle and bury them at a site near what was then Gowanus Creek.

The mass grave has long been a source of fascination for amateur archaeologists and Revolutionary War enthusiasts. In the 1940s and ’50s, city officials considered mounting a comprehensive search, and Robert Moses even drew up plans for a memorial park. Ultimately, the park never materialized because of a lack of money, and the one dig undertaken, in 1957, found no remains.

Various archaeologists say geography is the main reason the grave’s location has remained a secret. In 1776 the area featured marshland and millponds surrounding Gowanus Creek. Only a few dots of high ground would have been suitable for a grave.

The area was transformed beginning in the mid-19th century. The canal itself was dug in the 1860s, followed by industrialization along its banks. The neighborhood was made level, and both sides of the canal were lined with landfill. “Historically speaking, it’s like night and day,” said Alyssa Loorya, owner of Chrysalis Archeological Consultants Inc., which has surveyed the area.

Grave hunters’ attention in recent decades has focused on a stretch of Third Avenue between Seventh and Eighth Streets, because Revolutionary War-era maps show hills in the area. Written reminiscences, compiled mostly in the 1950s but dating as far back as the 1890s, also tell of bones being found when basements were dug.

Many archaeologists are skeptical.

New mapping software, ground-penetrating radar, and other technology may turn up things where older techniques failed. Then again, this might be a reminder that we’re much more concerned about preserving ordinary graves than most people of past centuries have been.

The photo above, from mikkime via Flickr under a Creative Commons license, shows one of the existing, weathered memorials to the Maryland soldiers. There are other signs in the borough, but it’s not clear how close they are to any identifiable graves.

“A good way to check in on the invading force”

At the Awl, Robert Sullivan is sharing a series of discursive articles on “how the trail of the Battle of Brooklyn would pass across modern-day New York.”

For example, the British military’s crossing from Staten Island to Long Island:

A good way to check in on the invading force from your apartment right now—which assuming the time-space continuum allowed it—would be to watch the MTA’s live bridge cams, specifically the ones set up on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which are spotty and always under repair (like the bridge itself) but eventually would give you some idea of how things were going, invasion-wise. . . .

On August 24, 1776, the Constitutional Gazette would report that the “ministerial troops” had landed “between New-Utrecht and Gravesend on Long Island to the number of 7000 men.” A later report noted that there were a little over 12,000 British “on the Shore by 11 o’Clock.” As far as military logistics go, Brooklyn was a good place to invade; the farms in Brooklyn could feed an army, and the Dutch settlers in the area do not have a political dog in the fight. It was a big landing. The statistic that is invariably mentioned in post-World War II accounts of the 1776 British invasion is this: it was the largest invasion by military forces until D-Day.

And the day of the battle approaches:

The city itself, the rocks of it, are, grossly put, a combination of two big geologic stories—one that is a vertical story as you look down at the map (see the northeast trending valleys that create the East River the Harlem and Bronx rivers or the Palisades along the Hudson) and one that is a horizontal story: see the glacial moraine as it runs through Brooklyn and Queens, a miniature two-borough mountain range, usually invisible unless, say, you go to Ridgewood Reservoir in the fall and take in the amazing view of Manhattan on the one side, most of Long Island on the other. The vertical geology is the result of stresses and fractures that are related to the very old Appalachian Mountains; the horizontal geology is related to the not-as-old Wisconsin glacier, which pushed a lot of junk to New York from elsewhere and left the forward hills as if marking how far it had gone. . . .

In the days between the first British landing on Brooklyn and the face off itself, Washington and his staff could only make guesses as to what the British were thinking, as to whether the war would be fought in the glacial landscape, you might say, or the Appalachian one. Washington seems to have thought maybe the British were faking a Brooklyn battle, getting ready to swing in on the East River, or the Hudson. He had did not yet realize that there were upwards of 32,000 Redcoats preparing to march against his 10,000 poorly trained, gunshot-happy men. The Americans had built forts all along the moraine; the idea was to hold the Redcoats back at the passes, the cuts in the glacial hills.

Today’s the anniversary of the big battle, so check in on the sites of the fighting.

Sullivan appears to have taken a similar approach in his new book, My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78. (Unaccountably its marketing copy begins, “Americans tend to think of the Revolution as a Massachusetts-based event orchestrated by Virginians…” Don’t people know the Virginians were working for us?)

TOMORROW: Another attempt to rediscover the landscape of the Battle of Brooklyn.

After John Callender’s Court-Martial

Thanks to everyone who came out to my talk about the early Continental artillery at Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters last night.

Among the episodes I related was Capt. John Callender’s court-martial on the charge of “Cowardice” at Bunker Hill. Five days after arriving in Cambridge, Gen. George Washington affirmed that Callender should be booted out of the army.

I was determined to avoid doing what every version of that story I’ve seen does, and go on to describe how Callender traveled to New York in the fall of 1776 as a volunteer “cadet” in Capt. John Johnson’s artillery company.

I steeled myself not to say that when Johnson and his lieutenant were wounded in the Battle of Brooklyn, Callender took command of that company until the British captured him and the other survivors.

And that after his release, Callender received a captain-lieutenant’s commission in the Continental artillery dated 1 Jan 1777 and served to the end of the war.

So you may well read that about Capt.-Lt. John Callender. But you didn’t hear it from me.

Major Box in Brooklyn

Maj. Daniel Box, once a sergeant in the British army who released himself on his own recognizance, became quite prominent in the Continental Army in the summer of 1776.

As a military administrator, he was a brigade-major for Gen. Nathanael Greene’s brigade, and then for Gen. John Nixon’s. He also laid out fortifications to defend New York. By June 1776, “Fort Box” stood alongside Fort Greene and Fort Putnam in Brooklyn. On 26 August, Gen. John Sullivan made Box his interim adjutant general.

And the next day, the British army swept past the American lines in the Battle of Brooklyn. They drove the Continentals off Long Island, coming close to trapping most of those troops. Capt. Stephen Olney of Rhode Island wrote:

Had it been left to the British Generals to make a disposition of our troops, it is a chance if they would have made it more advantageous to themselves, and but from their tardiness they might have taken our main fort. All that seemed to prevent it was a scarecrow row of palisades from the fort to low water in the cove, which Major Box had ordered set up that morning.

The Americans withdrew to Manhattan and tried to hold that island. In September, Box had his run-in on the Harlem plains with Ens. Matthew Macumber, as he described back here.

On 30 September, Greene’s orders stated: “Major Box is appointed & requested in conjunction with the Engineers of this Department & Col. [Thomas] Bull to oversee & forward the fortifications at Fort Constitution.” That encampment on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River was also called Fort Lee, the name that stuck. In early October, Box was still spending all his time there. On 16 Nov 1776, the British army swarmed over Fort Washington and captured all of Manhattan.

Gen. William Howe and his troops then chased the American army south through New Jersey. In December 1776, Maj. Daniel Box fell off a horse at Neshaminy Ferry, Pennsylvania, badly breaking his arm.

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to Major Box?

Saratoga Not the Turning Point?

The Smithsonian website offers Prof. John Ferling’s article “Myths of the American Revolution”. Ferling explores how some common generalizations about the war aren’t completely correct, and may in fact be mostly incorrect. As an example:

Saratoga was not the turning point of the war. Protracted conflicts—the Revolutionary War was America’s longest military engagement until Vietnam nearly 200 years later—are seldom defined by a single decisive event. In addition to Saratoga, four other key moments can be identified.

The first of those four moments is the combination of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, which, one might argue, was a starting point rather than a turning point. But those events did mark a turn from a political conflict with threatening military moves by both sides to a shooting war.

I’ll let you discover the three other “turning points” Ferling mentions. To make it harder, not all of them are battlefield developments. To make it easier, they all involve the tide turning in favor of the Americans.

But surely there had to be moments when the war turned in favor of the British, right? Otherwise, the war wouldn’t have lasted so long. Gen. William Howe’s sweeping reconquest of New York in 1776 wiped out a lot of the American momentum after successful campaigns at Boston and Charleston. Similarly, Howe’s victory at Brandywine sent the Congress scrambling out of its capital and erased the memory of Gen. George Washington’s smaller battlefield triumphs months before.

Finally, as Ferling notes elsewhere in the article, the British military’s southern strategy looked very good after the battle of Camden, with Georgia back in the Empire, Charleston firmly in British hands, and many Americans sick of the war. At that point, the Americans really needed a new turning point.

Lecture Program at West Point, 27 June

Peter Feinman of the Institute of History, Archaeology, and Education sent me an announcement for a series of Revolutionary War lectures in the military academy at West Point on Friday, 27 June. The program is free, but security and parking considerations require that all participants register for the program by Tuesday, 24 June.

Winning the war, Winning the Peace: The American Revolution Historyhostel

10:00 “The Battles of Brooklyn and Saratoga and the Strategic Importance of the Hudson Valley”
Maj. Jeffery Lucas, Department of History, U.S.M.A., and Ray Raymond, S.U.N.Y.–Ulster and U.S.M.A.

The campaigns of 1776-1777 were Britain’s one and only chance to crush the American Revolution. The key was control of the Hudson, which would have cut off New England from the rest of the colonies. These lectures will assess why Britain failed to deliver a knockout blow at Brooklyn and why it lost the strategically vital battle of Saratoga.

12:00 Lunch

1:00 “Reassessing Yorktown and the Southern Insurgency”
Maj. Lucas and Prof. Raymond.

These lectures will reassess Yorktown and the Southern insurgency led by Gen. Nathanael Greene, which eventually won the Revolutionary War. They will address such questions as:

• Was Yorktown more of a French military victory than an American one?
• Was Yorktown’s real importance political rather than military?
• How close did the British military come to rescuing Cornwallis?

2:15 walking tour of the U.S.M.A. grounds from an American Revolution perspective

3:30 bus trip to Fort Putnam (not normally open to the public)

4:30 “Fort Putnam: The Thomas Cole Perspective”
Peter Feinman, IHARE

Thomas Cole is known as the founder of the Hudson River School of painting. When he emigrated from England, one of the first subjects he chose to paint was Fort Putnam. What did this site mean to him and to American culture in the 1820s?

To register, email Dr. Feinman or call 914-933-0440.